"Video: A Media Revolution?"
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Table of Contents

Issue #2 as well as supplement added at the end.

Communication Research Trends:
Video: A Media Revolution?
vol. 6 no. 2 1985

Research Trends in Religious Communication:
Coming to Terms with Video Culture
vol. 6 no. 2 1985

Abstract

Revolutions connected with technical inventions have been proclaimed, rightly and wrongly, so often in the recent past that it would seem appropriate to look for another expression just to avoid the danger of trivialization. But all the evidence says that this time we are in the presence of a real revolution and that we should call it by its name.

As a true revolution, the emergence of video has been like an explosion, full of energy and even passion, provoking divisions, inflicting wounds, destroying, upsetting and, also, raising hopes and promising new riches in the so-called "television wasteland". It will take some time before promises and hopes can be measured against reality. Meanwhile the video revolution has taken the world by storm, caught the popular imagination with incredible speed and set itself up as the universal entertainer of the future. It is not just the rich and it is not just the metropolises. If anything, video cassette recorders (VCRs) have conquered small towns and semi-urban areas even more easily.

Video-related problems are affecting international relations (for example, the so-called "battle of Poitiers", in 1982, when France tried to stop the invasion ofJapanese made VCRs and a diplomatic row erupted), family life, leisure time, education, industrial relations, the law and the arts. One of the many. names that video has been given is "guerilla television". There is a certain amount of aggressiveness (social, commercial, artistic) in this young child of television which is growing up very rapidly and is fighting to find its place in our midst. As a video artist put it, "Television has been attacking us all our lives; now we can hit back''.

The sound and fury accompanying the irruption of video attracts, on the one hand, the curiosity of researchers. But on the other it does not facilitate an overall view of the phenomenon. The presence of video is so elusive, so constantly changing, that even quantitative data are difficult to gather. Under these circumstances any probe into its future can only be undertaken with the strong conviction that it is basically unpredictable. The present issue of TRENDS is an attempt to explore a part of that unknown future.

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