The Video Culture FAQ

1. What's the book about, and why should we care?

The book maps out the rise of video culture from 1967 to 1995. This is important because understanding video culture is crucial to understanding the global marketplace, the Information Revolution, and the rise of the European Union and East Asia. It's literally the sensor-net which allows us to think globally and act as global citizens.

2. In plain terms, just what the heck is video culture?

It's the multinational media culture of planet Earth. Spawned by the culture-industries of the Cold War era, today video culture has blossomed into a planetary series of genres and forms, ranging from the Web to hip hop, and from anime to streaming video. It's a new phenomenon, just beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves; most cultural observes still concentrate on national film traditions. Video culture borrows extensively from film and TV, but it has its own unique characteristics.

3. OK, so what does the book cover?

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the idea of video culture. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Patrick McGoohan's 1967 The Prisoner TV series, Chapters 4 and 5 explore Krysztof Kieslowski's 1988 Decalogue TV series, while Chapters 6 and 7 concentrate on Hideaki Anno's 1995 Neon Genesis: Evangelion TV series.

4. Never heard of 'em. Who are these people, anyway?

Each created breakthrough works which revolutionized their respective media cultures: McGoohan created the first post-Cold War thriller at the height of the Cold War (sort of the media equivalent of May '68); Kieslowski innovated many of the features of the EU's multinational media culture; and Anno transformed the Japanese anime (animated feature) into an East Asian art-form. Surprising as it sounds, each of these artists is enormously popular in their respective fields – McGoohan and Anno are celebrated by science fiction and anime fans, while Kieslowski became a legend in European cinema circles. But until now, noone has put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and asked what these three have in common, i.e. how they pioneered specific aspects of video culture.

5. But we still live in nation-states and speak national languages. Where is this multinational culture you keep talking about?

Turn on the TV. Go shopping in a mall. Listen to the news. Wherever you look, you'll find the products, services and narratives of the global economy staring you in the face. Sure, nation-states still exist, but they're becoming ever more integrated into a global cultural, economic and political matrix. The European Union, for example, is the world's first truly multinational state. The EU's impressive track record of democratization, respect for cultural diversity, commitment to environmental reconstruction and high-tech economic success suggests that it's not going to be the last, either.

6. I've read lots of film and TV criticism. What makes this book different from the usual academic accounts of the media?

It ties together two key aspects of cultural production which aren't normally associated with each other: the global level of the objective structures of the world-economy, namely geopolitics, and the local level of our experience as subjects of a world consumer culture, or micropolitics. Geopolitically speaking, the world economy today is dominated by the European Union and the East Asian region; the US imports vast quantities of overseas capital every year to finance its economy. Conversely, the wiring of the world means that media politics are now the norm throughout most of the planet. Even the most distant rural communities of China, India and Brazil now have direct access to the media culture. By the mid-1990s, the whole world really was watching.

7. Globalization has brought about toxic forms of polarization, environmental destruction, and the destructive neoliberalization of the world. Shouldn't we just blow up our TVs?

Some video works are just advertising, junk food for the eyes, sure. But the works this book covers aren't. They're profoundly subversive meditations on the media culture, globalization, micropolitics, the information society, and many other things besides. They ask the crucial questions the neoliberals don't want you to ask: what's the point of technology, anyway? Who really benefits from the IMF's idea of free trade, and who doesn't? Should a tiny elite of unelected, unaccountable, megalomaniac greedhead rentiers be allowed to run the entire planet as their own private sweatshop, unencumbered by little details such as respect for the environment and the human rights of their workers? If not, what are the alternatives? How do we care for others in a brutally competitive world-market? Video works don't necessarily come up with answers; that's the job of political movements, after all. But the greatest video works ask all the right questions.

---

Back to GV Intro