Epistemographer

Just saw an absolutely fantastic example of the technology/public interface: Oprah did a segment on TiVo. Now, I myself haven’t gotten a TiVo yet, mainly because I don’t live in one place all the time where I have cable TV, but I have enough friends who swear by it that I’ve got a good sense of the details of what it can do (now, if I could bolt a DirecTV dish on the roof of my car and wire up a TiVo in there, that’d be a different story…)

One of the things I find fascinating about TiVo is the way in which the technology is constructed not simply as a thing in and of itself, but as a thing which is esentially a VCR, but better. Over the course of this Oprah segment, this point was hammered over and over: it’s like a VCR, but without tapes; it’s like a VCR but smarter; it’s like a VCR but easier to program.

So, not only are we seeing the construction of a new technology, we’re actually watching this happen based on understandings of an older technology. However, these tropes surrounding the VCR (particularly the idea that it’s hard to program) haven’t been around since the beginning of the industry…in fact, as I wrote in a paper that I’ll get around to sending off to be published someday, the idea of “not being able to program youtr VCR” that Oprah self-identified with only dates back to around 1990. In fact, I’ve got a copy of an old Betamax sales tape that shows how to program your Beta, and it uses pretty much the exact same rhetoric as TiVo is now.

This seems to be the life-cycle of a consumer electronic technology – introduction, obsolesence, and rebirth of a new one, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its old meanings.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2003 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.