Had a bit of technical problems earlier this week over at my Video Store Project site. The trouble (corrupted mySQL index) is cleared up now, but this reminded me that I should mention it here, since many of y’all who’re reading might not know about it. If you’re curious, check it out, and if you remember the earlier days of home video, please do take 5 minutes and fill out a survey…
Ahhhh…I seem to have figured out the problem that was tripping up my dissertating. While I’m not entirely positive it hang together perfectly, I’ve got a good enough sense of how to restructure things that I’m able to start writing with a clear destination in mind. At this rate, I’ll have another chapter cranked out by next weekend…
It’s funny – if I get too far away from my material and spend too much time thinking about how to piece things together, the best thing to do is simply to dive back into my interviews and archival material, and ideas start jumping out at me (“Oh, right…that’s what I wanted to say!”). It’s a good feeling, which not only gets the writing juices flowing but also reminds me that I did an extensively good job back when I was researching this stuff in the first place…
Two days into prepping to write the next dissertation chapter, I’m hitting a brick wall. Since I can’t seem to get anywhere doing “legitimate” writing, I figure I’ll try getting some ideas out here (and anyone reading who’s up on my dissertation, feel free to throw in your two cents).
So here’s my dilemma. The way I’d been conceptualizing my dissertation was as five chapters, each centering on a social group involved with the history of the VCR as an extension of the theater into the home: enthusiasts, distributors, retailers, employees, and consumers. That’s all well and good for the first chapter, which is kind of a stand-alone story in itself, as well as the last one (which is essentially about the resulting understanding of the VCR’s place in the home), but now that I’m wrestling with the next section, I’m finding that it’s not really so easy to separate distributors and retailers – in fact, the more I’ve thought about it and gone through research material, the more I realize that the two are interrelated to the point that discussing one without an equal emphasis on the other isn’t an option.
So, I’m trying to reconceptualize the outline of the middle few chapters – the best idea I’ve got going right now is to reframe the distributors/retailers stuff into two chapters: the first would be on the change in who’s actually distributing videotapes from the electronics industry/‘brown goods stores’ to the recording industry/‘video specialty stores’, while the second would be on the establishment of institutions by retailers and distributors that increased their power, while at the same time facilitating a greater sense of closure about what a video store (and by extension the role of the VCR in American life) should be. This way, I could still leave the last two chapters essentially the same (one on the intersection of the video store as a consumption junction with consumers, the other on the eventual role of the VCR and videotapes in the domestic space).
Here’s the problem – while the first of those “mediators” chapters (the one on electronics vs. recording industry technological frames) would have a strong, clear argument, I don’t have a foothold into the second one yet. Sinply arguing “Hey, look, these people built institutions” doesn’t really feel like it cuts it for me. Plus, I feel like I’d be backtracking to tell the story of video stores through the entry of Blockbuster only to then double back to the relationship of video clerks to consumers in the Mom and Pop video stores of the early 1980’s.
Argh. I guess I’ll go read through my interviews again, and see if anything jumps out at me…
E-mailed a draft of my first dissertation chapter off to my advisors earlier today, and now I’m fighting off a low, gut-level fear that it’s no good, that I’ve wasted the past two weeks of writing. Of course, I know that’s not true, not one bit, but I feel it nonetheless.
Interestingly, this feeling is in the same family as the feeling of having written a bit of computer code, and then leaving it for others to use…I know it works for me when I use it and I know how I think it should be used, but I’m concerned that the other people using it will come across bugs that I didn’t anticipate. Of course, I know that in the end the user testing process results in a better product, but I still feel nervous whenever other people first start playing with it.
So I guess I could think of this as user testing, except the product in question is the argument in my dissertation…if Ron, Bruce or Trevor find anything wrong, then I’ll just start debugging.
[Yeah, can’t you just tell that I’m more confident coding than writing these days?]
Favorite bit written so far today:
Due to this real-time editing, the very placement of the VCR in the viewing room wasn’t obvious. Because the VCR was usually located by the television set and remote controls were still years away, this often meant sitting within arm’s reach of the television, not the most comfortable way to watch a program. One of the early concerns of videophiles, in fact, was how far the VCR could be from the television set and thus how long a cable could be used to connect the two without signal degradation, explicitly so that “you [could] put the unit next to your chair and facilitate editing out commercials.” Several videophiles configured their homes in this way, with the VCR controls easily accessible from an armchair across the room from the television set.
When’s the last time you thought of putting a VCR anywhere but near a TV?