Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102210192
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARIA C. JOHNSON LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In bedrooms. Delivery rooms. At christenings and birthday parties. On the first day of school. At piano recitals. Proms. Graduations. Weddings. At the family reunion and its volleyball game and the knee surgery that follows.
At high school reunions and sales conferences. At retirement parties and on trips to Hawaii. It's even at funerals - just to prove the dearly departed looks as good as everyone said they did.
Smile - if you can - you're on video camera. That is, if you aren't watching a rented video movie or re-arranging your schedule so you can watch that PBS special you taped two years ago.
We are a culture bound by half-inch VHS tape, fascinated and enriched by some of the things it can do, and gagged by the sight of yet another zoom in, then out, of a mother-in-law chewing broccoli at a rehearsal dinner.
What are we to do? Put our camcorders and tapes in the microwave and set the dial on Chernobyl? Certainly not.
For one thing, you're not supposed to put metal in a microwave. And for another, the videophile in your family will just borrow a neighbor's camcorder and tape the ruins of your microwave.
No, this stuff is here to stay. Even though the video revolution is relatively new - VCRs have been common for about 10 years, camcorders for half that long - it's clearly the result of the natural human appetite to document our lives and times.
Surely, historians of the future will have an easy time studying us, although who knows what they'll decide. Perhaps they'll trace the decline of America as an economic power to the fact that we spent so much time waiting to get to the "really good parts" of home videos.
Oh, there have been some great moments, but most of them aired on the first episode of "America's Funniest Home Videos." More often our tapes contain off-camera voices coaxing us to "say something, say something." Consistently, we give brilliant replies, such as, "Hiiiii."
This is topped on the excitement scale only by the next step: popping the tape into the VCR and watching people who just said "Hiiiii" in your presence say "Hiiiii" on video. Virtually everyone who owns a camcorder knows this inspiring moment.
"They have personal meaning for the immediate family but beyond that, they have very little meaning at all," says Michael Porter, an associate professor of communication at the University of Missouri at Columbia. "It's very similar to `Let's look at Aunt Clara's slides from Europe,' but at least slides are quicker."
But enough ragging on video. It's not all bad. In fact, it has some very good points.
No other medium that's relatively affordable allows us to capture such complete images of people and play them back instantly. In a matter of seconds, we can record and store the way someone walks, talks, dresses and runs from the camera when she realizes she's being taped.
"Look at that, she runs just like her momma did."
Everyone has heard heartwarming stories of children getting to hear the sound of a grandfather's laughter or the lilt of a grandmother's singing on videotapes made by their parents. That's amazing, and something worth pre serving.
Bob Schrag, a professor of communication at North Carolina State University, taped the first time his daughter Emily, now 3, walked. She was standing between her grandparents. Schrag loves that tape. He can watch it for hours.
He also has a tape of an early birthday party for his daughter, Andrea, now 9. One of the revelers spilled punch. Schrag went to clean it up and set down his camcorder, still running.
"I've got five minutes of the side of a table leg," he says.
Schrag knows he can't be the only person who has had this experience, and he guesses that there are lots of idle cameras and tapes because of it. He thinks people will start being more selective about the events they tape, if they haven't started doing that already.
"I mean, how many people are really organized enough to go home, edit them in the order they want, store them and not record `Cheers' over the baptism?" he asks.
Good point. Or how about the guy who recorded a football game over the tape of his wedding (true story).
"I coulda pounded him," his wife says. "At least we have our wedding pictures."
For the taping that remains, how about some ground rules?
That's an idea from Emily D. Edwards, an assistant professor of broadcasting and cinema at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
"Maybe we ought to challenge Miss Manners or somebody to develop video etiquette," says Edwards, who, as a former television news reporter sometimes accompanied video cameras into uncomfortable, personal situations. She thinks many people wielding video cameras today have taken their manners from the only role model available: television news crews.
As much as Edwards works with video - she directed a taped documentary on the followers of the Grateful Dead - she has refused to let the camera into some of the most important moments of her life.
When her daughter Marissa, now 4, was born, Edwards and her husband decided not to tape the event because they thought a camera would be too intrusive in the delivery room. When she was pregnant, Edwards listened to other mothers tell stories of their babies' births, and she decided she wanted to pass on her baby's story through the oral tradition, too.
Like many others, Edwards realizes that not only are storytelling skills important, they offer the opportunity to edit out the parts you'd rather forget. Or, as Schrag says, "If your videotape proves conclusively that you went through your wedding with your fly unzipped, that's something your memory will erase for you that video will not."
Then again, life is filled with silly moments, and isn't there something to be said for the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from realizing we all can be bumbling idiots?
Edwards thinks video can help foster that feeling of community.
"When you see little Japanese children on `America's Funniest Home Videos' - I think they have similar shows in other countries - you see that family life is more or less the same. You have mommies and daddies and children, and they do funny things and have birthday parties. Maybe there is a way through video to bring people closer together. That's certainly a cheerful thought."
Another cheerful thought is that exposure to camcorders may be good for children. Looking at the world through a video camera could help them appreciate details, in the same way walking through the woods with a still camera sharpens attention to small flowers and dew-covered spider webs. At the same time, the experience can also let them know the camera doesn't show everything about an event.
That could make children more discriminating media consumers.
Schrag, author of "Taming the Wild Tube," a book about children and television, says there's another way parents can use video technology to help kids: Give them quality video rentals and taped television to overcome sloppy network programming.
He cites the example of the wholesome Hallmark movie, "Sarah, Plain and Tall," that was aired recently in the same time slot devoted, a few nights later, to Cher "in leather and chains."
"We essentially become our own programmer, and it's eating into the network market, which is making the networks crazy," he says.
Of course, that brings up the possibility of adults doing the same thing, and soon everyone's home-viewing schedule will be so personalized we won't have anything to talk about at the water cooler. How many times have you started to rehash a favorite television program at work only to be interrupted by "Oh, don't tell me! I taped it and haven't watched it yet"?
The truth is, that taped episode of "L.A. Law" or "thirtysomething" may never make it to the VCR. It's one thing to time-shift "Sarah Plain and Tall," from 9 p.m. to 7 p.m. to accommodate bed time. It's quite another to expect to pick up another hour in the day just because you have an hour's worth of "David Letterman" on tape.
"Once that hour is gone, it's gone," says Porter, bursting what may be a subconscious bubble in the mind of many video users - the idea that a tape holds time.
What it does hold is images and sounds that take a certain amount of time to watch and listen to. In some cases, those images and sounds have been very useful. Just ask the Chinese students and the eastern European revolutionaries, who, in recent years, have traded truth with the outside world via under ground video tapes.
Video is also having a strong effect in this country.
"I think the area where videotape is making it's biggest contribution is in education," says Richard Elam, a professor of radio, television and motion pictures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In class, Elam shows a taped television documentaries on Edward R. Murrow. At home, he watches videotapes, sent from Texas, of his 16- year-old grandson playing football and his 13-year-old granddaughter at a dance recital.
Video cameras, he says, are the latest creatures in a technological evolution.
"How different is this from people who pressed flowers in the family Bible and kept records?" he asks. "I think every civilization wants to document itself."
And now we have the chance to do that, with sound and color, continuously, for hours on end, boldly going where no Super 8 or Polaroid has gone before. That's great, right?
Last summer, a car pulled up to the brink of a canyon in Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. A man got out and put a camcorder to his eye. He walked to the overlook, pointed the camera at a waterfall, taped for a minute, turned, got back in his car and drove off.
Overhead, the clouds played havoc with sunshine. A slight breeze blew, and if you looked between the lodgepole pines that lined the walk way, you could see a rainbow at the foot of the falls.
by CNB