a hobby to fill up leisure time and as a retreat from social and political participation” (145–46). This marginalization was not inevitable, but was accomplished through the complex set of cultural and material forces, including “[t]echnical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures, and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby” (157). Despite these pressures, Zimmermann ends with the hope that future constructions of amateur film “may liberate it as a more accessible and meaningful form of personal expression and social and political intervention” (157).
The same cultural pressures that limited the political use of cameras remain operational in the digital age. Apple, for instance, has developed a remarkable suite of applications packaged as iLife. These applications include tools for archiving and manipulating still images, making videos, composing music, and burning DVDs, but they are marketed via images of leisure-time consumption that recall the Kodak marketing Slater discusses. A recent advertisement asks, for instance, “What if you could command an entire world of music, photos, movies and DVDs—all from your sofa? Now you can share the good life with friends and family on a . . . new iMac G5” (“Mac Expo”). Like the camera, iLife is positioned within a discourse that tends to render it politically innocuous rather than one that underscores its radical possibilities. GarageBand, an iLife application for composing music, seems to locate itself, by its very name, in the domain of trivial recreation rather than serious social action.
The evolution of digital technologies themselves also strikingly echoes the evolution of the camera. Slater notes that in its pursuit of the widest possible market share, Kodak’s goal was to make the camera as easy to use as possible. This imperative simultaneously resulted in cameras that were more restrictive (lacking features and settings available to professionals) and in consumption practices characterized by unthinking, unreflective use. “Point-and-shoot” became both a technical achievement and a (passive, depoliticized) mode of use. Likewise, newer versions of iMovie lack useful features available in older versions, rendering it easier to use, but more restrictive. That is, certain rhetorical options that were available in earlier versions were lacking or more difficult to access in later versions.
To sum up: the cases of the still and movie cameras reveal that a complex web of forces interact to shape the way a technology is developed and adopted. Technologies never have a completely independent “life of their own”; they do not inevitably yield their full potential to society (Winston 86). Instead, a constellation of cultural and material factors influence how they are used and by whom. To operationalize the full potential of technologies on behalf of social justice, we need to better understand the material-cultural dynamics that govern the development and uses of technologies. Slater, following Raymond Williams, observes, “any medium must be analysed not only in terms of its present use (a restriction which encourages technologism) but also in terms of its potential forms” (289-90, emphasis added).
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