Wasiak, P. VCRs, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Late State Socialist Poland, in Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 132-161. , 2020
This chapter investigates the spread of videocassette recorders (VCRs) in late socialist Poland, ... more This chapter investigates the spread of videocassette recorders (VCRs) in late socialist Poland, a period of evolving consumer culture. During this period, consumers, government agencies, retailers, and cultural intermediaries invested the VCR with multiple and contested meanings. VCRs were understood as one of the most distinctive symbols of consumer desire, were read as a symbol of individual identity made possible through consumption, and stood as a symbol of contradictory and ideologically charged values: the consumer culture of the West and universal technological modernity. As such, analyzing the social life of VCRs in 1980s Poland well demonstrates the interdependencies and tensions between affluent consumption and socialist ideology, the politics of mass consumption and the modernization process writ large. This chapter investigates the social life of VCRs from three different perspectives, each of which points to larger negotiations about the role of consumer desire in late socialist Poland. First, I outline the role of the VCR in identity construction, focusing on the manner in which individuals experienced the consumption of VCRs as a means of self-fashioning. VCRs were understood first and foremost as an expression of upward social mobility. Second, I investigate how the hard-currency chain stores, Pewex and Baltona, sought to meet, channel, and capitalize on this consumer desire by organizing and expanding new modes of distribution and retail in order to attract intended VCR owners. Finally, I explore the state-sponsored attempts to design, manufacture, and distribute Polish VCRs more broadly-a policy aimed at refashioning the cultural meanings of VCRs to those more closely related to official ideology and the promises of developed socialism. These policies sought to remove VCRs' symbolic connection to the West and to underplay the role of VCRs as status symbols by recoding the VCR as a universal artifact of high-technology modernity of the 1980s. The failure of the Polish electronics industry to independently manufacture "a synonym of
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Bulletin Board System (or BBS) technology to circulate computer
software across national borders. This paper is shedding more light
on the roots of contemporary internet-based software piracy by
investigating how appropriation of international telephone networks
contributed to the globalization of digital software distribution.
It also highlights the mundane aspects of the organization of
media convergence on the junction between analog and digital
technologies. Here I argue that the use of telephone networks as
a means of transnational software distribution is an instance of
actors setting up a convergent media environment driven by the
cultural logic of a specific subculture. My paper provides an overview
of BBS technology to demonstrate how it linked analog and
digital domains and then outlines its cultural significance, ultimately
discussing the appropriation of BBSes and their role in
transnational expansion of ‘the scene’.
meanings that reflect the outside world both in terms of mass media culture and the ongoing process of post-communist transition.