The electrical transformation of the public sphere: Home video, the family, and the limits of privacy in the digital age

One of the constituent features of the digital age has been the redrawing of the line between private and public. Millions of social media users willingly discuss intimate behavior and post private photographs and videos on the internet. Meanwhile, state and corporate bodies routinely violate individual privacy in the name of security and sophisticated marketing techniques. While these occurrences represent something new and different, they are unsurprising given the history of home and amateur media.;In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary shifts in the nature of the public/private divide have historical roots in the aesthetics and style found in home movies and videos. In other words, long before Facebook and YouTube enabled users to publicly document their private lives, home movies and videos generated patterns of representation that were already shifting the unstable constitution of the "private" and the "public" spheres.;Using critical theory and archival research, I demonstrate how home moviemakers represented their families and experiences in communal and liminal spaces, expanding the meaning of "home." When video become the predominant medium for domestic usage, home mode artifacts became imbricated with television, granting them a form of phantasmagoric publicity that found fulfillment in the digital era. Finally, I analyze select films, including Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) and Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1988), to understand the implications of home video for the narration of family history and the depiction of the family home. In these analyses I pay particular attention to the scope and the limits of video's power to narrate family history, and the colonizing power of video's representations over our intimate family and national spaces.