Whatever Happened to Home Movies? Self- representation from Family Archives to Online Algorithms

Home movies are cultural acts and artifacts that have much to teach us about the way we use media technologies to situate ourselves in contemporary and past cultures, and how we use them to store and reshape our images of self, family and community. Archives of personal, family, or community media have always been rich and complex, albeit relatively bound sites of analysis, however when we now upload personal media to video sharing platforms we subject them not only to new economies of scale, but of meaning and audience as well. The prolific use of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok now requires us to take stock of how systems of producing, organizing, and circulating self-made media are impacted by corporate profit motives and backend functionalities. The capacities and uses of digital recording technologies and online file sharing platforms have complicated the status of the category of home movies and necessitate a revision to the analytical frameworks that several scholars of Cinema and Media Studies have offered in the past. Through a discussion of several user-produced media texts on video sharing platforms, I aim to elucidate the ways in which the platform is now apparatus that structures new social and affective relations and how we conceive of and represent our personal worlds, drawing attention to how capital flows through these systems, commodifying images, affect, gestures, expression, movement, sounds, and desire, and how and where existing social biases are reproduced or challenged. 

: Two young children perform a fitness routine as their cousin records on a smartphone. Image provided by Debra Berliner. What kind of video is this? It is not purely what we have come to think of as the home movie, in which only "invested spectators"those who care about the children involved in its productionhave a stake or interest in watching, preserving, or circulating the text. 1 Viewers beyond the family saw it even before some of the children's parents. And despite its resemblance to online video memes (in both length and content), it is not exactly what is typically thought of as social media either, because it was circulated through direct, private messaging rather than through online social networks (such as Facebook or Instagram) or discovered by viewers through video search outcomes (as we would expect from video sharing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo). What, then, if it were to be posted on an online sharing platform and happened to go viral and earn profit for the person who posted it? The actual and potential lifecycle of this particular video points to a myriad of questions about for whom this video holds meaning. It matters who holds power over how that video might be appropriated, manipulated, monetised, or preserved. Its particular production and circulation path troubles existing categories of non-professional media, as does the content.
Archives of personal, family, or community media have always been rich and complex sites of analysis, albeit relatively closed ones. However, when we now upload personal media to video sharing platforms we subject them not only to new economies of scale, but of meaning and audience as well. 2 One's personal media, once posted online, has the potential to reach millions of strangers, whose responses and interpretations will most certainly differ, reflecting new meaning back onto the text through comments and how, when, and to whom it is circulated. This is compounded by the fact that it is almost impossible to possess or destroy a home movie once it is uploaded to an online platform. Someone may choose to remove the video, but that does not protect against prior downloads or the likely possibility that the file will remain on the platform's server.
It is in these ways that the video text and its interpretation become quite literally out of the hands of the makers and subjects. Is the category of the home movie even useful in discussing the production and circulation of digital self-made media?
The capacities and uses of digital recording technologies and online file sharing platforms have complicated the status of the category of home movies and necessitate a revision to the analytical frameworks that several scholars have offered in the past. We are therefore compelled to confront a lacuna in the field of Cinema and Media Studies, a gap in language and theory for media that troubles the line between familiar amateur or nonprofessional forms, and what is commonly considered to be social media production. This essay puts home movie scholarship from the field While the ubiquity of mobile media has enabled self-produced videos to become a fixture of popular culture, the prolific use of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok now requires us to take stock of how systems of producing, organising, and circulating this media are impacted by corporate profit motives, backend functionalities of the sites, and the inherent social bias embedded in them due to their existence within technosocial artifacts of racial capitalism. 3 This essay questions what is valuable from the study of home movies that might help us to elucidate changes in self-made media making, and where are we pushed to find new taxonomies for understanding contemporary practices and their import.

A Brief Overview of the (Fragile) Category of Home Movies
Home movies have historically shared common characteristics and aesthetics over many decades, and across media technologies. The common home movie conventions have become recognisable from the shaky handheld camera, lack of professional lighting or sound, and grainy or pixelated footage, film stock or tape quality 4 to the tacit acknowledgement from the subject(s) that they are aware of the camera. 5 The home movie look has been relentlessly reproduced because of its familiarity as a form. Its formal characteristics have even become shorthand in many narrative and documentary films and television shows to signify realism, historical evidence, nostalgia, or a behind-the-scenes vantage point. Several video editing software programs now include "home movie" filters to give footage the look of small gauge film stock. Home movie clips, even the apocryphal ones created for narrative fiction programs, provide an intimacy through suggested access to more private momentsa backstage or backstory for the characters. Filmmaker and scholar Michelle Citron suggests that home movies construct "necessary fictions" used to shape specific narratives, rather than serving simply as recorded evidence of the particular dynamics or details of a family's past. 6 The common use of home movies as quotations in fictional and documentary texts therefore underscores the paradox of the home movie genre itself; while they are used by makers and audiences as a way of presumably indexing the real, home movies only deepen or complicate stories that are being told.
Home movies, as a category, have had a niche role in the last several decades of cinema and media scholarship. The widespread access to imaging technologies after World War II encouraged many scholars to begin to consider the home movie to be as worthy of study as broadcast or commercial media. 7 Visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen's 1986 book Snapshot Versions of Life continues to provide a particularly useful framework for understanding the conventions and communicative purpose of homemade media, specifically, for its introduction of the concept of the home mode of media production. 8 Beginning with the premise that the home is not just a geographic but a conceptual space that is continually remade and reaffirmed through symbolic mediation, Chalfen describes the ways in which home is imagined through homemade media production while distinguishing personal and private features of home mode communication from mass modes of communication.
The category of the home mode draws boundaries around an autonomous field of practice in which amateur representations of domestic life and other things known to the invested spectator are produced to be (re)viewed by those within a delimited sphere that excludes strangers and mass audiences. Chalfen argues that the home mode must be studied distinctly from the professional formal codes, commercial system of exchange, and public context of typical image production. He argues that home movies, like family photo albums and other cultural artifacts, are produced in the home mode and therefore possess clearly defined conventions for the types of images produced, the circumstances under which they are made, and the kind of people and events that can be represented. In this way, the home mode is a means to symbolically unite the community through a visual network of social relationships. Home mode artifacts hold an important cultural function in the retention of details of people, places and events.
In the pre-digital time of Chalfen's writing, he noted that home mode media had autobiographical functions -to represent the events of one's own life, and to observe one's image in action, as well as rites of passage and seeing one's place in relation to others in the family. These functions have been used by families as performances of membership, identity and lifestyle, and they have enabled individuals to produce and circulate their own images, measure them against other images, and negotiate their place in a mediated culture. 9 As a result, and perhaps most vital to our definition of the home movie form for the purposes of this article, viewers who were not already connected to the diegetic world of the home movie were therefore less able to draw on its contextual, intertextual, and indexical references. The symbolic world at the time of Chalfen's writing of the late 1980s was a relatively closed one. In other words, if you did not know or care about anyone in a given home movie, you would be less likely to care or want to watch it. If you have ever been asked to sit through another family's home movies, you have likely already discovered the truth in the claim.
We can utilise the concept of the home mode to account for contemporary media making practices because it is not simply a technological device deployed in a private setting (the family) but an active mode of media production representing everyday life: "a liminal space in which practitioners may explore and negotiate the competing demands of their public, communal and private personal identities." 10 The home mode provides a flexible lens with which to examine home movie production practice across time and technologies, and is therefore useful to us in our studies of contemporary online digital media in both formal characteristics and semiotics. In addition to the continuing impact of the specificities of the media that is used for recording and playback, the home mode is shaped by technological and economic structures.
Invoking Chalfen's original description of the home mode, film scholar James Moran, who was writing in the context of analogue video of the 1990s, reminds us that rather than existing solely at the service of a nuclear family, the home mode works to construct an image of home as a "cognitive and affective foundation [for] situating ourselves in the world." 11 It also temporally situates, family members as it serves as material evidence of generational continuity -of one's connections to others, groups, rituals, and traditions. The act of video recording itself becomes an active tie that binds. Moran argues that the home mode has become more elastic to accommodate the shifts in familial constitution and dynamics, while families have continued to use the home mode to articulate and make visible their relationship. 12 Using the symbolic work of home movie texts, other cinema and media scholars and practitioners have provided ways to think of home movie production and preservation as a site of ideological (re)production. As Patricia Zimmerman argues in her ground-breaking 1995 book Reel Families, home movie making practices, and their resulting image memories, serve an ideological function beyond the family dynamic. Writing at a time when VHS recording technologies made home movie recording, transfer and duplication more widespread, her historical study of nonprofessional film from 1897 until the mid-1990s considers the ways in which amateur film is "not simply an inert designation of inferior film practice and ideology but rather is a historical process of social control over representation." 13 Zimmerman observes that ideology flowed through the home movie maker, often a family patriarch, who had the resources to buy a camera and process films, frequently relying on instruction manuals that encouraged particular norms of representation. The home movie obscured class, as well as other kinds of social differences, while promoting the (white, middle-class) nuclear family as the place of leisure and the centre of all meaningful activity.
In these ways, she argues, home movies encouraged a retreat from social and political participation as well as family truths. Personal archives of home movies, therefore, can be seen as potent sites of a localised struggle over meaning, which is one reason why utilising home movies in personal documentary and experimental films has been such a compelling technique. 14 Just as home movies in the personal sphere, through their organisation and use, have been part of an exercise of power, home movies have also historically been used in the production of and resistance to state and imperial power. Scholars such as Veena Hariharron and Julia Nordegraaf and Elvira Louw have illustrated how colonial archives of movies of everyday life of white settlers and bureaucrats were used to exert power by fortifying the colonial logics of domination and subordination and colonial ways of seeing the colonised other. 15 Just as many independent professional filmmakers have reworked their personal home movies to make interventions into family representation, many others have also used home movies to resist dominant state narratives. 16 And, with the ubiquity of digital, online video, anyone with an internet connection, a smartphone camera, and the appropriate software can edit videos to remix their personal media collection with available professional media. As YouTube proliferates with fanvids and remixes, critiquing state power has become common social media fare. 17

Expanding the home mode; challenging the archive
The audience for home movies prior to online video sharing platforms was typically limited to private viewings by technology, too, as sharing movies was not possible without duplicating the footage and securing technologies for playback. For these reasons, home movies were rarely seen by others outside of the family or community depicted. With the introduction of consumer video in the late 1970s, however, amateur recording and reproduction devices proliferated, making home movie production more portable, less expensive, and simpler to use, widening the scope of who and what could be recorded and shared. Even so, with rare exceptions, home movie circulation was still limited to existing personal networks.
Recognising the value of home mode media as a site of communication and meaning-production, there have been efforts on the part of several institutions, scholars, and organisations to collect "orphan" and "found" films, discern their provenance, screen, and catalogue them, as well as to collect the home movies of marginalised makers and make them available to researchers, artists, historians, genealogists, and community residents. There is an existing foundation of resources and networks that have been active in finding, organising, screening, archiving, contextualising, and circulating analogue media that might have otherwise found itself in a landfill or passed from attic to yard sale and back again. 18  As Jasmyn Castro argues in relation to the home movies of Black families and communities, while they were initially recorded for the intention of private viewing, they ultimately "operate outside of the representational norms of mainstream theatrical media and thereby [are] able to transcend its limitations." 21 In doing so, they "redefine mis-and-underrepresented Black communities; they provide an intimate moving image record that complements and counters the often-negative imagery in the media" while providing a resource for "re-examining and understanding the African American experience." 22 The home media archive therefore works in contradistinction to commercial film of the same era of their production, what Castro calls the "microhistories that challenge the parameters of broader histories and film canons." 23 Yet, as much as home movies have the potential to present "plural pasts" that challenge dominant representations, Crystal Mun-Hye Baik warns us not to see them solely as an "oppositional schematic of power," but rather as full of contradictions that reflect the complexity of everyday life, a place to "track the discursive tensions" that emerge from the pairing of the everyday with a yearning for visibility. 24 Baik urges us to consider the ways in which archives of historical home movieswhether they are in a family attic or a museumare always remediated, generating new inscriptions of meaning through the act of curatorial decisions. As Stewart explains of her work with the SSHMP, the act of constructing a catalogue requires the archivist to contend with "overwhelming detail." Specific taxonomies and metadata are most useful when the archivist has additional context through oral histories and active participation with those who have connections to the texts. 25 In the archivist's struggle to organise and make these home movie collections legible to the public, we are reminded the extent to which the arrangement and categorisation of any given archive and its parent organisation shapes the meaning surrounding its artifacts. 26 These scholars gesture here not just to the incredible labour of home movie archiving and the process of remediating, but also to the process of signification and resignification that occurs along the way. The meaning that is inscribed through the cataloguing, screening, and circulation of home

Platforms as Archive and Curator
Prior to the ubiquity of mobile media and file sharing platforms, most home movie collections had been stored, maintained, or discarded by someone with a close (typically familial) connection to the people depicted. Artifacts of the domestic sphere and community life that typically wound up as part of the detritus and heirlooms of estates, their full context was unlikely to be understood by outsiders well enough for archival or even screening purposes. 30 Even most of the home movies that found their way into museum or library archives had very few people involved interacting with them. Home movies were also, by-and-large, not monetisedwith the notable exceptions of Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV in Japan (1986 debut), the long-running hit television program and franchise America's Funniest Home Videos (1989 debut), and other international spinoffs which solicited viewers to submit videotaped clips of home movies for possible broadcast and prize money.
I am using the term "archive" as a term for sites for file storage, organisation, and narrativisation as opposed to a "collection," which refers more to accumulation and private meaning to the collector, than use. 31 Referring to online video sharing platforms as archives is a complicated issue, as online file sharing platforms to date have not defined themselves as such. If anything, the disappearance or difficulty of finding videos online is more of a defining feature than any kind of reliable preservation and organisation system. However, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have become ad hoc and default archives for many home mode movies, as many people have posted there in order to share widely within and beyond their networks. In doing so, they have, perhaps inadvertently, submitted their content (and rights to it) to the platform, in perpetuity.
Yet while many users rely on platforms to host their videos, the actualities of how, where, and when the content is viewed and circulated are in part impacted by the laws and regulations (in most cases, the lack of regulations) that govern the platforms.
Conversely, some individuals, organisations, and institutions may intentionally use these platforms as an archive for their media, without necessarily knowing (or understanding) the terms and conditions that will shape the video's half-life. In other words, while these platforms may appear to function as archives for long-term storage and access, the actual functionality and fickleness of the systems in play betrays that potential. If we do accept these platforms as de facto archives, we must ask: who or what, then, is the archon, organising and systematising the files? We know that what can be seen by an individual user at any given time is a product of what search terms they have used, along with the meta-data and algorithms that shape what is viewable to them. That is very different from a grandparent making decisions about whether to transfer and duplicate the family's VHS home movies for the family or a community collecting the home movies they have gathered from others to develop a local archive for future historiography and identity formation.
The organisational logic of contemporary user-produced file sharing platforms is structured around optimising reach, and ultimately profit. Meta-data (the information users enter about their videos, including hashtags) and algorithms (embedded formulas that determine which videos play when and for whom) structure the user experience. Home mode media, then, is subject to the logics of the platform to determine its audience, and in turn, the audience to determine its lifecycle. As a result, videos are distributed and decontextualised from the family or home mode context and recontextualised within streams of content chosen by the platform. For example, imagine a video of a person making a wedding toast. The toast was then posted on YouTube and watched by not only the attendees and people who could not make it to the event, but by others to whom the video was suggested when they typed in search terms that matched the keyword tags. Search words like "weddings" or "toasts;" might call up this specific video, but even some seemingly minute detail or subjective reading such as "bridesmaid in ugly dress" or "funny speeches." Even suggestions of broadcast clips such as "Wedding Toast -Saturday Night Live" or infotainment from topicrelated organisations such as the public speaking club Toastmasters offering "Toastmasters Wedding Toast Tips" might come up. Whatever meaning the invested spectators of the initial wedding event might attribute to the subsequent video is situated in intertextual flows of meaning, by the algorithms that guide associations between videos. While the complexity of search terms and results also impacts the archives of home movies in general, what I aim to draw attention to here is how results found through online for-profit video sharing platforms organise home movies according to monetary logicswhat is most liked, shared, commented on and therefore, monetisable. Video content is bound up in advertising revenue, and the profit-oriented structures of the site. Viewers are directed towards content that has proven itself successful according to these governing principles.

Platforms have Politics
As scholars of media and technology such as Tarleton Gillespie, Sofia Ujuoma Noble and Ruha Benjamin have all argued, online platforms are not neutral. 32 They have existing politics that determine development and coding systems and the ways they are taken up by users often reflects and reinscribes social biases. Moreover, depending on their governing and regulatory structures, such as what counts as "offensive" or the flagging or blocking of copyrighted content, media sharing platforms will impose particular norms upon the videos that they host. At this very basic level, the invisible structures on the platform are already shaping what we do and do not see of other users' videos. On YouTube, community (also read as corporate-mandated) guidelines are literally presented as "common sense principles." 33 It is assumed that users will have an intuitive sense of what to post or not to post. And yet, that videos that circulate do so is because of their successful harnessing of algorithms and manoeuvring within a (digital) attention economy rather than due to their inherent social value. Evaluative structures, such as the "likes", "hearts", and "shares" found on many platforms, are known to boost attention, and further ensure the spreadability of the video. 34 Video recommendations on YouTube, much like the automatic replenishing of videos on TikTok, are based on browsing history and the keywords and metadata attached to videos one has watched previously. When we treat platforms as neutral systems, and as de facto video archives, we fail to see how our encounters with these systems are shaped by their systems at every level.
Algorithms are designed to keep you watching. 35 This is because a user's time online produces capital, for the person who posted, as well as for advertisers, and investors through digital labour that may be experienced by users as pleasure or even fandom. 36 The social capital of "likes" and "shares" is rewarded with monetary capital to the content creator, which is tied up in profit generated by the platform through its corporate relationships, and increasingly, directly to content producers as they acquire "influencer" status (meaning that they have large followings to their social media accounts that they leverage to persuade people to buy or use products and services). 37 Capital is produced even when online file sharing platforms are not the vehicles of circulation.  41 She writes of what she pointedly identifies as a "New Jim Code," in which recent technologies invoke discriminatory practices of previous eras while claiming to be more objective or progressive. It is the perceived neutrality of these technologies that is dangerous, for they continue to do the work of reproducing inequality and racist ideologies, further obscuring how Black people's labour and bodies continue to produce capital for white entities. Sheldon Pearse has written about how despite the diversity of TikTok content producers, the most visible and most followed TikTok trends feature white stars, often "feed[ing] off of the content of smaller users in an act of vampirism, growing stronger as competitors wither away, using culture as a commodity to maintain their positions." Black cultural production is thereby credited to white producers. And as Safiya Noble underscores in Algorithms of Oppression, the pornographic and anti-Black results that appear when conducting a Google search for "Black girls" emerges from either "corporate logic of either wilful neglect or a profit motive that makes money from racism and sexism." 42 It is of critical importance for scholars in the field to identify, analyse, and help undo the white supremacist architectures of the platforms we examine. Even though online video file-sharing platforms may appear to enhance the visibility of people at the margins, we must look to the structures that condition, and profit from, their participation.

Conclusion
Online practices of self-representation challenge earlier frameworks of "amateur" and "nonprofessional" media production by opening up onto different kinds of capitalist relations as they expand on existing notions of how we think about "home" and other personal/domestic spheres.
As we consider the status of home movies in the online digital landscape, it is important to consider the ways home mode communication is no longer simply adjacent to commercial media practices, but rather, part of a diverse, self-made media production ecology that is contiguous with other commercial and profit-oriented media practices. The home mode of making, as we have understood it as a field, has been replaced by personal media that has been sculpted by makers and algorithms to deliver clicks, likes, shares, and ultimately, profit. The representation of the personal sphere, performance for a possibly unknown audience, and the overlapping of circuits of meaning that are inscribed and reinscribed through online video-circulation puts pressure on existing taxonomies and frameworks.
Online video platforms and the media they store and circulate now structure meaning and reinscribe relationships of power within and among home mode representations while pushing us to attend to the curatorial power of the systems and entities that shape what circulates, how it does, and why. Of importance is attention to how capital flows through these systems, commodifying images, affect, gestures, expression, movement, sounds, and desire, and how and where existing social biases are reproduced or challenged.