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102 Consuming Media

Among our informants, video recording was not only a way to control viewing
time. Video recordings of favourite films or televised programmes were also saved and
watched several times. In this way, video recording from television can result in
substantial collections that also include purchased films as well as self-produced
amateur videos. The introduction of video in the 1970s has thus also made it possible
for anyone to collect films, transforming film collecting from an exclusive hobby for
a select few to a widespread popular practice. By that time, records had been
collectibles for decades and gone through several cycles of material and technological
remediation, in that shellac records had been replaced by vinyl records and supple-
mented by tapes, and the introduction of CD records was in its infancy. However,
the invention of the phonograph around 1900 transformed rather than initiated the
practice of music collecting. In the eighteenth century, devoted collectors could
already fit rolls or disks in automatic pianos and street organs, and collecting music
scores for piano playing was a popular practice among women in bourgeois families
long before records became collectibles for the listening public at large in the twen-
tieth century, with the 1920s as the main breakthrough decade.
Most people who have a video or DVD player also possess at least a rudimentary
collection of favourite films, without considering themselves devoted film collectors.
Differences among collectors are gradual rather than substantial, making it hard to
draw a clear line between collectors and those who do not collect. In contrast to the
vernacular practice of collecting photos, record and film collectors are not primarily
occupied with saving memories of special occasions or events that reflect their own life
course. Like books but contrary to photography, records and films do not serve as a
primary biographical material for those who collect them. Book, record and film collec-
tors can easily be described as book, music and movie lovers, while there does not seem
to be a necessary relationship between collecting one’s own amateur photos and a deep
devotion to or even interest in photography as such. Record and film collectors seem to
collect in a more determined, systematic and purposeful way, while collections of
photos often have a more occasional, unintentional and unsystematic character.
Our interviews confirmed that the collector is a vague, but nevertheless real, social
figure in people’s minds. The same goes for efforts to define what a collection is,
which to a great extent could be explained by the intersecting meanings of words
such as ‘saving’, ‘accumulating’, ‘hoarding’ and ‘collecting’. People’s views on collec-
tors and collections seem to rest on family resemblances of the sort Wittgenstein had
in mind when he wrote that ‘phenomena have no one thing in common which makes
us use the same word for all – but they are related to one another in many different
ways.’ 13 Some collect for taxonomic, others for aesthetic or economic reasons, and
some even out of necessity, like the ragman. Although there is no single property or
motive that all collectors share, they are conceptually united by the fact that they
resemble one another in various ways. 14
Hence, it comes as no surprise that people hesitate when asked whether they
consider themselves collectors. Even the most prolific photographer among our
informants did not consider herself a collector, but rather a ‘big-time consumer’.