VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

) The social life of thingsWhen considering media as practice mobility of objects and meanings assumes a particularimportance, and Appadurai offers an interesting theoretical apparatus to analyze it. In theintroduction to the collection of essays The Social Life of Things: Commodities in CulturalPerspective edited in 1986, Arjun Appadurai proposes to look at commoditization as a processresulting from the social and cultural mobility of objects. Under this perspective “things” are notimmanently considered as commodities but they become such in relation to their specific socialhistory and cultural biography (see also Kopytoff 1986). Throughout its life an object can thus enterand exit the commodity status according to rapidly changing balances in the politics of commercialdemand. According to Appadurai, then, we have to “approach commodities as things in a certainsituation, a situation that characterizes many different kinds of thing, at different points in theirsocial lives” (1986: 13). Following this perspective, the “regimes of value” (1986: 14) within whicha certain object travels transform the way the object itself is consumed, conceptualized anddiscussed. This constitutes an important methodological shift toward the study of the materiality ofthings (see also Miller 2005). It suggests, in fact, taking into account the specific materiality ofobjects to understand and interpret the constantly changing social meanings embodied by theobjects themselves. In Appadurai’s words, “even though from a theoretical point of view humanactors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the thing-inmotionthat illuminates their human and social context” (1986: 5).It is important to note here that Appadurai recognizes the articulation of two different ways ofconceptualizing objects-in-motion, that is, through the analysis of long-term and short-termmobility. He defines them as “social history” (long-term mobility) and “cultural biography” (shorttermmobility, specifically analyzed by Igor Kopytoff in his article within the same collection). AsAppadurai suggests,the social history of things and their cultural biography are not entirely separate matters,for it is the social history of things, over large periods of time and at large social levels,that constrains the form, meaning and structure of more short-term, specific, andintimate trajectories. It is also the case, though it is typically harder to document orpredict, that many small shifts in the cultural biography of things may, over time, lead toshifts in the social history of things (1986: 36).33