The Moving Image: A User's Manual

"How did Americans come to vote into the most powerful political and military post in the world a reality TV star from NBC, groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS, who then appointed his Cabinet from Fox?

The moving image had something to do with it."

Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. Join BKC co-founder Charles Nesson to discuss Kaufman’s book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (MIT Press). The Moving Image is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived at this point. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how it’s the moving image—not social media, not artificial intelligence, but television networks and online video—that has played such an outsized role in bringing personalities like Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, and Netanyahu to the front of the world stage and in deepening what journalist Hanna Rosin calls our “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.”

Kaufman also presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. He offers up new ways for us to get a proper handle back on the moving image—how best to produce it, distribute it, clear rights to it, authenticate it, cite it, and ultimately archive and preserve it.

Speaker

Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning and Executive Producer of Intelligent Television.  Earlier he served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning.  Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Kaufman is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021), The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (MIT Press, 2025) and The Fifth Estate: Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century (Seven Stories Press, forthcoming).