Upon returning home from work, a colleague of mine was buoyantly greeted by his ten-year-old daughter. She begged him to fetch his camcorder and come to her room, where she was playing with two other girls – a karaoke of sorts in which they combined song and dance with typical kid's fits of laughter and fun. “You need to tape us because when we’re famous they’ll show this on TV,” his daughter explained, with a sense of urgency. The two girls’ motivation for being filmed betrayed a sophisticated reflexivity of the camcorder as a tool for producing future memories. This awareness was most likely triggered by contemporary television programs – anything from so-called reality TV and lost-relative shows to dating shows and celebrity interviews – that deploy home video footage to represent a person's past life. The girls not only grasped the significance of moving images as a memory tool, but they also showed a complex understanding of the nature of mediation: whereas the camcorder registers their private lives, in the context of television these images may also help shape their public identity. Even at this young age, children apprehend the constructedness of mediated experience: the camcorder and television camera construct family life simultaneously and by the same means as they construct our memory of it.

In his excellent study of the home video, James Moran has theorized the historical and cultural specificity of the “home mode” – the place of home movies/videos in a gradually changing media landscape. Rather than identifying the home movie or home video according to its ontological purity or as a technical apparatus, Moran rethinks the “home mode” as a historically changing effect of technological, social, and cultural determinations, a set of discursive codes that helps us negotiate the meaning of individuals in response to their shared social environment. The “home mode” is not simply a technological device deployed in a private setting (the family), but is defined by Moran as 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”.