Gone but Not to Be Forgotten: 1980s and 1990s Media Histories

Jesper Verhoef is a historian and media scholar at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has researched a
wide array of media – including cinema, the portable radio, Walkman, pager, and Nintendo’s Game Boy and other handhelds – and associated practices to analyse critical sociocultural, historical developments such as Americanisation, individualisation, consumerism, and the advent of neoliberalism. His research has appeared in Convergence; Mobile Media & Communication; Game Studies; Digital Humanities Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Tom Slootweg is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen. He
wrote his dissertation on the (often utopian) hopes and expectations, but also the everyday amateur
uses, of electronic video in the Netherlands and beyond, between the 1960s and 1990s. He is currently
exploring various digital tools for doing media historical research and wrote about these and other
topics in Digital Roots (De Gruyter 2021) and Doing Digital Film History (De Gruyter Fall 2024). Tom is
the parting editor-in-chief of TMG-Journal for Media History.