Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.

Hollywood Video was a VHS, DVD, and video game rental shop company started in 1988. It ceased operations, after declaring bankruptcy, in 2010. Credit: Flickr / The MIT Press Reader

If a DVD owner from the year 2005 found herself transported back to a video store circa 1982, she would likely find the space remarkably familiar: videocassette cases lining the walls, a movie playing on a television set, maybe some marquee lights framing an announcement board over the checkout counter — all in all, not terribly unlike the video store of two and a half decades later.

However, understanding the video store simply as a transactional space in which money is exchanged for goods and services misses the forest for the trees.

That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out…