Camcorders had been focused on weddings, birthday parties and other private joys. Now the public realm would increasingly belong to the new video technology and to accidental historians such as Holliday.
The 1991 King video was "the flash point, the coming of age of portable video that everybody's got," said Syracuse University television professor Robert Thompson. "Which, in a very real way, was the beginning of the total change of how information is gathered in America."
Once content to provide filler for the TV series "America's Funniest Homes Videos," camera owners became eager one-person news teams.
Abraham Zapruder had shown that film could capture a crucial moment with his 1963 record of President Kennedy's assassination. But his dramatic piece of celluloid was an anomaly, not a bellwether of change.
As the Sept. 11 horror unfolded, we expected TV news footage to be augmented by personal video. We weren't surprised by the brave physician who recorded his journey through the World Trade Center disaster; we expected it.
Videotape is so beguilingly simple and, as Thompson puts it, so "promiscuous": "You can stick in a two-hour tape, press 'record' and just keep going."
The King video didn't merely record an event; it ultimately created one. The tape was seen by many as irrefutable proof of police brutality. Their shock over the officers' acquittals was the gas that fueled the 1992 riots.
The city of Los Angeles was affected by Holliday's tape and so was Holliday himself, said attorney James Jordan, who represented him. Holliday could not be reached for comment, Jordan said.
"He started to blame himself for the riots," the attorney said. "He was a humble general manager of a plumbing company, and now he's thrown into the center of a media circus and controversy."
Does the increasing flood of images make us better informed? Not necessarily, says Joe Saltzman, a University of Southern California broadcast journalism professor.
"Seeing Sept. 11 pictures of the jets is horrific, but it doesn't tell you key information, the who, the why, the how," he said.
Such footage is so striking, so digestible that it's easy to stop there and miss getting the complete story, Saltzman said.
"At times, a tape can almost be more distorted and give the wrong impression than no tape," he added.
While Thompson agreed that videotape cannot stand on its own, he argues that it can make a contribution.
"The only intelligent thing to do is to gather every bit of evidence you can: verbal, descriptive, witnesses and video. Then, presumably, you try to make sense of that," he said.