Core Post 1 — Televisions, cell phones, and oppositional reading

There’s something deeply unsettling for me about cultural criticism of technology that speaks just as well about the past as the present. On the one hand, it makes me feel comfortable because it says almost nothing has changed. The phenomena we’re seeing now aren’t new; technology hasn’t changed us so radically. On the other hand, it says that almost nothing has changed — except the specific products that we see.

I was struck by that uneasiness reading all of Lynn Spiegel’s piece for this week, seeing parallel after parallel between television and cell phones. The continuity is clearest on page 7, where she writes, “The dream of eradicating distances was a central trope of America’s early discourse on technology. Particularly in the post-Civil War years, it was machines of transport (especially the train) which became the rhetorical figure through which this dream was realized in popular discourse and literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, communication technology)' had supplanted transportation. It was now the telegraph, telephone, radio — and later, television — which promised to conquer space” (7).

Cell phones, and especially smartphones are the latest version of distance conquering devices that full the promise being able to, “remain alone in the living room, but at the same time sustain an illusion of being in the company of others” (24). It feels intuitively true, but examining it specifically in relation to the advertising only serves to close the gap. Phone ads are primarily visual, and frequently focus on the camera — and photos are so much more now the currency of connection, because where photos in the past were for sharing in albums with people in your living room, now they’re for people to experience while in separate living rooms. Telecom commercials take a slightly different route, focusing on audio connection, but the progress along the track of illusorily defeating isolation across is palpable. That “can you hear me now” was such a long running and successful ad campaign that its spokesperson was able to get a job as an ad rep for another company speaks volumes about how much phones trade on the ability to be connected when apart.

Of course there are plenty of differences and the relationship is by no means just progress along a linear track — but I think it’s powerful to look at television and cell phones as evolutions of similar impulses. I think this dialogues in interesting ways with the Lipsitz reading, thinking of the ways that advertisers seek continuity with tradition, its best-ever fulfillment, rather than breaks.

I have a lots of questions thinking about those readings together, but there are two in particular that I’m pondering. One is, I think, more about the class’ content. The other is more my own curiosity.

• Lipsitz notes how increasing ease of household work did not decrease the amount of work to be done — instead, it primarily raised the standards. When it comes to communication with people who are not immediately present, has the ease at which we can access them primarily raised the expectation of continued connection? Are we expected to do more now because it’s possible, to a nearly infinite degree?
• Lipsitz discusses how the imperative to continually attract as widely as possible leads to contradictions that invite oppositional and negotiated readings of mass culture. Given that now there’s a drive to narrow and target more specifically, are such readings getting more difficult? Are they more built in to some of the content being consumed?