The above image is from one of my friends' Instagram stories last week; although I didn't have any immediately intellectual response when I first saw it, it was striking and I instinctively took a screenshot, knowing the screens was the major topic for this week's class. Granted, this person is particularly interested in film production and digital media, but it's probably not an inaccurate expression for many people our age. I had forgotten that I'd even taken this picture until I read McCarthy's "Television While You Wait" chapter, and it suddenly reminded me of all the screens I was supposed to have been thinking about all week, and in one particular public space: the gym.
I'm not a frequent visitor to The Gym (any gym) and treadmills freak me out because I have big feet and I'm afraid if I think too much about what my legs are doing I'll inevitably trip and break my neck or something tragic--so I try not to look at my feet when I'm on a machine. Obviously, being near a window is ideal, but if you're stuck in the back or some place where all you can see are other machines and people more athletic than you are, you generally tend to pick a point of focus--or I do at least, to stop myself from looking straight down, or self-consciously all around me. There are TVs in gyms, and some machines have a plug for your earphones in case you want to listen to whatever the staff has chosen for everyone to have to see. Of course, this week, it's the Olympics, a live ongoing event which I haven't been keeping up with (because who has cable anymore and also I already used my NBC app free trial), and although sports generally do nothing to pique my interest, whenever I've passed a screen with the Olympics on this week, I have a fleeting thought of "Oh, should I pay attention to this? Just to have seen something, in case it comes up somewhere?" McCarthy says that "Live broadcast reception in public places, Hollywood moments imply, is a metaphor for the nation's collective interest" (196) and that "as a temporal structure of TV, liveness is associated with crisis; it interrupts." Both of these thoughts stuck with me when I was considering how my experience at the gym was affected by the presence of TVs and what was on. It was especially interesting (or amusing, I guess) to think about the gym as another public space of waiting, a temporary location you occupy before moving on to somewhere else--an interruption in the day, maybe (for some). The gym isn't like a waiting room, because you are supposed to have some other reason to be there and to occupy yourself--so why have TVs in there at all? It must be anticipated that the gym will be a space of waiting for some people, like me, who are just waiting for the 20, 30, 40 minutes, or however long you tell yourself you're going to be there, to end. I'm thinking, too, of "the ways in which television blurs the distinctions between time of work and time of leisure in various locations." Exercise is supposedly a leisure activity already, right? But someone must have assumed that it would feel like work sometimes, thus, putting TVs around to get our minds off the very activity we came there to do will make the whole experience feel like leisure time. But also, in the case of a live national event like the Olympics, which is supposed to be for everyone to enjoy, something universal we can share, going to the gym might now feel like either double the work or double the leisure. It's either "Awesome, I can watch something I enjoy while also doing something I enjoy" or "Well, I guess I can kill two birds with one stone and catch up with the national homework while I try to be healthy." Even when the Olympics are over, what are most gym TVs tuned to? The news, right? It still feels like homework in a way, even if "TV, as Paddy Scannell argues, blurs the distinction between work and leisure," in which case "this ambiguity can make the completion of routine tasks and activities more tolerable, at home as well as in places where we work, places we are often waiting to leave" (218).
There really is so much that's bizarre about gyms — especially now that people so often bring their own devices to block out whatever is going on within the gym itself (whether with music or their own screens to watch).
ReplyDeleteThis post also made me think of an old blog post by a adjunct professor in Illinois about her experience with Bally Total Fitness. The way she puts it is this: "Have you ever walked into a Bally Total Fitness? It's a super creepy technodystopian cult. Everyone facing the same way while subsisting on weird powdered nutrition and making repeated Sisyphean movements while staring zombiefied to Bally-sanctioned TV and wide-smiling propaganda."
In a sense, that's what public screens in waiting spaces really break down to, right? A sanctioned propaganda that tells you what behavior is acceptable while simultaneously encouraging you to have no behavior except for waiting?
http://thingsthatmakemestabby.blogspot.com/2010/08/bally-total-fitness-aka-corporate.html