Core Response 3 - The Public/Private Divide and Televisual Spectators

This week’s readings examine where television falls on the public/private divide, and their authors suggest that the way in which TV straddles that divide is instrumental in understanding its specificity and effects. For Colomina, the encapsulating logic of the television set structured architectural changes in the twentieth century, wherein “the public concern for surveillance and control moved into the private space” (4). Morse’s notion of “privatized mobility,” or “mobile privatization” as a way to group television, freeways, and malls according to their shared production of a distraction effect positions TV as an interlocutor of a complex interrelation between interiors and exteriors, both real and imagined. McCarthy studies public screens to determine how television controls time in social spaces. All three authors implicate television in larger systems of social interaction/isolation, and to varying degrees, their perspectives complicate the unidirectional or hypodermic conception of television’s ideological effects as propounded by Gitlin.

McCarthy in particular identifies the possibility for oppositional subjectivities and viewing experiences, asking, “How do oppositional, or critical, practices interact with the conventional site-specific operations of the public screen?” and, “On what scale of everyday experience do people’s actions reorganize television’s politics?” (223). In describing the vastly different contexts in which public screens operate, and in enumerating the active, frustrated reactions to the Accent Health content, McCarthy begins to answer the first question, though I am more interested in her second question, which she promises to address in the following chapter. As we have attempted to identify the key differences between television and film, we keep returning to the spectator as a means of distinguishing the two media: the passive film spectator and the active TV spectator, or as we discussed in class, Baudrillard’s conception of the distracted, glancing TV spectator as opposed to the immersed film spectator. I’m not sure whether Baudrillard would prioritize content or context in the construction of the glancing spectator, but McCarthy considers both within her analysis. She implies that a public screen is distinct from a domestic screen, and further, that the placement and content of each public screen structures a unique viewing experience, and perhaps hails a unique spectator.

I’m interested in the degree to which TV’s embodiment of the public/private divide creates fragmented subjectivities among viewers. Are smartphones “miniature ‘homes’ that make the space seem like an oasis of privacy, an escape and retreat from the pace and crowd of city life,” or are they unavoidable shackles to the public sphere (McCarthy 222)? For whom and when do they become vehicles for privacy or social interaction? To revisit McCarthy’s question of scale, how can we begin to compare the effects of the fortress-like home-as-TV that Colomina describes with a television controlling the collective gaze of an entire pub, or with an individual smartphone? As this week’s readings suggest, while TV bridges private and public spaces, it does so to varying degrees depending on context and content, opening up space for a variety of subject positions.

Morse would likely disagree with my utopian assertion. She writes:

When included within television, the public and private worlds outside are distanced ontologically under several other layers of representation. That is why inclusion in representation per se is not enough to open the television apparatus out into the public world…That is, the very formats and conventions which have evolved in US televisual representation work against dialogue with the ‘other,’ the excluded outsiders. (213-214)

In the coming weeks, as we delve into audiences, race and ethnicity, I hope to situate Morse’s contention within discourse on televisual representation, and to respond to McCarthy’s question regarding the viewer’s involvement in reorganizing TV’s politics.