Harry Potter and the Enticing Gift Shop - Core Post, Dan Lark

This week's readings are concerned with how television structures the in-between spaces of everyday life: waiting rooms, airports, cars, malls, and freeways. Anna McCarthy writes about how television organizes various public spaces, such as waiting rooms and restaurants, towards a commercial address, while Beatriz Colomina examines how the architectural design of the private home has changed over time to reflect broader cultural anxieties about the family, hygiene, and domesticity that need to be protected from outside disturbances like germs. Finally, Margaret Morse describes how television in all of these aforementioned spaces structures an ontology of distraction, whereby television is expected to take up the free moments of everyday life. In each of these articles, television serves to structure the mundane, habitual "nonspaces" of everyday life, designed to reinforce a "national culture presented not only as desirable but as already realized elsewhere" (Morse 210).

Nonspaces, according to Morse, are characterized by displacement from surroundings and disengagement from the face-to-face. One moves through non-spaces in a state of distraction that relies upon an "incomplete process of spatial and temporal separation and interiorization" (Morse 202). that promotes both a sense of intense vigilance and spacing out that has to be carefully managed. It is this state of distraction through which cultural anxieties emerge: the couch potato, the overspending consumer, wasted unproductive time. A good illustration of these anxieties might be found in the Disney Channel movie Smart House (1999), where a motherless family wins a house run by an AI who learns to be an overbearing mother from TV and movies before she is eventually tamed and replaced by a new, real mother figure. The AI believes the outside world to be too dangerous and attempts to institute domestic peace through "environmental control" and the displacement of the public domain indoors (Colomina 7) through large wall-size screens. Here, the anxieties surrounding television's role as a socializing agent through distraction manifest in the figure of the rogue AI who learns too much about her social role from TV.

Television is not an isolated technological phenomenon, but shapes "time flexibly and adaptively, in cohort with other institutional and personal elements, and according to site-specific cultural norms and protocols" (McCarthy 197). It symbolically links "incommensurabilities of all sorts" (Morse 207), restoring a unified social world out of highly fragmented and segmented experiences. This unified world, Morse argues, is responding to the demands of mobile privatization, whereby social life is privatized behind clear glass windows and decentralized into systems of self-management in order to facilitate the exchange of commodities and symbols (which themselves are now interchangeable).

Universal Studios might be another illustration of the ontology of distraction through the use of glass screens. Arguably, Universal Studios is oriented around walking from screen experience to screen experience, each of which usually lasts in bursts of minutes or even seconds at a time. The nonspaces of the park, particularly the waiting lines, are full of screens, with the whole experience designed to  make wait times palatable and to create immersive narrative and discursive worlds full of stacked layers of meaning that flow into each other laterally and hierarchically, in Morse's terms, and provide a disciplinary and commercial function, in McCarthy's terms. This is why moving portraits in the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride (itself a journey around massive screens) can both gossip about the upcoming Quidditch match I'm trying to sneak into and politely remind me to keep my hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. At the end, Albus Dumbledore invites me back to Hogwarts and gently reminds me to collect my belongings before heading to the gift shop.