Core Response #1 Alexandria

The three pieces of this week all focused on space in relationship to television, but with very different approaches. Colomina and the McCarthy were extremely focused on the position of tvs within private and public spaces, while the Morse reading was less concerned about demarcating the position of tvs within rooms (and what those positions have to do with different cultural modes of organizing time) and much more focused on seeing tvs as an example of nonspace within a postmodern context. 

I had a difficult time with Morse’s characterization of tv as something that organizes realities in a hierarchical manner. Maybe I didn’t feel like she provided enough justification for this idea. Morse wrote about how television organizes realities according to proximity, orienting the “spectator in various degrees of nearness,” but does that necessarily equate to a hierarchical ordering? I think part of the reason why I had a hard time with the idea of hierarchy here is that I kept relating this reading to the writing of scholars like Mike Davis and Edward Soja who were concerned with postmodern networks and Los Angeles’ sprawling urbanity, as a city that spreads outward. To them it represented a particular break from modes of urban development that build upward. So, while I understand the stacking idea that Morse referred to in this reading (in terms of realities that overlap simultaneously as viewers enter different worlds through television), I had the hardest time with accepting her idea of hierarchies, because the stacking that occurs in a postmodern context seems much messier and something that moves outward (like the freeways she refers to). 

It is really fascinating to think about the Colomina reading in relation to the Morse reading because of the different modes of temporality each author presented. How do we relate Colomina’s observations about waiting (and boredom) to Morse’s writing about distraction? Colomina argues that “The vagueness of boredom, waiting, and other ((moods and feelings that resist analysis» makes waiting an emblematic instance of the unmarked universality of everyday experience that can all too easily slip through the conceptual nets that surround it” (198). I liked her piece because I felt like it was more honest about tv’s failures at times to create immersive experiences that effectively shorten waiting, while Morse did not seem to fully address those moments when tv fails to be an all-encompassing vehicle of distraction.