Core Response #1 - Emma Hughes

Beatriz Colomina’s conception of space in the technological world attempts to make sense of the progressive blurring of television and the home that had been occurring since the introduction of television, but I think it makes even more fascinating and strange sense in today’s technological world. In “Domesticity at War,” she describes the Underground Home presented in the 1964 World’s Fair, a house buried in a bunker in anticipation of a nuclear fallout. The house is built to look like it is outside, when it is really inside, displacing time and space. Windows, she notes, are “picture windows,” able to be changed to a different landscape at will. This, she says, is television itself, where the “the rituals that were once shared conspicuously in a group are now still shared—but in isolation” (10).

People bought televisions to experience the outside world, even though they were not in a bunker, privatizing the public, bringing the public into the private space. I am inclined to think about this as it applies to our current “picture windows”—how can we think of social media and the internet more generally as a space within Colomina’s framework? The earlier internet seemed to operate under the idea that it would bring the public into the private; you could read the news, chat with friends, learn about things in real-time. Just as “many American bought their first television set to ‘attend’ Kennedy’s funeral,” we could all do the same on the internet. Social media, then, seems to reverse this. By posting our previously private moments and experiences, social media publicizes the private, even more than Colomina’s description of the Room in the City, and even more than television predicted. The internet, previously a space of refuge from the outside world, becomes a space that, like Colomina says of TV, “not only brings the public indoors, the front line into our living rooms, it also sends the private into the public domain” (19). I think that the internet and social media in particular complicates the lines between public and private, between inside and outside, even more than television, even more than I think Colomina could have known. Today, we curl up before bed and scroll through social media on our phones, go to sleep, and wake up to do the same thing, still in bed. 

“To enter here is to be placed in front of a screen” (8), Colomina says of the IBM pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. If the internet, previously a place of safety, is now a new place for war, how can we think about our pandemic-induced world of isolation? Our lives are now lived out in our screens, with nearly every public space now existing in our private homes. Everything that was once shared together is still shared, but in isolation. What would Colomina think of our world today, one not unlike the Underground Home?