Core Response 1 - Kimberly

Something that stuck out to me in Andrejevic's piece, "Watching Television Without Pity," was the common practice of posting and reading TWoP at work. For me, it picks up a loose thread from the Morse reading. Discussing the ever more constructed nature of temporality in post-industrial life, Morse writes, "As Labor is more and more liberated from solar and circadian rhythms, cycles of commuting, shopping, and viewing become shiftable as well. Television schedules are 'intricately woven into the fabric of out daily activities' because they are organized by the same division of labor outside and inside the family which recruits the daily commuter and the recreational shopper" (202). (Although I will admit I am kind of guessing here) As the arbitrary rhythms of labor structure our experience of time, so too does leisure, and not the strolling-down-by-the-marsh-to-take-in-the-fresh-air variety of leisure (an image I copped from my current leisure activity, Grantchester on Masterpiece Mystery), but a constructed, produced, programmed variety. 

With the advent of interactive media, the structuring effect of TV can be warped by those who engage it. Andrejevic mentions multiple times the excess enjoyment viewers experience by posting to and reading TWoP, generally in terms of increased enjoyment, but an unmentioned effect that I suspect is also at play (taking from my personal experience) is extended enjoyment. By engaging with a community of fans, producing and consuming content as extensions of the television programming, viewers can continue to experience the pleasure of the finite product that had aired and ended on their television screens through a secondary interface.

Although the interpenetration of  labor and leisure time cuts both ways (lol) by allowing workers and employers to steal time from each other, the idea of TV warping temporality still excites me. It may not be radical or revolutionary, but extending the pleasure of the televisual experience raises questions for me of what qualifies as "watching TV." I'm not a sports person, but doesn't "game day" imply the tailgate just as much tossing the old... pig skin? Or something. 

These are, of course, the revelations of 2008. Sure, message boards could extend televisual pleasure into the work space, but now I watch TV shows, listen to podcasts about those shows while I walk around my neighborhood, scroll through memes about those shows scattered randomly (No! Algorithmically!) throughout my world news and celebrity gossip. The division that Andrejevic observes, that "the TV screen has been split into one to be watched and one to be interacted with" has been reconciled by new technology that makes those two screens one again. Not just those two screens, but the screen on which I bank, and ignore texts, and find romance, and play "Dots" (circa 2014).

Anyways, since this post inevitably ended up at the "Can you believe iPhones???" place, I'll share my surprise at learning that the lowercase i stood for interactive. I think there may be no better example of the development of time, meaning, and technology than this, because I remember the advent of the iPhone. I remember my first iPod shuffle. But I never knew that the i was the result of what I'm now sure was an extended marketing campaign to set the tone for a new era of tech consumerism. The signifier quickly became its own referent, the i in iPhone does not stand for anything, it simple is.