Core Response #2 - Laura Broman

In its more lucid moments, Beatriz Colomina’s article makes some interesting points about how television reshapes our conceptions of public and private. She notes: “TV not only brings the public indoors... it also sends the private into the public domain” (19). I’m interested in understanding further how our conceptualizations of the public/private spaces have evolved over time, especially keeping in mind the previous stuff we’ve read on the construct of the (white) nuclear family in the suburbs.

But she loses me elsewhere in her chapter; for example, when she describes modern warfare: “War takes place today without visible fighting. The battlefield of this new war is the domestic interior. The house is a military weapon, a mechanism within a war where the differences between defense and attack become blurred” (4). I’ll admit that her larger point here is still somewhat murky to me (she begins with the “battle” for hygiene before moving onto the actual Gulf War?), but I feel compelled to point out that the “invisible war that enters the domestic space” idea is not native to the television age. The “home front” was called that in both World Wars, after all, and experiences of war at home have been mediated since there was media to circulate about it.

This is maybe a minor detail to focus on (though of course the chapter is titled “Domesticity at War”), but I feel it is representative of a larger issue in the piece, which we've already seen addressed by Raymond Williams. Television is part of a continuum – technological, economic, political – not some miraculous accident that fell out of the sky like Promethean fire. Yes, the world with television looks significantly different than the world without it, but can we not at least give some consideration to context and history before making these broad statements about transformation?

For these reasons I think I prefer Morse’s piece, as it places television as an apparatus of capitalist postwar society alongside other developments like the freeway and the mall, all of which have distractive, homogenizing effects. But it runs into the same issue: how much of that homogenization is native to the television era, and how much is it just a feature of mass media that’s been intensifying over a long period of time? What about radio, another domestic mass medium? Or film? Or popular literature before that?

Also, on a completely unrelated note, Colomina’s reading reminded me of the Tom Lehrer song “So Long, Mom:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrbv40ENU_o