Core Response #2 - Lilla Spanyi

 

Quoting William Severini Kowinski, Morse’s article An Ontology of Everyday Distraction calls the shopping mall a “TV you walk around in” (197). While Morse is here discussing the two in terms of space and reality, it is an interesting comparison in that both are, in a sense, dying spaces. The fall of shopping malls has been well-documented in the past few years, as shopping malls such as Westside Pavilion (housing the iconic Landmark Theater) in Los Angeles stand empty. Similarly, the television described in Anna McCarthy’s Television While You Wait is no longer. McCarthy describes TVs as accompanying “the act of waiting” in “places we occupy temporarily” (195, 198). She argues that in waiting areas, television transforms from a waste of time to a legitimate activity. Yet when you look at waiting rooms today, nobody is focusing on the television: they are all scrolling through their phones. McCarthy’s book was published in 2001, and it’s interesting to consider how much has changed since: televisions are still present in waiting areas, but they have been rendered ambient noise, usually airing news that people already know from their phones.

Yet while TV is an “instrument for the management of the public and its time,” the same cannot be said about phones (McCarthy 199). People control what they see on their phones; they do not control what they see on a public television set. Not only does TV programming have a structured temporality, but people in waiting areas often have no say in what channel they watch. Now that autonomy has become so prominent with phones and the Internet, the idea of just watching what’s on TV has become outdated. In fact, it could even be argued that TV is now a source of boredom in waiting rooms: people only watch it as a last resort; it is no longer the “escapism” that McCarthy talks about (222). It no longer provides “dreamlike displacement” from our surroundings, but makes us painfully aware of where we are (Morse 197).