It feels almost trite at this point to continue comparing discussions around television changing the private sphere with the shift during the pandemic to work and school from home, and yet still reading Morley this week I was struck by how relevant his discussions from almost 30 years ago felt to the present moment. In writing about the connection between the public and private in broadcast television, he looks at the way that at the way that large events can be broadcast in a way that is “neither public nor private in their traditional senses,” due to how close it places the viewers to the event and how disconnectedly different viewers experience it (Morley, 13). This idea of neither public nor private felt relevant to the idea of bringing a workplace, classroom, or other meeting into one’s own private space, often a bedroom or other living space for those without a home office. Similarly, a recent article on Zoom fatigue discusses the way that video calls can place the participants at a much more familiar distance with one another than they would usually find themselves (https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/1). This distance may be a bit larger on a television than on a computer, where the necessity of speaking and typing into a device can push the distance into the range of a foot or two, but both have this increased closeness between people. There’s a way that both of these forms of communication technology create an uncanny perception of a more intimate relationship than groups or individuals might have. The largest difference between these forms is the interactivity of video calls, which I think push them even further from private than broadcasted events that one would still experience individually. However, considering something more equivalent to a broadcasted event over Zoom – Zoom theatre, q&a type events, etc. – the broadcasting has a sense of seeping into the private while the added interactivity bridged some lack of a communal sense from other forms (a chat box allows for reactions where television gives no sense of what others experience in the moment). Altogether, it seems like new forms of interactivity creates a deeper permeation into the private sphere, while still retaining some of the public sense, in a way that mirrors without directly paralleling the divide of which Morely writes.
Supplemental Response #4 - Emma
ReplyDeleteSabrina, you’re not alone—I was also reading about the Morley piece this week and thinking about our current state of media and media interaction, while also feeling like I do that too often in this class. However, Morley is so interesting to think about in this context! His ideas about a “diasporic ceremony” (14) and the idea that “we increasingly live in a ‘television-geography’” (14) feels especially pertinent today. While we may not live in a space defined by television exactly, we definitely increasingly live in a geography defined by the internet broadly, and we inhabit our own various electronic spaces every day, whether that means group chats, social media, or our own Zoom spaces.
This article you cite by the way is extremely interesting, and so helps explain my Zoom fatigue!