Core Response #1 - Larcom

With regards to the readings this week, I found myself particularly fascinated with the idea of the television's function outside of the domestic space. McCarthy discusses the function of the TV in public waiting areas, and briefly describes this as turning these spaces where we would otherwise be left with our own thoughts into "productive" spaces, filling the boredom or monotony or distracting from the stress of a given environment. It's a very interesting inversion, I think, of what we've discussed as the TV's function within the home: a site of endless interruption, a breach of the private space by an outside world. 

McCarthy focuses for much of this chapter on how TVs in public spaces alter our relationship with the experience of waiting. What personally interests me with regards to placing the television in public spaces is the shift waiting creates in our relationship with television. What happens when we take something designed for the private home into the wider world? There's a level of intimacy we develop with the television in the home space—it becomes almost "part of the family," as we've discussed in previous classes. TV in public creates a sort of distance between the viewer and the television. It becomes a means to an end—an alleviation of boredom—or else a part of the boredom itself. Watching a program we did not choose on a device we do not control or own in a hospital waiting room is a quintessentially more guarded, alienated experience than watching something we actively decide to invest ourselves in in our private home space. 

A big part of this, as McCarthy also discusses, is the liminality of a lot of the spaces in which TVs in public are placed: waiting rooms or line areas not meant to be lingered in or inhabited, places that individuals will pass through and leave. Hard to get thoroughly invested in something when you know you'll likely have to leave it unfinished, when you arrived partway through, when your entire relationship to it is dictated by waiting for something else. Plus, I do think part of our investment and closeness with our home TVs comes from our level of control over it: deciding what we watch and when. 

Yes, the ubiquity of screens and television have changed our relationship with public waiting; but by the same token, the act of waiting changes our relationship with those TVs as well.