Core Response #2 – Abby Corbett

 

Eileen’s reflections on Morse’s piece brought to mind a passage from Colomina’s article, “Domesticity at War,” which I also connected to the current digital era. Commenting on the 1987 Room in the City exhibition she says, “the flaneur’s perception of the nineteenth-century city is understood to have been replaced by aimless cruising through the television channels. The television is a window through which the spectacle of the city can be seen in a state of distraction. But this window is not only about receiving a view. The broadcast antenna alongside the satellite dish allows the house to broadcast its intimacy to the outside in an age in which the home video is no longer the video seen in the home but is the video of the home seen in public. TV not only brings the public indoors…it also sends the private into the public domain” (19). In the current digital age, we can replace the “aimless cruising through the television channels” with aimless scrolling on social media and switching between apps. Although channel surfing on broadcast and cable television is certainly less common, it hasn’t been completely replaced. Rather, instead of cruising through TV channels, we can now cruise endlessly through film and TV catalogues on the various streaming networks to the point where we spend so much time searching for the perfect thing to watch that we don’t actually get around to watching anything at all. 

Going back to Colomina’s comments - “television is a window through which the spectacle of the city can be seen in a state of distraction” – with digital media, we can not only view what has evolved into a global spectacle, but we can interact with it as well. And we do so not only in various states of distraction, as we are walking to class, for example, but also anytime and anywhere (waiting in line, at the café waiting for our friend to arrive, at the café across from our friend who has long since arrived, the minute we wake up, right before bed, etc). Colomina mentions television’s (more specifically the broadcast antenna and the satellite dish) ability to both bring the public indoors and send the private into the public domain. Incessant posting on social media of our private lives and the interiority of our human minds, not only blurs the lines between public and private, but also reality and…(un)reality? Virtuality? Elsewhere? Beyond questions of how accurately social media profiles and posts reflect the “real,” digital media can be likened to Morse’s conceptualizations of television, the mall, and the freeway as nonspace. Morse says, “Nonspace is not only a literal “nonplace,” it is also disengaged from the paramount orientation to reality – the here and now of face-to-face contact” (200). At the risk of overgeneralizing, it would seem the more connected we are in the digital world, the more disconnected and disengaged we become from the actual reality of the here and now.