Notions of space and time in Anna McCarthy’s Television While You Wait and Margaret Morse’s An Ontology of Everyday Distraction work almost perfectly in dialogue with each other; though Morse does not say as much, the waiting room can be seen as one additional form of the “nonspace” she articulates in the context of television, freeways, and malls. Indeed, I believe with the passing decades these nonspaces have become increasingly fluid and no longer governed by regimented schedules. With the industrialization of cities, especially after World War I, came increasing isolation within the metropolis, as many Frankfurt Writers would elaborate in their works (namely Adorno’s writings on the “culture of industry” and Walter Benjamin in “The Arcades Project”, among others). Despite an increasingly lonely society in which leisure time would be spent in isolation, media (then primarily radio and cinema) became yet more powerful means through which to spread hegemonic ideology, a unidirectional flow of information absorbed without means of recourse. With the Autobahn modernizing Europe before World War 2, then later the standardization of these nonspaces in the US and through many European cities upon their reconstruction (especially in Germany), the idea of transportation as a form of waiting, a nonspace, becomes increasingly prevalent as we view such significant portions of our daily routines as wastes of time, times of nonevent. City planning in most US cities, to an extent, consists nearly entirely of nonspace. Visually identical commercial franchises dominate retail space between eight-lane boulevards without sidewalks; one drives from the home, to one of a plethora of Starbucks, to work, then drives home to one of a plethora of chain supermarkets or a Chipotle; all of these establishments have standardized products that one can expect will not vary, and that like the shopping mall encourage only one thing: consumption, not experience. No new experience is expected in these spaces; any extraordinary event, pleasant or unpleasant, is a violent interruption.
Side note: I actually disagree with Morse’s equivocation of shopping malls with the arcade, as arcades are integrated into city landscapes, in which one leisurely strolls and observes others. Malls, in contrast, often stand in isolation either within cities or often on the outskirts of cities (such as larger outlets — and sometimes these even become miniature cities unto themselves in the middle of nowhere; think the Tejon Outlets along Highway 5) where commercial consumption, not observation, is the primary task.
As these nonspaces become so prevalent in our daily existence, it is no wonder they become increasingly commodified. As televisions in waiting rooms, especially if broadcasting so-called “productive” educational content, seem to mask wait times as potentially productive (thereby concealing the so-called socio-economic “fault lines” of which waiting rooms are symptomatic), the presence and popularity of personal devices likely can be attributed to rendering nonspaces productive. Commodifying free time, internet uses at every moment of waiting for some productive function (a side hustle, an informative podcast, emailing, etc.), truly seeing to fruition Gary Becker’s elaborations on “human capital” where our every action, even in leisure time, becomes a form of investment. Additionally, the liberation that the mobile device and streaming create from traditional television programming, now coupled with COVID-era work from home and a new wave of self-employment brings a new temporal and spatial fluidity to these nonspaces. A nonspace can now occur in one’s home, for example, when checking Twitter between Zoom meetings. Ironically, the entrance of the nonspace induced by the mobile device while in the nonspace of the freeway (as many do), often in an attempt to commodify the commute and/or cure boredom, induces the violent interruption to the freeway’s illusion of nonspace, as Morse describes of the possibility of accidents.
Becker, G. S. (2009). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press.
But more importantly, Couscous destroying my daisies the other day:
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