Anna McCarthy tracks the "practices associated with television and the act of waiting in a few carefully chosen sites--focusing sometimes on TV screens that are placed within waiting rooms per se and TV screens in multiuser environments that serve to designate a space of waiting" (199). My biggest question while reading this is what about the people today that wait and focus on their own screens, ie. their phones or tablets or computers, in a public setting. Other examples include in the subway, in a car, on the plane. More often than not, people choose to look down at their pre-downloaded shows, or excel spreadsheets, or text messages or instagrams and "wait," rather than the tv screen hanging on the wall. Would McCarthy's argument still hold true with this application or these additional screens in mind? As the digitization and technologically advanced today seem to be more individualized, less communal, and much more portable causing people to wait and thereby detach all the time Are we really "waiting" anymore so to speak? Or in someways, do we "wait" all the time? Is it so invisible if everyone is doing it (looking down rather than up)? What about parents who give their kids an iPad to watch while sitting at a dinner table? Or during a car ride? I argue that waiting is no longer "a public address" but rather a "private entertainment" (201).
Camila,
ReplyDeleteYour post actually spoke to a lot of what I was thinking about when I read the piece. As a slow eater, I often sit in establishments for 2-3 hours as I finish my food and do my work. There are usually TVs on the wall, but I notice that no one ever watches them. Instead, we are all absorbed in our laptops and phone screens. I would argue that these screens can be likened to TV and can serve the same purposes. However, I question the notion of “waiting” itself. McCarthy characterizes waiting by describing it as “a state of inactivity” or ”a situation we often find ourselves in at times of urgency, emergency, and crisis” (199). But when we distract ourselves with our screens, we often become so absorbed in them that the act of “waiting” is no longer an idle period of time, nor an in-between state, but a time for leisure. Perhaps, the time spent fixated on the screen is even more pleasurable than the event one is waiting on. To reference an example that you gave, consider a kid with an iPad at dinner, waiting for his food to be served. Is the iPad really interrupting dinner time? Or is it the dinner that is interrupting the child’s play time? From the perspective of the child, it may be the latter. This likely lands outside the scope of McCarthy’s piece since she was mostly referring to spaces specifically designated for waiting, but it is interesting to think about.
Both of your comments have gotten me thinking about how technology has changed that way we spent our time waiting. As McCarthy’s piece indicates, the widespread adoption of television in these spaces was intended to offer people another way to pass them time apart from reading magazines or talking or any other activity. She even notes that this time-killing act is “legitimized when it takes place in waiting environments” (199). Decades later, we occupy waiting rooms all the time, but like you both suggest, the TV is not the screen holding our attention. Rather, we stare at phones or computers to pass the time (even at home, we may split our focus between our TV and our phone). Do our phones better provide the temporary (and prone to interruption) type of entertainment that the waiting room TV once did? Or, while the TV programs may be inconsequential and something we can walk away from when called, do these personal devices engage us in just that way – personally? As a meta example, I was doing this reading on my computer in a waiting room while getting my car serviced. With only a few pages left to read, I was notified that my car was ready. I paused momentarily to consider taking a few extra minutes to finish the reading versus promptly picking up my keys at the front desk. After all, wasn’t I trying to get through this errand as quickly as possible to move onto the next part of my day? And yet, my computer had given me a task that I felt I needed to see through to completion. Perhaps it was because this was an activity (and a screen) that I had chosen to invest in, as opposed to one that I would “occupy temporarily” that I even felt I had a decision to make.
DeleteI chose the car.