Blog Post 3

CJ Severin 

As someone who has made art and decorated with televisions I found Anna McCarthy’s essay in Television after TV to be particularly interesting in that her approach to television studies looked both at television’s themselves as medium and at television audiences as viewers  so differently than the other texts we read in this half of the semester.  Whereas the majority of the other texts we’ve looked at have essentially meant “television” to be the thing which brings broadcast and cable programming into our homes, McCarthy examined how televisions work as parts of our everyday, non-domestic life, in and as a part of the world around us.  

My own most recent television-based project and its results can best be understood through McCarthy’s analysis of site specific television studies.  Last month for Halloween I was charged with the task of decorating for a friend’s house party and alongside the more traditional decorations I used multiple televisions playing different horror and Halloween movies to decorate and illuminate the house.  Following what McCarthy described, the televisions in areas with seats and in places where people were waiting got watched much more intently than those in hallways or more active areas, no matter what was playing on them; the wall of televisions in front of the living room couch, for example, was almost constantly being, if not watched, at least looked at.  

On the other hand, however, there was a television in the bathroom, the sole source of light in the space, which when almost entirely forgotten about.  The fact that this set, which was put in a place where the viewer was most isolated and had the most opportunity to focus solely on it, was ignored speaks to the relationship between the viewers and the content.  For traditional television content the viewer is present for the majority of the content, they form some sort of relationship with what they are watching, and even when they watch only parts of the content (as the viewers at the party did in the bathroom) they actively engage with programs/movies/advertisements.  McCarthy describes how engaging with programs in waiting areas both helps pass time and, if the loop of content is viewed multiple times, elongates it because of the nature of the bond between viewer and program.  The set in the bathroom then should fall into the first group by McCarthy’s analysis, but for some guests this was not the case because the film being shown filled the time spent in the bathroom in a negative way and thus blocked out; instead of having their own personal space away from Halloween, the party decorations intruded into their empty time and forced an uncomfortable personal engagement that many guests intentionally didn’t watch.  

The way that McCarthy approaches TV studies in her art and essay remind us that television is a medium in itself and not just a device to watch cable shows; she enables a type of study that goes beyond analyzing commercial broadcasting and looks at what active engagement means to television viewers when the content and the audiences are less predictable.

Spigel, Lynn, Jan Olsson, and Anna McCarthy. "Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and the Waiting Room TV." Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 183-209. Print.