Core Post #3

While I find Margaret Morse’s chapter a bit hard to grasp, the connection she made among the freeway, the mall, and television is illuminating. According to Morse, the everyday distraction in what she calls “nonspace”—exemplified in the freeway and the mall, where people experience “a dual state of mind” that “depends on an incomplete process of spatial and temporal separation and interiorization” (202)—is analogous to the virtual presence created by television that conceptualizes and organizes “‘stacks’ of worlds as a hierarchy of realities and relationships to the viewer” (206). This “virtualization” is most manifest when the mode of direct address is used—when the audience seem to interact with the tv host in another space between the viewer’s world and the world in layers of representation.

To a certain extent, Morse seems to be making an implication that television (and analogously, the constructed space of the mall and the freeway) anticipates today’s cyber culture. One possible rebuttal is that she only focuses on one particular television format; however, Morse is cautious not to make a claim about the “essence” of television. This extraction of one tv format, then, is at the same time what enables Morse to make a narrow and precise connection. Thinking, for example, how much we forget our physical presence during a VR game, and movies like Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Pixar’s Inside Out, or the animation series Mobile Suit Gundam, I would say Morse made a quite fascinating argument about the “cyberization” of everyday—wouldn’t the experience of driving in a car have similar “meta-psychological effects” with walking in a mobile suit Gundam?

As Morse points out, what is at stake in the “nonspace” of privatized mobility is that alternative values are largely overwhelmed by the dominant ones (212)—that is, the preference of privatization and massification after World War II—and that ideas in the market place are only judged by their exchange values. One question I would like to ask, however, is that to what extent does the physical infrastructures of architecture and space determine our experience of everyday life. Henri Lefebvre, in his The Production of Space, distinguishes among the perceived space (the materialized, the routine/the common sense), the conceived space (the design and the knowledge), and the lived space (the experienced, the images and symbols). This might be a useful analytical model to decipher the space of everyday life. Morse’s chapter largely deals with what Lefebvre would call the conceived space (of mental design) and the perceived space (of the routine in systems of materialized institutions), which should be distinguished from people’s individual, lived experience in these spaces. Although the former two spaces seem to overwhelm the latter, I agree with Morse that television criticism—which recognizes discursive value in addition to market value, and which helps more individuals to be conscious about “the extent and scope of an attenuated fiction effect in everyday life”—would contribute to the long-term goal.