Core Post — Week 5

My intervention into Anna McCarthy’s, “Television While You Wait,” was at first anecdotal. As a child who grew up spending a good deal of time in my parents’ office, a small, medical practice in Newark, I was drawn quickly to McCarthy’s articulation of the politics of waiting, vis-à-vis doctors’ offices. She writes, “AccentHealth presents us with a persuasive corollary, namely, that these differential power relations are reflected in the question of who has the option to not watch television and which persons are able to isolate themselves from television advertising in a waiting environment — not the staff and certainly not the patients. Freedom from television advertising is apparently a prerogative of the doctors alone” (207). Skeptical of this tonally harsh conviction, I immediately called my parents to interrupt them at work:

“AH and things like that are monthly or annual subscriptions, so cable just makes more sense to bundle with our phone and internet. Whatever we leave on, it doesn’t distract our staff and is extremely mild; many of our patients are older, and with varying degrees of literacy, English or otherwise, so they just look at the TV while they wait — whether they actually pay attention or not, they do notice it. Patients will bring it up to us all the time, whatever they were just watching, good or bad. I think right now we have on the Portuguese news channel, since nearly all our patients are Portuguese, but sometimes we do cable news depending on the day — we avoid local news, though.” —my folks, paraphrased.

I would first argue that doctors do indeed receive criticism on their waiting rooms, and in some cases that’s probably worse than watching an ad. Jackie makes an excellent point about the Octopus service for ride-hailing apps and its clever disguise of broader crises of labor and personal finance in the gig economy. By contrast, medical SVOD programming seems to get to the same point, though along starkly different class lines. If someone in the gig economy can be lured with a free tablet, in exchange for their data and boatloads of ads, then surely a medical professional can invest in trusted programming for their patients as part of a comprehensive health service that, in reality, does little for reducing patient wait-times or increasing monetary compensation for that professional. Similarly, though McCarthy acknowledges that, “for many people — women, the poor, and others who occupy particularly disadvantaged positions within systems of social administration — the long wait is a time-consuming and inevitable requirement of basic access to goods and services in modern life”, I see a missed opportunity in connecting those groups, in my case the elderly Portuguese immigrants, with the popular accessibility of television (198). Trivia, no matter how commercially valuable, about atrial fibrillation and macular degeneration will no doubt pose hurdles for individuals without such English proficiencies, whereas the iconography of news and weather, and to some extent daytime editorial content like quiz and talk shows incur no such problems and will not deter viewers — especially on local language channels, or at least considerately subtitled (214).

On page 207, she writes how medical SVOD strives to equate location and identity of a viewer, in hopes, “to attempt an alteration in the itinerary of the viewer on that particular day”. Though I give credence to the notion that that may be true in the case of parents stopping at CVS on their way back from the pediatrician’s office, and that yes, medical advertising is nastily exploitative, I’m again finding a critical narrowness in McCarthy’s equation of a wholly diverse population sample as a function of the kinds of insurance they carry. Applied to a hyperlocal physician’s office, I can understand why local news is avoided; whereas AH “marks [the] existence (of crisis)” rather than “evacuates” it, local news too, activates the domestic and near-domestic city space as a site of many crises: car crashes, traffic, fires, storms, and so on. Human interest stories peppered throughout remind viewers that such goodness emerges sparsely out of the trend of doom and gloom that “there is not much one can do about” (211). This collapse is built upon in Colomina’s article, but I’ll conclude by noting how the continually narrated liveness of “breaking” daytime, national, cable-news does it best — staving off the punchline, keeping you tuned in while you wait, and cementing waiting as a “deep structure” of TV spectatorship — in short, holding you over until your next appointment that day.