Core post - Week 5

Though Anna McCarthy’s, "Television While You Wait" evokes TV as an essential part of the waiting room lifestyle, her evocation of the CNN Airport Network got me thinking about how CNN is something I have almost exclusively watched within the confines of an airport experience. These places too are somewhere we are "waiting to leave," that might be gussied up (or so we hope) with a TV that provides some sort of escape.

The news briefings seem to be there, all around an airport, to "reinforce the institutional identity of the space," to serve as a way to keep you "connected" when you are almost decidedly out of access. They serve as a point of strange neutrality within the hegemony of an airport: CNN is clearly seen as something of a "neutral" news channel that we can all agree on; news, as a subject matter, is seen as something that people would need, even if they don't want, in a way that lends itself to prominent (and frequent) placement in the terminal. Though McCarthy mentions that the "presence of the screen can also serve a variety of disciplinary agendas, demonstrating the institutional conception of TV as a highly flexible instrument for the management of the public and its time," airport TVs rarely seem dynamic in this way. 

My experiences "watching" TV at airports has almost never been a rousing experience of the live-ness of television; it's more out of the "partial absence of the mind" described by Margaret Morse in her article. CNN rarely serves the news I want to know about, to the degree I wish to know it, or in a format that is accessible (especially within a busy terminal).

I do have one notable example: I was flying back from Austin when the Seahawks were in the NFC championship game in the 2015 NFC Championship game. Though my friend had checked the score earlier, we likely wouldn't have witnessed what became a real nail biter if we hadn't been at the airport. But we, with several others, stood outside a restaurant in the terminal watching the (classic) Seahawks 4th quarter reversal. McCarthy is right that these moments feel very jubilant when they happen, "a metaphor for the nation's collective interest." These are the moments in which they feel more like a "public address," creating a bizarre sense of community where it's not only that you witnessed an event but that you have a story to tell about how or why you came to witness the live event.