Core Response #1: Our Phone Screens and the Specter of Crisis

Just as I’m sure many others in our class did, reading this week’s assigned texts I was insistently curious about how the temporalities of crisis identified by McCarthy might be altered in our moment of portable and wearable screen technologies. I was taken in particular by her claims concerning something like the passivity of crisis as it relates to the scene of the waiting room, primarily in the “resolute, unchanging banality of programming cycles unable to adjust to the cycles of the health care institutions in which they play” (211), drawing out crisis in the non-acknowledgement of the context and surroundings of a broken health care administration, replete with double bookings and oversaturated services. It was interesting reflecting on these assessments, first as a Canadian whose relationship to the health care system growing up was markedly different and whose moments of waiting carried a different political bent. Additionally, my significant experiences of waiting at the doctor, dentist, and orthodontist were all accompanied not by TV but by the same radio station (Montreal’s 92.5FM), which my dentist would additionally play in the room while I was in the chair. This, of course, had the power of negative association outside of these spaces of health care and to this day 92.5 is still inseparable from the pain of my first cavities.

Now, of course, the waiting area is populated by a proliferation of screens in the form of our phones. While perhaps outside of the explicit bounds of the televisual, I am curious how the phone screen, with its warped possibilities for so-called “liveness” (which we know to be completely false, even in the inconsistent chorus of phones receiving amber alert notifications at different times) or the portability of its structure replicates the effects and contours of the “nonspace” described by Morse in a much more expanded fashion. While there is potential for distraction and social disengagement in the anywhere of the waiting room or the freeway, how does the phone screen also create for us an ontological model of privatization and surface nearly everywhere we go? I think to the many times in which walking, I check emails or watch Instagram stories, creating a kind of spatial liquidity in which I am detached from my surrounding while still moving through them. Walking while looking at a screen, are we granted the “autonomy of protected selfhood nourished by its environment” (117), until of course we collide with a mailbox or another pedestrian?