Core Response #2 (Week 4)

Lynn Spigel details “how television was introduced to the public,” or, in other words, the history of television’s entrance into thousands of households in the 1950s. I try to compare that history with the phenomenal growth of mobile phones, or, more specifically, smartphones, in our time to examine how the product of technological innovation that is considered as an entertainment form is often responded and expected when it first enters the public on a mass scale.

There is a distinct difference between television and smartphones – television can be seen as a piece of furniture. Indeed, I rarely see television through its status as furniture simply because it is so different from other furniture, including other electronic appliances. Generally, furniture purchases are made to meet certain functional requirements, which is usually the end of the story – regarding the functionality being delivered to customers. Yet in the case of television, the purchase is only the beginning of the story mainly because it can be a “window on the world” (26). Television should not be seen as fixed, but ever-expanding due to the infinite amount of content it can bring, which continues to surprise or shock customers and hence complicates its relationship to either the interior décor as a whole or the rest of the domestic space.

Different from television, mobile phones are not conceived as a household object but a supplement to landline phones installed at home. Yet, nowadays digital electronic appliances have been developing rapidly, mobile phones – or more accurately, smartphones – come with a wide range of functions, and are becoming an entertainment form. Meanwhile, the focus is no longer the transfer of the site of exhibition from the public space to the private space but the indistinct boundary between the public space and the private space. People use smartphones anywhere, both in the public space and in the private space, both at home and outside it. Spigel “examines how the television set was figured in the representations of domestic life,” a corresponding study on smartphones maybe be to examine how smartphones are figured in representations of our life as a merging of the public and the private. The television set as “a focal point of the room” (25) provides the prerequisite for George Lipsitz’s argument that early network television programs indoctrinated the public with an increasing homogeneous postwar culture. This cannot be applied to today’s case as the individual consumption of smartphones has gradually surpassed the family consumption of television as the preferred source of entertainment.

Spigel also elucidates the contradictory responses toward television as both an eye-opening and a threatening instrument. Similar claims have been made for digital devices including smartphones and iPads, but for different reasons. I would like to specify how the negative side is framed in different eras. In the 1950s, the central issue is that television “disturb(s) the normative ways of seeing in patriarchal cultures.” For example, “the man’s position of power in domestic space” (28) was weakened due to the attraction of television. Such an argument is closely related to sexual politics, especially traditional gender roles. Nowadays, discussions over smartphones’ disruptive effects are less concerned with gender differences but generation differences as younger generations tend to use smartphones more frequently. A sample image would be, at a family gathering, family members, especially young people, are playing with their phones instead of talking to each other. The prevalent use of smartphones, which contributes to the construction of the neoliberal self in terms of individualized entertainment consumption, appears to disrupt and undermine the family unity.