Television while you wait (and maybe some escapism) - Core Post #2

In McCarthy’s “Television While You Wait” chapter, she discusses the way television regulates the flow and experience of time passing. She analyzes public places with screens, even more so waiting rooms and how their TV sets structure our sense of time. 

First, McCarthy brings up how scholars have discussed the way “the passage of time in home life is measured through the repetitive, segmented structure of the TV schedule, intertwining viewing with other domestic habits and practices” (195). This points to an experience of having the flow of television indicate time; of television functioning as a sort of clock and the different segments of programming serving as subtle alarms or notifications of time passing while doing mundane tasks. It is suggestive of a continuous experience where TV is more of a participant of the domestic habits rather than a controller of time. With streaming and so many options of television content to consume, I find myself letting TV have an even stronger role of controller of time. I choose what I want to have on while doing other tasks depending on how much time I need for certain tasks. If I need to have a quick lunch, I’ll choose a 20-minute sitcom episode to regulate my lunch time, but if I’m doing laundry I might choose a 40-minute drama and only give myself that time to finish my laundry. It’s still a similar experience of television measuring the passage of time, but I’m interested in how my contemporary experience feels more direct and controlling. It feels like TV as more of a timer than a clock.

When it comes to the waiting room, I liked how McCarthy described that “it is wiser to approach the screen’s role as highly indicative of the temporal tensions that define the act of waiting – tensions between the here and now and the anticipated future, between boredom and the expectation of its release” (199). She briefly brings up the anxiety of waiting rooms in the end of the chapter, but when I read this quote I kept thinking about how we could switch out “boredom” for “anxiety” and the quote would still be accurate. However, it would engage a lot more with the idea of TV as escapism that McCarthy doesn’t seem to like. I agree with her that taking this perspective of TV as only escapism can be narrowing, but it might still be worth looking into it as a reason for engagement with television in these spaces. I can’t remember a time when I was in a waiting room and was actually interested in whatever was playing on the TV, but I do remember desiring to be interested in what was on explicitly so that time would pass faster and distract me from my overwhelming anxiety of waiting for medical results or an excruciatingly long MRI scan to start. The customer’s desire to pass time and be somewhere is definitely related to notions of escapism, so I don’t think it should be completely ruled out when analyzing screens in public spaces.