SFU Television Technology Ideology and Capitalist Society Discussion 1. 500 to 750 words long. In the journal, you’re expected to apply a concept from the

SFU Television Technology Ideology and Capitalist Society Discussion 1. 500 to 750 words long. In the journal, you’re expected to apply a concept from the reading(s) for that week to an instance of working-class representation from outside of the course.

in other words, The assignment asks you to take a concept you learn from the readings (possibly one which I go over in lecture) and use it to analyze a depiction of the working class from outside of the course. It’s meant to get you analyzing media and popular culture using the ideas we learn.

2. Students should explain their chosen theory in detail and how it fits with their case study. This means providing examples of how representation in the text conforms or does not conform to the theory.

3. please use simple sentence structure and words as possible.

4. at the end please come up with a question that one or two sentences long, based in a weekly reading or readings, and MUST demonstrate a familiarity with the text(s). Article
From ‘a box in the theater
of the world’ to ‘the world
as your living room’: cellular
phones, television and mobile
privatization1
new media & society
12(8) 1331–1347
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461444810362094
http://nms.sagepub.com
Stephen Groening
Brown University, USA
Abstract
The ability to receive and view television programs (and other moving image material)
on the cellular phone should be seen as part of a larger system of asserting private
space in an environment that is crowded with both people and technology. I begin with
Walter Benjamin’s notion that the rise of the private individual can be indexed to the
set of practices that transform the dwelling place into an interiorization of the external
world through the collection of images and objects while at the same time acting as
a place of refuge from the external world. Linking those observations to Raymond
Williams’ notion of mobile privatization, I argue that the contradictory impulses of
moving through the world while retreating from it are the product of economic and
social structures which act to isolate individuals from each other while connecting them
to the products of corporate media, and do not arise from any inherent traits within
cellular phone technology.
Key words
Walter Benjamin, cellular phones, mobile privatization, public/private divide, social
atomization, television, Raymond Williams
New media devices, such as radio and television, accentuate an ongoing emphasis on
private life, privacy and privatization already present in 18th- and 19th-century European
life. Increased privatization, in which private space attempts to encompass public space
and the world at large, is one of the central tendencies of electronic visual media. New
communications media enable and produce new social orders marked by an accentuation
Corresponding author:
Stephen Groening, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media, 155 East George St, Providence
RI 02912–1957, USA.
Email: Stephen_Groening@Brown.edu
1332
new media & society 12(8)
of private space, with regulated and limited connections to the public. As I will show, this
emphasis, which takes the form of an effective identity, has political and social implications. Raymond Williams calls this retreat ‘mobile privatization’: an identity offered by
contemporary capitalism and enabled by communication technologies that promises new
freedoms and forms of mobility in the seclusion of the domestic space.2 This article
argues that the introduction of television-style programming on cellular phones indicates
a changing role for television in the public/private dichotomy, a categorical divide that
structures modern life and experience.
The project of transforming cellular phones into mobile television receivers in the
USA has a history dating back to initiatives in 1999.3 This article is a retrospective look
at the past five years of the advertising discourse of mobile television. By analyzing the
‘the official art of modern capitalist society’ (Williams, 2005: 184), I seek to demonstrate
the ramifications of omnipresent portable television. The promotional materials of consumer electronic manufacturers and cellular service providers represent the fantasies of
mobile television’s promoters, which may have little to do with actual use. Nonetheless,
these fantasies are attempts to appeal to potential users and so are based on market
research and the advertising expertise of commercial firms, and must rely on a code of
signification that can be understood by its audience. In other words, the promotional
materials engage their audience based on a shared worldview, and so these promotional
materials envision new technological interactions within a pre-existing social order.
Commercial firms sell new products by addressing ideas already present in the target
market. Max Dawson has pointed out, ‘advertisements for mobile television services
address affluent, technologically advanced male consumers between the ages of 18 and
34’, a target market which influences the types of appeal and the kinds of idealized
situations portrayed (Dawson, 2007: 233). The primary fantasy within these commercials is one of control over sensory stimuli. But, as I will show, this control over what
cellular phone users devote attention to necessitates a withdrawal from sociability and
interpersonal interaction and an immersion in a private ‘bubble’ (Bull, 2004). Crucially,
the cellular phone is a device many users feel they must always carry with them, in order
to achieve ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2002), and so this article investigates
the consequences of carrying television technology on one’s person. In particular, I am
concerned with the transformation of cellular phones from devices that allow communication between private individuals (through telephony, text messaging or email) into
handheld receivers for commercialized product.4
The boundaries of public and private are fluid because they are culturally and historically structured. For instance, certain bodily functions considered private in one place
and time may not necessarily be given the same consideration in another. But fluidity
does not mean that the public/private distinction should be ignored. The opposition
between public and private is crucial to how we structure our experience and to how our
experience is structured by institutions (particularly those, like liberal-democratic state
governments, which rely on the distinction for their very existence). Indeed, the contest
over this boundary has been a vital force in human rights movements (including feminist,
gay activist, anti-racist and others), advocacy for economic justice and the environmental
movement, to name just a few contemporary debates. The flexibility of these categories
is testament to their power.
Groening
1333
Jeff Weintraub provides a useful framework for untangling the web of meaning
characterizing the discourse of public and private. Weintraub notes that visibility and
collectivity form the foundation for most conceptions of public and private. The first
supplies us with the notion of public as open to examination and accessible. The second
is the background for ideas that link participation and citizenship to public-ness: what
is private is individual and personal; what is public is general and impersonal. Visibility
and collectivity are hardly complementary, and the tensions between these two rudiments give rise to some of the inherent contradictions in the discourse of public and
private (Weintraub, 1997: 5–7).
As an example, television watching is traditionally understood to be a domestic
activity and therefore private.5 Television’s central place in the market economy, as a
commodity and an advertising medium, also makes it private in the sense of private
property. Television provides access to debates and information about public life, yet
watching television is a secluded activity. Seclusion precludes the interaction crucial to
public-ness as a form of sociability; and, because it effects a one-way conversation,
television also precludes the kind of collective action and decision-making central to
notions of the public-ness as a kind of citizenship. Nonetheless, television has become
the pre-eminent technology of communication, through which knowledge of the world
is mediated and produced. Television’s role as communication technology is as crucial
to the formation of the public sphere as newspapers once were (Habermas, 1991).
Television provides a membrane between the public and the private, allowing particular
images and sounds of the outside world into domestic space. These fragments of publicness are controlled and regulated by television producers and programmers initially and
secondarily by the viewers themselves. In fact, it is through television-watching that
public events, activities and ideas are brought into private space.
The adoption of cellular phones as television platforms presages a changing role for
television in the public/private divide. This type of mobile television turns these longheld notions of television-watching on their head. In domestic viewing, television brings
what is out there into the relative safety, security and seclusion of the home. The ability
to watch television on a cellular phone while riding public transportation, waiting at an
airport lounge, or on a park bench means that the viewer is already out there. The fact
that the television is mobile does not simply compound public-ness so much as it creates
a small-scale mobile private space that interacts with public-ness as a television set in
the home would. Indeed, the promotional and advertising discourse surrounding these
technologies frames mobile television as an idyllic form of privacy and attempts to
persuade consumers that mobile television allows us to carry our home around with us,
outside domestic space.
The techniques of using visual media to produce an interface between public and
private did not originate with television or cellular phones. In fact, the admixture of interior and exterior as a personal collection is symptomatic of mass culture and industrial
capitalism. As Walter Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire as well as his analyses of the
urban culture of turn-of-the-century Paris detailed, the hypertrophy of the private was
already occurring before the invention of cinema, radio or television.6 In numerous
essays, Benjamin drew attention to the home as a place providing both shelter from and
access to the outside. The new modes of visual display at work in the home make it an
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new media & society 12(8)
arcade, ‘something between a street and an intérieur’ (Benjamin, 2003: 19). Reflecting
back nearly a century to the 1830s and 1840s, Benjamin observed how the private individual negotiated a protracted and partial retreat from the public. This particular form of
privatization involves careful regulation of the exterior’s intrusion on the interior, all
the while making sure the private space of the home controls public space. Consider the
following passage from Benjamin’s ‘Paris, capital of the 19th century’ (1999: 19):
The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior
to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention
of grafting onto his business interests a clear perception of his social function. In the arrangement
of his private surroundings, he suppresses both of these concerns. From this derive the
phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In
the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a
box in the theater of the world.
Here the individual is associated with interiority. In other words, the singular and
atomized person is secluded in a space cut off from society. The private individual uses
the office to carefully control interfaces with the outside world. The private individual
has withdrawn from social obligations in the economic sphere. Likewise, the interior of
the dwelling place is the realm of illusions, the souvenirs, collectibles, mementos and
dreams of distant times and places that have significance to the individual dweller. There
is no room for social obligations in the bourgeois interior. Benjamin concludes by stating
that the private individual is thus an observer, a member of an audience watching the
world from a private box. Benjamin uses the same image of the theater box in ‘The Paris
of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in which the ‘man of leisure’ inspects objects with
a set of opera glasses (Benjamin, 2003: 27–8). Importantly, during the performance,
those in the private box, a privileged vantage point above and separated from the crowd,
are invisible to the performers (invisibility being a form of privacy) until the house lights
come on and everyone can see the important personages in the box, giving the private
individual a public-ness associated with celebrity.
For Benjamin, the equation of the home with seeing the world begins in the early age
of photography, and grows from an encounter with mass culture and urbanization. The
private individual becomes overwhelmed with objects and access to those objects.
Collecting and managing becomes a way to cope and a form of power. The imagined
unfettered and unlimited access is, as we shall see, a sustaining part of bourgeois ideology
and remains a trope for promoting new media technologies up to and including the present
moment. The lure of such a vision requires constantly representing new objects and new
modes of availability to private individuals.
Benjamin provides a clear path from changes in social relations – the withdrawal of
the individual into seclusion – to the compensatory act of observing and watching. In
short, what Benjamin describes in these passages is a form of what Williams, in his book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2003) calls ‘mobile privatization’. For
Williams, mobility is a basic impulse borne of curiosity (which Williams treats as an
essential part of human nature). Likewise, the new and larger social organizations
brought about by industrial capitalism required the increased mobility of workers and
Groening
1335
goods. Contemporary to these developments is a series of struggles on the part of laborers
to shorten the work day, and gain increased wages and improved working conditions.
According to Williams, the combination of these conditions led to an increased emphasis
on improving the single family home. Thus the home is made possible by changes in the
social structure and a defensive response to these changes. Communications technologies,
such as radio and television, allowed the private dwelling an outward looking disposition. These communication systems, television in particular, substituted for public life by
granting their users a whole social intake: music, news, entertainment, sports and drama.
The concept of mobile privatization is a powerful and productive way of analyzing a
society that is both isolating and connecting, atomizing and cosmopolitan, or inwarddwelling but outward-looking. Likewise, the concept of mobile privatization allows an
examination of the interplay between communication systems and the society in which
they are embedded (Williams, 2003: 19–25).
I will use Williams’ premise that technologies arise from emergent social, cultural and
economic needs as my starting point for discussing how cellular phones interact with the
already present mode of living of mobile privatization. When Williams links technology
to emergent needs, he is not referring to the technical devices that are nifty gadgets that
never become instituted in society. He means the ubiquitous technologies that pervade
society and without which, often enough, we cannot imagine existence. In particular,
Williams characterizes communications systems as an outgrowth of already existing
societal conditions, since the formation of communication systems are foreseen, even in
the technical details, before their crucial components are in place. Cellular phones,
whose genealogy includes wireless telegraphy, radio, wired telephony and citizen’s band
two-way radio, have long been prefigured in industrial society. Although its current
incarnation on cellular phones may seem faddish, mobile television (that is, a television
set one can carry around and still receive signals on) has been a recurring figure in television’s history (Spigel, 2001). The cravings fulfilled by these devices are the cravings
described by Benjamin, although I will use slightly different language. The contemporary
equivalent to Benjamin’s theater box are the various media devices (television sets,
radios, the internet and cellular phones) that allow us to be simultaneously isolated and
connected. We want to be open to certain types of communication: from friends, family
and/or the workplace. At the same time, the cellular phone acts as a shield from unwanted
contact. It becomes a means of escaping the hyperstimulus of modern urban environments. I would argue, further, that if these yearnings were not widely felt, the cellular
phone would have remained a technical device rather than the pandemic communications
device it has become.
The cellular phone allows its users to carry the home with them, even into the workplace, creating an uninterrupted path of mobile private space throughout the day, a
withdrawal into interiority unsullied by social obligations, even during the commute.
The cellular phone links its users to these stationary private interior spaces such as the
home and the workplace. Additionally, with its capacity to take and store digital images,
phone numbers, addresses and other personal information such as birthdays, the cellular
phone supplies the mobile user with an approximation of the comforts of home. These
collected fragments, akin to the accessories and mementos evoked by Benjamin, constitute an assemblage of the home. Likewise, the email, instant messaging, clock and
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new media & society 12(8)
calendar functions turn the cellular phone into a portable facsimile of the workplace.
Company-issued cellular phones, especially, strengthen the obligation of worker to
workplace even when physically absent. Indeed, the cellular phone enables the collapse
of the boundary between workplace and home. The dwelling and the workplace have
become interpenetrated. They are now more than ‘complements’ (as Benjamin portrayed
them), and no longer simply organized along similar ideologies of efficiency and technological progress (the home economics movement is a good example). The cellular
phone acts as the membrane through which these relationships coalesce. In this way, the
private individual, used to retreating into the dwelling to flee from the realities of the
workplace, finds the theater of illusions (to borrow Benjamin’s terms again) is no longer
the refuge from the office it once was. The response to this, somewhat paradoxically, is
to use the same device that has collapsed the opposition between dwelling and workplace (a historically short-lived opposition), to escape into the theater of illusion despite
the individual’s physical position.
Cellular phone technology was initially adopted because it offered an amount of privacy to conversations. Utilizing radio technology (similar to cordless phones, citizen’s
band radio and even television), cellular phones transmit conversations in such a fashion
as to disallow eavesdropping and keep the conversation secluded and private. These
characteristics – mobility and secrecy – make the cellular phone a favorite tool for those
involved in financial transactions: traveling salespeople, field agents, stockbrokers, even
drug dealers. In the past 10 years, the cellular phone has transformed from a device
enabling mobile conversations between two people into a multi-use technology; many
models can also be used as web browsers, phone/address books, planners and alarm
clocks. More recently, the business orientation of cellular phones has been augmented
with increasing leisure and amusement features such as music player, digital camera
(still and/or motion), video game platform and television. Indeed, the Apple iPhone
series of commercials endeavor to show that any conceivable activity has a corresponding ‘app’ that can transform the cellular phone into an essential tool for that activity.
Alongside an emphasis on entertainment is a widespread advertising discourse that
trumpets cellular phones as a way to partake in an exciting and vibrant entertainment
culture. Since advertising attempts to transfer values and meanings on to the commodity
being sold, they portray fan…
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