After powering
through the density and jargon of Margaret Morse’s “An Ontology of Everyday
Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television,” I felt she really did have quite
a lot of insights that are difficult to fully flesh out in a single blog post. So,
I’ll narrow my focus to her use of the segment.
Morse, contrary to Raymond William’s concept of flow, utilizes
John’s Ellis’ notion “that the segment is the basic unit of television
(205-206). She writes, “The duality of passage and segmentation in physical as
well as represented space is related in turn to the dual places of language,
the engaged discourse of a subject in passage and the disengagement of stories
from the here and now of the subject” (206).
On my first pass, I was wondering how the concept of a
segment could entice a viewer, especially a distracted one, to keep watching. After
all, Morse’ example of a traveler’s dismay of being trapped for a fixed period
of when traveling by train sounded to me a lot like watching a single episode
of a show: trapped (unhappily) for a fixed duration with the desire escape as
soon as it is over.
However, upon closer inspection of her definition of a
segment, the restrictiveness disappears. Morse refutes that segmentation be
constructed linearly. Instead, Morse proposes that the segment is actually
comprised of “multiple worlds condensed into one visual field” (206). Morse says, “Thus, television discourse typically
consists of ‘stacks’ of recursive levels which are usually quite different in
look and ‘flavor’” (206). Morse offers an example of a news anchor with a globe
behind him or her as an example of these multiple worlds coming together in a
single view (206). Indeed, Morse suspects that the shifting space along the
z-axis in television reflects the changing distance of the distracted viewer to
the screen (207).
Morse posits that “voices and images [on television] offer
community to a disengaged and enclosed word world of the home, the automobile and
the mall. A banished, paramount reality is recreated as a phantom within
elsewhere” (208). Maybe TV too is a
phantom of liberty that not only alienates us from our
comrades, especially now since digital TV can be catered to individual tastes, but also from the world through its artificial
reconstruction of the world with its own “multiple worlds.”
In the vein of how we consider television as a series of segments, I'm reminded of an anecdote from my childhood. In the pre-Internet and pre-cell phone era, I was a small boy who watched way too much TV. During that time, I often found myself demarcating time through television programs. Without looking at a clock, I could tell you what time it was based on whatever cartoon I happened to be watching at the time. It set the rhythm of the relative inactivity of daily domestic life (a sort of waiting of its own). On the other hand, I have a younger brother who is 11 years old and also watches a lot of TV. Yet, due to the time-shifted opportunities of streaming, he does not consider time or TV in this specific way. Is this simply a quirk of a new era or is something lost in this transition to unscheduled TV time?
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