Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture
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Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Stephen Francis Groening IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Keya Ganguly, Adviser December 2008 © Stephen Francis Groening 2008 i Acknowledgements When one embarks on an academic project on contemporary culture, invariably everyone has an opinion. So I should mention at the outset that I have gained from the numerous conversations I have had with strangers on airplanes, in hotel elevators, the cable repair guy, house painters, the staff of restaurants and coffeehouses – in short anyone who ever asked me, “What do you do?” in the past three years. This is hardly a cooperative project; nonetheless, I could not have completed it or embarked upon it without the assistance and hard work of others. I wrote the first chapter, “We See Ourselves as Others See Us” with the financial assistance of the University of Minnesota’s Harold Leonard Memorial Film Fellowship and Grant, which allowed me to travel to Washington, D.C. and perform archival research at the National Museum of American History Archives Center and the Library of Congress. I am enormously grateful to the staff at the Archives Center who assisted me: Wendy Shay, Reuben M. Jackson, Kay Peterson, and Susan B. Strange. I am also grateful to Rosemary C. Hanes, who helped my research at the Library of Congress. I presented a version of that chapter at the 2007 “Media History: What Are the Issues?” conference and benefited enormously from the conversations that followed. A Graduate Research Partnership Program Grant awarded by the University of Minnesota allowed me to travel to the Boeing Archives in Everett, WA to perform much of the research underpinning the second chapter, “Film in Air.” I presented a version of the second chapter as part of a mobile cinema panel the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Conference in Atlanta and benefited enormously from the guidance and feedback from Zoë Druick, who chaired the panel, and Martin Roberts, who has regularly engaged me ii in conversations regarding media and mobility in the years since that talk. I presented portions of the third chapter, “From ‘A Box in the Theater of the World’ to ‘The World as Your Living Room’” as part of an SCMS panel on mobile television. I am grateful to those I met through that panel: William Boddy, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Elizabeth Evans, and Scott Ruston. Our ongoing conversation regarding television and new media has been enormously productive for me. The fourth chapter, “Doing Things at the Same Time” is heavily indebted to my wife, Andrea Christy, who managed to tape the television coverage of the emergency landing of Flight 292 while I was out of town and later initiated a dinner conversation regarding the Staples Center Jumbotron. Suffice to say, my dissertation would be very different without her. I am grateful my fellow graduate students who read initial drafts of chapters. In particular, I am appreciative of Eva Hudecova, who met with me twice a month for more than a year to exchange writing and advice, as well as moral support. Lindsey Simms gave me long distance editorial advice that was timely and humorous (including a not-suitable-for- reproduction guide on the use of semi-colons). Alicia Gibson and Andy Opitz read chapters on short notice, without hesitation or question, and offered valuable feedback. Both the third and fourth chapters were helped greatly by several meetings I had with Katie Levin of the University of Minnesota’s Writing Center. There have been numerous members of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature who have lent moral support, logistical assistance, and a sympathetic ear, but I want to single out Robin Brown, Richard Leppert, and Julie Stevens as particularly supportive and helpful. iii Finally, I want to thank the members of my committee, without whom this project would be impossible. Keya Ganguly, Ron Greene, John Mowitt, and Haidee Wasson have all taught me, through example, advice, and direct instruction, how to be a rigorous, insightful, ethical, conscientious, and principled scholar. For this I am eternally grateful. iv Dedication To Andrea, for suffering through seven winters of sub-zero temperatures, frostbite and vitamin D deficiency and seven summers of mosquitoes, chiggers, and 90% humidity – all without a beach in sight. v Abstract “Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture” is an analysis of the implications of individualized media forms that increasingly constitute and encroach upon what was previously regarded as public space. I argue that the role of screens in non- theatrical contexts requires that we reassess the importance of media distribution and flows. The reconfiguration of social spaces caused by the proliferation of screens leads to new aesthetic modes and new forms of sociality. The push and pull of those media forms results in a social order I call “connected isolation,” a predicament in which subjects must isolate themselves in order to connect to the world through media technologies. These technologies compel separation from the local in order to achieve immediacy with the global, thereby reconfiguring long-standing categories of space. The unresolved tensions between public and private produced by these devices (the use of cellular phones in public areas, for example) express the emergent social order of connected isolation. My dissertation provides a deeper understanding of a larger cultural problematic – the role of communication technologies in structuring social belonging – through a focus on the tensions between community and technological innovation in a social milieu structured by mass media. To describe the emergence of connected isolation as a new social order, I engage four theoretical constructs: distraction, the “space of flows,” “mobile-privatization,” and the aesthetic of liveness. As specific objects of analysis, I examine corporate training films from the silent era, in-flight entertainment, cellular phones, and television screens in public spaces. This dissertation, then, moves between the sociology of culture, economic geography and social theory to arrive at some conclusions regarding electronic communications technologies and the proliferation of screens. vi Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Screen Isolations and Connections Chapter One: 31 “We See Others as They See Us”: Identification, Distraction, and Training Films Chapter Two: 73 In-flight Entertainment: New Screens, New Spaces, New Networks Chapter Three: 103 From “A Box in the Theater of the World” to “The World as Your Living Room”: Cellular Phones, Television, and Mobile Privatization Chapter Four: 129 “Doing Things at the Same Time:” Connected Isolation, Liveness, and the Public Sphere Conclusion: 172 Connected Isolation and Community Bibliography 186 vii List of Figures Figures 1.1–1.2: stills from “Family Reunion” 15 Figure 2.1: still from Accuracy First 45 Figure 2.2: Comic from Telegraph World March 1921 52 Figure 2.3: Comic from Telegraph World June 1921 52 Figure 2.4: front page of Dots and Dashes, October 1931 60 Figure 2.5–2.6: stills from Accuracy First 65 Figure 2.7–2.8: stills from Accuracy First 66 Figure 3.1: DVD Region Codes 78 Figure 3.2: Range of German Airships 80 Figure 3.3: Media Technologies Available on Selected Airlines 93 Figure 3.4: Production Origin of In-Flight Films 98 Figure 4.1: Verizon VCast advertisement 113 Figures 4.2–4.7: Stills from “The World As Your Living Room” 116 Figure 5.1: Celebrations outside the Staples Center, June 2000 153 1 Introduction: Screen Isolations and Connections The Proliferation of Screens This dissertation is an analysis of the widespread deployment of moving image technologies in the contemporary United States. My aim is to present an account of the proliferation of screen technologies over the past eighty years since. Many histories of media technology attribute particular traits to a device in order to give each innovation a specificity that distinguishes it from other similar devices, how television is different then film, for example. I approach moving image technologies from another direction. I contend that the installation of screens – technologies that serve as the exhibition sites for moving images – enable and structure a specific social order. The contours of this social order are structured by already present conditions of industrial capitalism as well as the ideologies of individualism and competition. I use the term “connected isolation” to describe the social order generated through the establishment of moving image technologies as a routine component of contemporary life.1 Connected isolation is a social order in the sense that it describes how screens organize society – linking various media, transportation, and economic institutions. My overarching argument is that the ubiquity of these technologies calls for a new understanding of the importance of moving image distribution and flows to supplement analysis of media form and content. Through a focus on the tensions between community and technological innovation in a social milieu structured by visual media, my dissertation Screen Isolations and Connections -- 2 provides a deeper understanding of a larger cultural problematic: the role of visual technologies in structuring social belonging. My inquiry is concerned with the phenomenon Will Straw has dubbed “the proliferation of screens” (Straw 2000), referring to the presence of television screens in department stores, bars, train stations, and doctor’s offices examined by Anna McCarthy in Ambient Television. The scope of this dissertation covers the installation of motion picture projectors in offices and schools that began in the 1920s, the deployment of screens in vehicles of rapid transportation such as the automobile, train, and airplane, the ascendancy of the personal hand-held screen, and the large-format screens (known as Jumbotrons) at sports arenas.