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Logics of Attention: Watching and Not-Watching Film and Television in Everyday Life

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Logics of Attention: Watching and Not-Watching Film and Television in Everyday Life LOGICS OF ATTENTION: WATCHING AND NOT-WATCHING FILM AND TELEVISION IN EVERYDAY LIFE Dan Hassoun Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University June 2019 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee Co-chair: Barbara Klinger, Ph.D Co-chair: Ilana Gershon, Ph.D Stephanie DeBoer, Ph.D Joan Hawkins, Ph.D Ted Striphas, Ph.D June 5, 2019 ii Acknowledgements This is a project about the ways people understand how they pay attention or not pay attention to media in their daily lives. I was especially interested in the many fleeting and half-forgotten things that we do as we watch—the things that constantly happen around us that threaten to disrupt or lead us away from our watching. Writing this dissertation has been its own exercise in managed attention. As anyone who has sat down to cobble together thoughts on a page can attest, writing is a process of countless distractions, diversions, disruptions—some external, many others self-imposed—but almost all of which tend to be smoothed over or ignored when reading the final product. That this project is completed in its present form owes its fact to the colleagues, friends, and loved ones who helped me through the process and ensured that the many diversions encountered along the way indeed remained only fleeting hiccups. I owe so much to my advisors Ilana Gershon and Barbara Klinger. Their own work has been a guiding example of how to create scholarship around audiences and media users that is at once rigorous and accessible—not to mention generous toward the human beings actually being studied. Interpersonally, their commitment to my growth and success have been central to my ability to navigate the myriad challenges of formulating and actually writing something as big as a dissertation project. I must thank Ilana, in particular, for her grace in stepping up to the co-chair role during a particularly fraught bureaucratic period at Indiana University. I was also lucky to work as Ilana’s research assistant on numerous projects from 2014 to 2018, which informed some of the approaches I took in this dissertation’s audience study (in addition to providing some much-appreciated additional funding). Among my other committee members, special thanks must go out to Ted Striphas, who has been an indispensable anchor of support starting at the moment of my acceptance to the PhD program and continuing long after he left the IU system. iii This project is a direct outgrowth of many of the questions that Ted posed in his seminar on everyday life and cultural theory in spring 2014—a life-changing class if ever there was one. Stephanie DeBoer has been an important voice of support, encouraging me to iron out many ideas about media, home, and space that I had not previously considered. Joan Hawkins is a rock star in her time and empathy to grads, and the biweekly writing group she organized was invaluable for workshopping various pieces of this project and keeping me on track. More thanks are owed to a range of instructors and mentors I have been fortunate to know across various institutions. At IU, Liz Ellcessor was a crucial help during my first several years of coursework and exams. A one-off question posed to me by Greg Waller in a 2013 conversation about whether films have a “right to be watched” planted a seed that ultimately grew into Chapter 1. At the University of Minnesota, Mary Vavrus, Mark Pedelty, Ed Schappa, Laurie Ouellette, Kjel Johnson, Steve Groening, and Jules Darg were all influences, helpers, and advice-givers at various points of my undergrad and master’s years. Conversations and collaborations I had at conferences with Charles Acland, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, and Ken Rogers helped give form to some key ideas I ended up incorporating into this project. I am lucky to have found a particularly giving community of peers at Indiana University. Alex Svensson and James Gilmore were key co-conspirators, both as friends and as collaborators on different article projects. I am glad our interests were able to cross-pollinate so well. My friendship with Megan Brown helped keep me sane for the first few years of my doctoral program, and my coffee and writing sessions with Chris Miles did the same during the last few years of working. Many other colleagues and friends have read and commented on versions of chapters, forwarded me articles, shared job hunting materials, or just generally offered emotional or intellectual help in some way: Kate Altizer, Amanda Bates, Jesse Balzer, Josh Coonrod, iv Catalina de Onis, Danny Grinberg, Forrest Greenwood, Blake Hallinan, Jamie Hook, Katherine Johnson, Saul Kutnicki, Martin Law, James Paasche, Caitlin Reynolds, Nancy Smith, Josh Vasquez, Matthew Von Vogt, Kirstin Wagner, and Eric Zobel. The audience study around which this project is based was funded through grants from the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics and the Alexander M. Doty Memorial Fellowship at IU, as well as a dissertation completion fellowship from the College of Arts & Sciences. Rob Potter and Sharon Mayell helped to set up a cozy interview space for me to use in the Institute for Communication in the Media School. Recruitment for the study was made possible by permissions to post flyers from the Monroe County Library and Bloomington YMCA. Jon Vickers at the Indiana University Cinema was particularly kind in posting a call for participants on the cinema’s social media pages, which ended up netting enough people to meet one of my quotas in less than a day. A giant thank-you must go out as well to the fifty-one participants who were willing to share their time, stories, and thoughts about media with me. I hope I’ve been able to write about their routines in a way that does them justice. We are nothing without our circles of support and intimacy. I am so grateful to list the fabulous Ben Hanson, Toby Jones, Madeline Queripel, and Greg Carlson among my close friends, and to have them available during periods when I want/need to redirect my mind toward something other than dissertation-writing or graduate school. Thank you to my Uncle Ghazi for modeling what a brave and generous scholar can look like. I’m thankful that my brother, Michael Hassoun, is just a phone call away whenever I want a sympathetic listener or just someone to swap opinions on horror movies, superheroes, or politics for a few hours. My mom has always been a beacon of reassurance, advice, and love in times both good and challenging. If I have any traces of empathy, kindness, or patience in my being, I most surely owe them all to her. My non- v human companions are sources of delight each day, and were literally by my side during my writing years more than probably any other living beings: Amina is one of the only dogs that could earn the heart of this cat-lover, and Mozart is more cat than any cat-lover can probably handle. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation and so much more to Emily Corturillo. They are a reminder of all the types of joys, large and small, that the everyday can contain, and a constant source of good wisdoms. If the currency of love is focused attention, then I am certainly a wealthy man. vi Dan Hassoun LOGICS OF ATTENTION: WATCHING AND NOT-WATCHING FILM AND TELEVISION IN EVERYDAY LIFE This study draws from a series of qualitative interviews and take-home diaries conducted with groups of home film and television audiences to examine everyday practices of media attention and distraction. Often taken as clear and separate experiential states, attentiveness and distractedness are actually social categories with leaky boundaries and definitions. Together, they suggest logics from which audiences draw when they justify combining or not combining movies and television with other aspects of their daily routines (including mobile phone use, cooking, sleeping, working, and so on). Interviewing groups of cinephiles, television binge- watchers, and parents of small children, I detail how people try to attend and not attend to aspects of media texts in order to see themselves as “attentive” or “distracted” in particular contexts. I argue that these practices reveal some of the boundary work of everyday life itself— as a domain of accidents and unpredictability, as a sense of certainty and stability, as a series of managed time and work/leisure boundaries, and as a site for suspicion toward media influences. Within cinema and media studies, arguments about screen attention and distraction have been central to claims about medium specificity, genre and textuality, fandom, screen influence, and the organization of home life. By focusing on everyday knowledges about media engagement, my study both augments and complicates these assumptions about what it means to “watch” a media text, reflecting the (at once) anxiety, pleasure, impulsiveness, and indifference in how people may treat watching as a part of life to manage or cultivate. Ultimately, attending to issues of attention suggests the ongoing interrelationships involved in negotiating screenic versus non-screenic areas of life. vii Co-chair: Barbara Klinger, Ph.D Co-chair: Ilana Gershon, Ph.D Stephanie DeBoer, Ph.D Joan Hawkins, Ph.D Ted Striphas, Ph.D viii Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Defining Attention/Distraction in the Everyday ........................................................... 7 Attention as Self-Cultivation ........................................................................................ 12 Attention as Self-Destruction ....................................................................................... 15 Method and Construction of the Audience Study .......................................................
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