Spigel on Portability

Spigel on Portability

CCT 2195HJanuary 21

• What is the cultural significance of portability• In the era where it was introduced?• Postwar US• Rise of television, advertising industry..• How did this impact family life?• What were the marketing discourses?• How did this reflect new sensibility of ‘good

citizenship’, or, ‘active citizenship’?

• Also think about how media and news gathering was changing

• Remote news gathering• International news• Movement as a trope: adventure television

shows, ‘on the road’ shows

• “The portable TV was the material manifestation of broader conceptual frameworks for television and family life in the 1960s…portability came to represent larger social anxieties about postwar transformations in the relationship between public and private spheres” (p. 63)

• Portability and mobility?• Same or different attributes?

Mobile Privatization

• From Raymond Williams notion of mobile privatization – how communication and media technologies play a role in shaping modern life…and accounts for the paradox of an increase in increased geographic mobility (of people, knowledge, etc, through tech modes of transportation & communication tech’s) and of privatization (arrangement of homes, suburbs, the automobile)

What is meant by privatized mobility

• Literally – the mobile home• Television viewing in the home as spectator

sport, as public life coming indoors• Portable televisions pool-side (weather and

water resistant)• Emphasis on indoor-outdoor products• Television spectatorship changes – is more

active

Portability = Liberation

• Symbols of ‘women’s liberation’, post WWII• More young women in colleges and

universities• Leaving home to work• Peggy, Megan, on Mad Men

• In Spigel’s examples, how were notions of portability gendered?

• What are current discourses and marketing about portability and communication tech’?

Questions

• What are the equity issues related to access to portable technologies?

• Elitist? (initially?)