Juan Monroy — Module on Spigel and Manovich

For each of the following quotes from the assigned essay, interpret and summarize the quote in your own words—in about two to three sentences in length.

Lynn Spigel, “The Domestic Economy of Television Viewing in Postwar America,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no. 4 (1989): 337–54.
1. The ads evoked a sense of fragmented leisure time and suggested that television viewing could be conducted in a state of distraction. But this was not the kind of critical contemplative distraction that Walter Benjamin suggested in his seminal essay…. Rather, the ads implied that the housewife could accomplish her chores in a state of ‘utopian forgetfulness’ as she moved freely between her work and the act of watching television (Spigel 334).
2. “The bifurcation of sexual roles of male (leisure) and female (productive) activities served as an occasion for a full consideration of power dynamics between men and women in the home. Typically, the magazines extended their categories of feminine and masculine viewing practices into representations of the body. “For men, television viewing was most often depicted in terms of a posture of repose. Men were typically shown to be sprawled out on easy chairs as they watched the set… But for women passive calm of television viewing was simply more problematic…the female body watching television was often engaged in productive activities” (Spigel 348).
Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (January 2009): 319–31.
1. “As de Certeau points out, in modern societies most of the objects that people use in their everyday lives are mass-produced goods; these goods are the expressions of strategies of designers, producers, and marketers. People build their worlds and identities out of these readily available objects by using different tactics: bricolage, assembly, customization, and—to use a term that was not a part of de Certeau’s vocabulary but that has become important today—remix” (Manovich 322).
2. “In summary, today strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics in the original formulation by de Certeau while tactics look like strategies. Since the companies that create social media platforms make money from having as many users as possible visit them…, they have a direct interest in having users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible” (Manovich 325).