Constructing the Sony Watchman Pocket Television: Personalization, Spatial Agency, and the Conundrum of the Mobile Idler

In this article, I detail a material history of the Sony Watchman pocket television (released in 1982), demonstrating that the competition between Sony and other manufacturers to create viable miniaturized displays during the 1980s and early 1990s was catalytic for the development of television technology. I then analyze how the Watchman was made meaningful through ad campaigns. By incorporating some of the lifestylizing tactics of the Sony Walk-man music player while, somewhat disjunctively, negotiating the low-brow cultural status of television and its most dedicated viewers, marketing for the Watchman entailed a negotiation of the broader cultural disposition toward television as a medium.