The Other Side of the Screen

The Other Side of the Screen Brad Stiffler (bio) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN TV SNAPSHOTS: AN ARCHIVE OF EVERYDAY LIFE BY LYNN SPIGEL Duke University Press, 2022 In the spring of 2020, as stay-at-home orders moved work and school to virtual formats, many people suddenly became acutely aware of the spaces directly in front of their computer screens. For newly remote workers, private and usually unseen interior spaces became Zoom backgrounds, revealing household clutter, roommates and family members, idiosyncratic decorations, unruly or well-behaved pets, and bookshelves filled with revealing selections. Some opted out by employing virtual backgrounds, keeping their cameras off, or taking their computers outside, while many others carefully rearranged these interiors now visible to a broader public, crafting more camera-ready spaces and angling their laptops in order to control the image. Responding to this new popular concern, media outlets like Forbes and USA Today offered advice on how to create a "Zoom-worthy" background on a budget. In a broad sense, the shift to remote meetings and classes transformed the position in front of the screen, shifting it from a place of looking or spectating to one of self-conscious display and performance. This was a disruption to the established dynamics and relations of the multimedia or "wired" home, bringing with it new visual reciprocities, different conventions for negotiating the public-private division, and novel ways of seeing our familiar environs. Thinking back on this very recent past, some of the more memorable moments involve people trying to negotiate these altered relationships between space and visibility. (I'm thinking of Jeffrey Toobin, Zoombombing, and Robert "BBC Dad" Kelly here, among others.) [End Page 179] Lynn Spigel's latest contribution to TV studies and media history, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life, focuses on an earlier period when the spaces in front of our screens were made visible, transformed into self-conscious stages for performance and display, with an array of awkward, telling, and provocative results. The illuminating collection of photographs in this book, collected by the author over more than a decade, mostly capture the space directly in front of the television screen, as well as the spaces on top, immediately behind and near it. Although all these images, crafted by amateur photographers from the 1950s through the 1970s, feature the TV set in some way, they show so much more, including particular ways of experiencing the home as a site of representation and social performance. While the TV itself did not function as an image-making technology as laptops do now, Spigel's study reveals that the spaces it inhabited were uniquely charged with complex dynamics of visuality and communication, making living rooms places to be seen and to show— not just to watch. A combined cultural history of television and the snapshot camera, TV Snapshots brings new meanings and depth to the concept of the "media home" and the "home theater" developed in her earlier works (Spigel 1992; Spigel 2001). Instead of focusing on the content of network broadcasting, the myriad images in Spigel's archive testify to the everyday practices that people employed "on the other side of the screen," actively responding to and reshaping the media home (257). The snapshots show people using the television and the space around it to craft and perform themselves, sometimes aspiring to the polished images of family life that dominated TV broadcasts and sometimes subverting them. They also show individuals using that space as a site of pleasure or sexual play, responding to the currents of desire circulating around and through the TV set. Notably, they show a much more racially diverse collection of audience-performers than the predominately white cast of network stars as they reimagined their place in the social order by posing with the television. More broadly, Spigel's anthology of images and careful analysis "reorients television studies away from the programs on-screen," presenting "the home as a theater of everyday life" filled with active and sometimes unruly social actors and image-makers, not just passive viewers (23, original emphasis). As she puts it, "Armed with snapshot cameras, people re-envisioned the dominant [End Page 180...