Screens used in Public Locations
Today’s society is obsessed with technology. Because the average human been is now always plastered in front of a screen, large of small, the notion of privacy is a lot more muddled than it used to be. A study on screens in public spaces found that ‘The emergence of this shift reverses the previous dominant trajectory in which broadcast media such as radio and television ‘privatized’ the public sphere by relocating key processes of civic engagement from public to domestic space’ (McQuire 2006). Now people can be out in public, but still be encapsulated with their little devices that no socialising will be involved, whereas the internet has opened up brand new ways of connected with people through screens, like group chats, skype call, and the infamous social media platform Facebook for socialising between friends and relatives, and has even branched out into human entertainment, allowing for connectivity over games or movies and such with Online Play and YouTube. The TV was made as a private get-together event for the family to share and experience together, while nowadays watching something with over a million people seems plausible with the internet.
Since the early 20th century, people were already fearing the public sphere was being overtaken by other medial items as the world became more modernised, and the internet was the next step. The TV has now become the background noise of situations; where it provides comfort sound while doing work or interacting with others or just to break the silence of the area, not for actual viewership. Screens are so prevalent now that the purpose of TV has changed as much as the internet has changed people. With an ethnographic perspective, the notion of having multiple viewable screens the all to commonly known issue of hogging the remote. This method of an individual watching another smaller screen in the vicinity of others has coined the term ‘cocooning’, where the person is so enveloped in their own screens that the other public screens have no real meaning. This has not only become apparent in the home area, where the activity of watching TV together has almost gone extinct in most homes, but now even in public places with public screens now with even less of a purpose. Watching something on the big screen at a cinema or at home on the TV was seen as a group moment, but now has been relegated to a past time or occasional moment when something of shared importance is on-screen. This is one of the factors that influences Hollywood’s fear of the internet; it gives to the public what they themselves can give, but will get it to them quickly, it can be viewed without anyone else, and it comes for free.
But with more frequent screenings from mobile phones brings up the thought of digital spying. Most mobile devices along with any digital device is under constant surveillance, keeping track of every little bit of information about the owner of the device. The funny situation surrounding this secrecy is that many may already be aware of the privacy breach on their devices but don’t care enough to fight against it, being more focused on the use of the phone before thinking that other people watching. The unknown invasion of privacy is not as important to them as the obvious invasion of privacy, where they can planning see someone is getting into their personal space of information, with examples like paparazzi.
http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2008/03/06/public-screens-and-the-transformation-of-public-space/