Dissertation Abstract
Upholstered Frontiers: Remote Control Apperception in the Home Entertainment Zone
Cinema and media studies tend to be preoccupied with what is mediated (matters of representation and aesthetics) or with who is mediating (matters of industry, distribution, and marketing), but not with how media consumption is an embodied process that is surrounded, shaped, and supported by material environments. Through its gradual technologization, the living room or ‘home entertainment zone’ has served as a training ground for an evolving set of technical competencies and digital literacies that have become foundational to our mediated lives. My dissertation is a cultural study of how an everyday object within this space, the remote control device (RCD), has been instrumental in constructing historically specific user identities, expectations, and habits of perception.
Following Lynn Spigel’s groundbreaking 1992 Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, there has been a notable uptick in cultural histories of television within its domestic context, including books by William Boddy, Anna McCarthy, and Barbara Klinger. Few scholars have published on the remote control, however. There are only four works by Robert Bellamy, James Walker, Max Dawson, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, all of which are singular studies devoted to programming, advertising, or marketing. More recent work in media archaeology, design studies, and disabilities studies has provided useful methods that I combine together for a holistic cultural study of this media device.
Between 1975 and 2008, the percentage of American living rooms with remote controls increased from seventeen to over ninety-five. Covering this time span, from the release of the first infrared RCD to Logitech’s ‘Harmony One’ advanced universal RCD, I detail the emergence of a historically-specific mode of mediated engagement. As a techno-material object and a sociocultural practice, the remote control functions as an agent of design culture: it has redesigned our living rooms and acculturated habitual ways of seeing and being in the world. Materiality mediates, but materiality is itself a rich and storied amalgamation of matter, force, power, and practice. Parsing this complexity leads me to investigate the RCD from the inside to the outside, from the electronic engineering of internal circuitry and components to the industrial design of plastic casings and button layouts. Going further, I explore the ways in which the subject inhabits the remote-controlled space as a designed environment. This environment is, on the one hand, the result of ongoing innovations within the consumer electronics industry, design practice, and business marketing; it is also a dynamic field that is continually domesticated, negotiated, and reconfigured through the user’s particular body, desires, and creative acts of consumption.
A comprehensive study of these different scales and contexts calls for a mixed-methods approach. I therefore draw upon a different disciplinary field in each chapter. Chapter One studies the interior of the infrared remote using Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeological method. Following Ernst, I delineate the device’s ‘time-criticality’, or the temporal, sequential, and rhythmic relationships between the RCD’s internal components. Time-criticality brings attention to an unseen, physical layer of existence that is scarcely noticed or understood by most users, but is something to which they must unconsciously adapt and synchronize. This internal reading of the object is then juxtaposed against a design history of its exterior in Chapter Two, which surveys the evolution of button layout, ergonomics, and functionality from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. During this period, users have developed distinct habits of ‘grasp,’ ‘fit,’ abduction, and adduction. This chapter illustrates the increasing importance of sensuality and affect to the user’s experience with consumer electronics since the advent of user-centered design and emotional design.
Chapter Three conducts a business history of two manufacturers of peripherals with differing design philosophies – Logitech and Safko International. Logitech employs user-centered design methods for its ‘advanced universal’ RCDs, intended for the affluent consumer, while Safko employs universal design principles for its ‘Siptroller’ infrared RCDs, intended for persons with disabilities. Using a disabilities studies approach, I critique the product design of Logitech’s RCDs for how it tacitly perpetuates a universal subject. Logitech’s design practices not only exclude and further marginalize certain user groups, but they also miss untold opportunities to enhance product design for all, including the able-bodied, upwardly mobile users they prioritize. The final chapter considers the surrounding network of objects that support RCD use, such as screens, couches, cabinets, batteries, wires, and instruction manuals. Thus, it sheds light on how real-life use exceeds the limits of product design and user-profiles, as outlined in Chapter Three. Deficiencies of maintenance and know-how, non-compatible wireless protocols, pet hair and insects, dying batteries, dust, rust, and eroding solder – all conspire to frustrate the home theatre experience and confront viewers with the unnoticed materiality that attends televisual spectatorship.
Some of the latest developments in RCD touchscreens, voice control, and haptic feedback reflect the remote control’s genealogical connection to smartphones, tablets, and related hand-held devices. In recent years, executives at Google and Microsoft have dubbed smartphones ‘remote controls for everyday life’. This extensive study of users’ acculturation to the remote control lays groundwork toward a genealogy of mobile media devices and home automation generally, while significantly broadening and deepening media studies’ approaches to televisual spectatorship.
Cinema and media studies tend to be preoccupied with what is mediated (matters of representation and aesthetics) or with who is mediating (matters of industry, distribution, and marketing), but not with how media consumption is an embodied process that is surrounded, shaped, and supported by material environments. Through its gradual technologization, the living room or ‘home entertainment zone’ has served as a training ground for an evolving set of technical competencies and digital literacies that have become foundational to our mediated lives. My dissertation is a cultural study of how an everyday object within this space, the remote control device (RCD), has been instrumental in constructing historically specific user identities, expectations, and habits of perception.
Following Lynn Spigel’s groundbreaking 1992 Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, there has been a notable uptick in cultural histories of television within its domestic context, including books by William Boddy, Anna McCarthy, and Barbara Klinger. Few scholars have published on the remote control, however. There are only four works by Robert Bellamy, James Walker, Max Dawson, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, all of which are singular studies devoted to programming, advertising, or marketing. More recent work in media archaeology, design studies, and disabilities studies has provided useful methods that I combine together for a holistic cultural study of this media device.
Between 1975 and 2008, the percentage of American living rooms with remote controls increased from seventeen to over ninety-five. Covering this time span, from the release of the first infrared RCD to Logitech’s ‘Harmony One’ advanced universal RCD, I detail the emergence of a historically-specific mode of mediated engagement. As a techno-material object and a sociocultural practice, the remote control functions as an agent of design culture: it has redesigned our living rooms and acculturated habitual ways of seeing and being in the world. Materiality mediates, but materiality is itself a rich and storied amalgamation of matter, force, power, and practice. Parsing this complexity leads me to investigate the RCD from the inside to the outside, from the electronic engineering of internal circuitry and components to the industrial design of plastic casings and button layouts. Going further, I explore the ways in which the subject inhabits the remote-controlled space as a designed environment. This environment is, on the one hand, the result of ongoing innovations within the consumer electronics industry, design practice, and business marketing; it is also a dynamic field that is continually domesticated, negotiated, and reconfigured through the user’s particular body, desires, and creative acts of consumption.
A comprehensive study of these different scales and contexts calls for a mixed-methods approach. I therefore draw upon a different disciplinary field in each chapter. Chapter One studies the interior of the infrared remote using Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeological method. Following Ernst, I delineate the device’s ‘time-criticality’, or the temporal, sequential, and rhythmic relationships between the RCD’s internal components. Time-criticality brings attention to an unseen, physical layer of existence that is scarcely noticed or understood by most users, but is something to which they must unconsciously adapt and synchronize. This internal reading of the object is then juxtaposed against a design history of its exterior in Chapter Two, which surveys the evolution of button layout, ergonomics, and functionality from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. During this period, users have developed distinct habits of ‘grasp,’ ‘fit,’ abduction, and adduction. This chapter illustrates the increasing importance of sensuality and affect to the user’s experience with consumer electronics since the advent of user-centered design and emotional design.
Chapter Three conducts a business history of two manufacturers of peripherals with differing design philosophies – Logitech and Safko International. Logitech employs user-centered design methods for its ‘advanced universal’ RCDs, intended for the affluent consumer, while Safko employs universal design principles for its ‘Siptroller’ infrared RCDs, intended for persons with disabilities. Using a disabilities studies approach, I critique the product design of Logitech’s RCDs for how it tacitly perpetuates a universal subject. Logitech’s design practices not only exclude and further marginalize certain user groups, but they also miss untold opportunities to enhance product design for all, including the able-bodied, upwardly mobile users they prioritize. The final chapter considers the surrounding network of objects that support RCD use, such as screens, couches, cabinets, batteries, wires, and instruction manuals. Thus, it sheds light on how real-life use exceeds the limits of product design and user-profiles, as outlined in Chapter Three. Deficiencies of maintenance and know-how, non-compatible wireless protocols, pet hair and insects, dying batteries, dust, rust, and eroding solder – all conspire to frustrate the home theatre experience and confront viewers with the unnoticed materiality that attends televisual spectatorship.
Some of the latest developments in RCD touchscreens, voice control, and haptic feedback reflect the remote control’s genealogical connection to smartphones, tablets, and related hand-held devices. In recent years, executives at Google and Microsoft have dubbed smartphones ‘remote controls for everyday life’. This extensive study of users’ acculturation to the remote control lays groundwork toward a genealogy of mobile media devices and home automation generally, while significantly broadening and deepening media studies’ approaches to televisual spectatorship.