Television and Everyday Life

Television and Everyday Life Television is a central dimension of our everyday lives and yet its meaning and its potency vary according to our individual circumstances. Its power will always be mediated by the social and cultural worlds which we inhabit. In Television and Everyday Life, Roger Silverstone explores the enigma of television and how it has found its way so profoundly and intimately into the fabric of our everyday lives. His investigation unravels its emotional and cognitive, spatial, temporal and political significance. Drawing on a wide range of literature, from psychoanalysis to sociology and from geography to cultural studies, Roger Silverstone constructs a theory of the medium which locates it centrally within the multiple realities and discourses of everyday life. Television emerges from these arguments as a fascinating, complex and contradictory medium, but in the process many of the myths that surround it are exploded. Television and Everyday Life presents a radical new approach to the medium, one that both challenges received wisdoms and offers a compellingly original view of the place of television in everyday life. Roger Silverstone is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Message of Television: Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Culture; Framing Science; The Making of a BBC Documentary, and (with Eric Hirsch) joint editor of Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Television and Everyday Life Roger Silverstone London and New York First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 1994 Roger Silverstone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Silverstone, Roger. Television and Everyday Life/Roger Silverstone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Television broadcasting—Social aspects. I. Title. PN1992.6.S465 1994 302.23'45–dc20 93–32143 ISBN 0-203-35894-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37150-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-01646-0 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-01647-9 (pbk) For Jennifer Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xii 1 Television, ontology and the transitional object 1 2 Television and a place called home 24 3 The suburbanisation of the public sphere 52 4 The tele-technological system 78 5 Television and consumption 104 6 On the audience 132 7 Television, technology and everyday life 159 Notes 178 References 184 Index 198 Preface This is a work of media theory. But not disembodied theory. In it I try to approach television’s significance in and for everyday life through lenses ground in, and refracted through, empirical research. I hope that the book will be the first in a series of volumes to emerge from ongoing, predominantly qualitative, research into the place of media and information technologies in everyday life, conducted under the auspices of the Economic and Social Research Council within its Programme on Information and Communication Technologies.1 Perhaps I ought to explain why the first substantive product of this research is a book on, and in, theory and why I have not sought to integrate—in the best sociological tradition—theory and empirical data within a single text. There is no simple answer. Convenience, my own inadequacy, circumstance (I am an inveterate theoriser), are all relevant at a personal level. But more substantially the answer has to be that, as Tom Lindlof and Timothy Meyer (1987) have observed, one of the outstanding strengths of qualitative social research is precisely its ability to generate theory: and in particular to generate theory which is grounded in, and which seeks to explain, social process, to understand the density of lived relations. The theory which emerges is, too, part of the process. It creates a dynamic of its own, feeding into the analysis of data and being challenged and changed by that data. In this sense, and for these reasons, this book can only be a provisional statement of an emerging position, but that should not necessarily invalidate it. It will, I hope, contribute to an ongoing debate about television and its place in the modern world. Of course television is a medium of considerable power and significance in and for everyday life, but this power and significance cannot be understood without attending to the complex over- and under-determining interrelationships of the medium and the various levels of social reality with which it engages. We need to think about television as a psychological, social and cultural form, as well as an economic and political one. We need to think about the medium as more than just a source of influence, neither simply benign nor malignant. We need to think about television as embedded in the multiple discourses of everyday life. And we need to understand what those discourses are, how they are x Television and Everyday Life themselves determined, how they interweave and, most crucially, how they are to be distinguished in terms of their influence relative to each other. This task of description and analysis requires both theoretical and empirical attention. I suggest in this book that it is through detailed analysis of the dynamics of everyday life on the one hand, and a theoretical account of the politics (in the widest sense) of everyday life on the other, that the most profitable route will be found. There are continuities with some of my earlier attempts (esp. Silverstone, 1981) to confront this problem—though the problem itself seemed different then—and any close reading will recognise continuities of theme running from that early work, even in its very different methodological orientation. But there are also differences; differences which mark, I hope, a more sensitive understanding of the contradictions of television’s status in the modern world. Indeed even if it is constructed differently now (and even if I have constructed it differently at various times) that problem remains the same. It is the problem, in all its social complexity, of the power and resonance of the media in our lives, articulating, albeit unevenly, their views of the world and limiting our capacity to influence and control their meanings; but equally offering the very stuff with which we can, and do, construct our own meanings, and through them (albeit equally unevenly) generate the raw materials for critique, transcendence, and change. Running through the discussions that do follow, and almost with a life of its own, is the phrase ‘essential tensions’. This phrase has emerged almost involuntarily while I have tried to work out what I wanted to say. It refers, of course, to a dialectic at the heart of social reality. This dialectic is that of the play and place of media in social life. It is a dialectic of freedom and constraint, of activity and passivity, of the public and private, and it is worked through at the interface of institutional forces and individual actions, historically situated and embedded in the contrary discourses of everyday life. It is in this context that any essentialist claim must be understood. Such essentialism does not imply an appeal to an unchanging social or political reality, nor is it a form of reductionism. It is an acknowledgement—for which I have no apology—that social life is, in all its manifestations, essentially, in constant and productive tension (see Murphy, 1972). My arguments attempt to specify some of the elements of this precarious but compelling tension. Their plurality is not just a matter of weakness. Theory must be plural and open if it is to survive the challenges of the real and if it is, more specifically, to accommodate the contradictory and fragmenting world of late capitalism. What I am attempting in this book is a layered analysis of the structure and process of a set of complex and constantly changing relationships: television as medium, television as technology and television constructed and constrained by the rules, roles and rituals of the taken for granted yet entirely insistent everyday world. My view of these interrelationships takes the form of a kind of matrix: articulated through layers Preface xi of ontology and individual psychology, domestic and suburban spaces, and industrial and technological structures, all of which are related, both in their collusion and contradiction, through the dynamics of consumption. Television, I argue, has to be understood in relation to all these things, because everyday life is formed through these things. There is one possible contradiction in my own arguments that does need identifying more precisely, however. It lies in the focus on television itself. The ESRC PICT research is actually framed as a study of information and communication technologies in the home. I have myself argued that television is no longer an isolated media technology, (if ever it was) but one increasingly embedded into a converging culture of technological and media relationships that also involve computing and telecommunications. In this sense this book offers an historically transitional account. Television is its focus, certainly and justifiably, because television is still our focus—the focus of so many concerns about its power and influence and its place in our everyday lives.

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