Television and Everyday Life

ROUTINES, RITUALS, TRADITIONS, MYTHS
If the subject cannot be grasped save through the reflexive constitution of
daily activities in social practices, we cannot understand the mechanics of
personality apart from the routines of day-to-day life… Routine is integral
both to the continuity of the personality of the agent, as he or she moves
along the paths of daily activities, and to the institutions of society, which
are
such only through their continued reproduction.
(Giddens, 1984, 60)
Routines, rituals, traditions, myths, these are the stuff of social order and everyday
life. Within the familiar and taken for granted, as well as through the heightened
and the dramatic, our lives take shape and within those shapes, spatially and
temporally grounded and signified, we attempt to go about our business, avoiding
or managing, for the most part, the traumas and the catastrophes that threaten to
disturb our peace and our sanity. It is not always easy. Not only are we faced
with the persistent contradictions and irresolvable challenges of daily life—
problems of death, identity, morality—but the bases on which our security is
grounded shift with each twist of the modern or post-modern screw; with
industrialisation and post-industrialisation, with shifts in population, social
structure, technology and cultural values. These shifts and their ontological effects
have been much discussed in recent years (Lasch, 1977; Berger 
et al.,
1974;
Ignatieff, 1984). Significant among prime causes are, it is often argued, the media,
above all television (Postman, 1987; Mander, 1978).
But, for most of us most of the time, everyday life does go on, and it is
sustained through the ordered continuities of language, routine, habit, the taken

---

Television and ontology
19
for granted but essential structures that, in all their contradictions, sustain the
grounds for our security in our daily lives. These comments may seem jejune.
They are nevertheless central to our understanding of the place of the media,
not just as disturbers (their most common characterisation), but also as
sustainers, of social reality. I would like in this final section of the chapter to
change register and move attention away from the individual and the
psychodynamic to the collective and the social, but to do so in a way that
preserves the basic concern: the ground base of social life and the crucial
importance of the symbolic in making sense of it.
Ontological security is sustained through the familiar and the predictable.
Our commonsense attitudes and beliefs express and sustain our practical
understandings of the world, without which life would quickly become
intolerable. Common sense is sustained by practical knowledge and expressed
and supported by a whole range of symbols and symbolic formations. The symbols
of daily life: the everyday sights and sounds of natural language and familiar
culture; the publicly broadcast media texts on billboards, in newspapers, on
television; the highly charged and intense private and public rituals in domestic
or national rites of passage or international celebrations; all these symbols, in
their continuity, their drama and their ambiguity, are also bids for control (see
Martin, 1981, 70 on working-class culture). Defensive or offensive, they are
our attempts, as social beings, to manage nature, to manage others, and to manage
ourselves. They have their roots in the individual’s experience of the basic
contradictions of social life: the independence-dependence, identity-difference
problem which Winnicott analyses; and they also have their roots in the collective
experience of sociality, in the demands of co-presence or face-to-face interaction
(Goffman, 1969), in the emotional charge of the sacred (Durkheim, 1971) and
in the demands of and for structure expressed in all our cultural forms,
prototypically in myth (Lévi-Strauss, 1968) and ritual (Turner, 1969).
What is the issue here? It is the place of television in the visible and hidden
ordering of everyday life; in its spatial and temporal significance; in its
embeddedness in quotidian patterns and habits, as a contributor to our security.
Television as object: the screen providing the focus of our daily rituals and the
frame for the limited transcendence—the suspension of disbelief—which marks
our excursions from the profane routines of the daily grind into the sacred
routines of schedules and programmes. Television as medium: extending our
reach and our security in a world of information, locking us into a network of
time-space relations, both local and global, domestic and national, which
threaten to overwhelm us but also to provide the basis for our claims for
citizenship or membership of community and neighbourhood. Television as
entertainer and as informer: providing in its genres and its narratives stimulation
and disturbance, peace and reassurance, and offering within their own order
an expression and a reinforcement of the containing temporalities of the
everyday.

---

20
Television and Everyday Life
Since social life has some order, yet moves continuously—on the grand
scale through historical time—on the micro-scale through each hour, its
movement requires a great deal of subtle meshing between the regular and
the improvised, the rigid and the flexible, the repetitive and the varying.
Social life proceeds somewhere between the imaginary extremes of absolute
order, and absolute chaotic conflict and anarchic improvisation. Neither
the one nor the other takes over completely.
(Moore and Myerhoff, 1977, 3)
The routines and rhythms of everyday life are multiply structured in time and space.
The daily patterns of work and leisure, of getting up and going to bed, of housework
and homework: the clock times, free and indentured, are themselves embedded
in the times of biography and the life-cycle, and in the times of institutions and of
societies themselves—the 
longue durée,
slow and glacial (Scannell, 1988, 15).
Everyday life is the product of all these temporalities, but it is in the first, in the
experienced routines and rhythms of the day, that time is felt, lived and secured.
And time is secured in the equally differentiated and ordered spaces of everyday
life: the public and the private spaces; the front-stages and the back-stages; the
spaces of gender and generation, domesticity and community.
Television is very much part of the taken for granted seriality and spatiality
of everyday life. Broadcast schedules reproduce (or define) the structure of
the household day (itself significantly determined by the temporality of work
in industrial society (Thompson, 1968; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972),