36
Television and Everyday Life
Family interaction patterns, then, embody the family paradigm, and through
them the family sustains or fails to sustain itself as an ongoing social unit. This
stress on ritual and on the consistency of pattern in social action has implications
for our understanding of the place of television in family life. I argued in Chapter
1 that both public and private forms of ritual are implicated in the management
and acceptance of broadcast television, and that the taken
for granted certainties
of both broadcast schedules and daily routines—which are of course both spatial
and temporal—create the framework within which the normality and security
of everyday life are sustained.
Space and time are inextricably intertwined. The quality of the temporal
culture of the family’s relationships is expressed in its attitudes to the past,
present and future embodied in speech or in the particular characteristics of
the household economy (ibid., 233).
Following Kantor and Lehr (1975), Reiss distinguishes between ‘orienting’
and ‘clocking’. Orienting refers to the reference points in time which a family
uses to conduct its affairs. Families can be shown to have dominant orientations:
to either past, present or future. Past orienting is remembering, re-experiencing,
or re-enacting—a living in the past or a preoccupation with
the history or tradition
of the family. Present orientation has to do with the here and now, with what is
being experienced or actually felt or being undertaken. And future orientation,
perhaps a stereotypical middle-class trait, is emphasised in anticipation, imagining
or planning ahead—to deferred gratification. Temporal orientation can be
expressed in household furnishings, contacts with kin,
patterns of friendship,
what is saved or thrown away, as well as in relationships to television and
technology (Silverstone, 1993). Time orientation is also expressed in the particular
economy of the family household, where credit, saving or accumulated wealth
indicate orientation to present, future and past respectively.
Clocking involves a different but related set of considerations of time.
Clocking is, according to Kantor and Lehr (1975, 82) the regulation of sequence,
frequency and pace of immediately experienced events from moment to
moment, hour to hour and day to day. Clocking entails
a whole series of activities
which in turn involve sequencing and the setting of frequency, duration and
scheduling. They result or do not result in a pattern of synchronisation in which
family or household members come together or pass each other, according to
a pattern which is set and engrained in their daily routines, and which also
meets both the organisational demands of everyday life and the cultural demands
of their particular orientation to the world. All of this is not just a matter of
synchronisation. There is often conflict about matters of time (and control
over space) within families and households. But
there is equally no question
that a family’s clocking pattern is not the basic mechanism by which it structures
itself as a viable social unit. Kantor and Lehr (1975, 86) suggest that clocking,
the organisation and management of time within the family, reveals ‘what the
family considers most important’.
Television and a place called home
37
The quality of the spatial culture of the family is, in a parallel fashion,
expressed in the ways in which families set and maintain the boundary between
themselves and the outside, regulating in numerous ways the material and
symbolic passages across that boundary—‘boundary maintenance’. It is also
expressed in the
regulation of internal space, the space of personal distance
and privacy within the family, and in the family’s conception of the physical
and emotional arrangements of its world: ‘[The] family’s arrangement of internal
space clearly reflects how it as a group conceptualises or understands the world
outside the family’ (Reiss, 1981, 237). Synchronisation is a matter, then, of
both temporal and spatial ordering.
The different ways in which families organise and express their space-time
relations in their daily and ritualised interactions become the basis for a typology
of families in Reiss’ work, in terms of the differential expression of a family’s
coherence, integration and points of reference (ibid., 209ff). I am not, for the
moment, going to pursue this typology here.
Suffice it to say, though, that my
excursion into the realms of family therapy has provided an important route
into an understanding of family process, at the level of daily social interaction
as well as at the level of the long-term stability and consistency of patterns of
social interaction.
2
It has also provided a route into an understanding of some
of the key questions relating social action to those beliefs, attitudes, values
and cognitions that comprise a family’s collective articulation
of its capacity
to sustain itself as a viable social unit.
I now want to relate these questions and issues specifically to the place of
television in the family.
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