Television and Everyday Life

TELEVISION AND THE FAMILY
The issues raised both explicitly and by implication in my discussion of the family
thus far are beginning to be taken into studies of the significance of television
in the family. Rather than being perceived, monochromatically, in terms of a
displacement of other activities (see Himmelweit 
et al.,
1958; Robinson and
Converse, 1972) or, in a blanket sense, destructive of family relations (see Morley,
1986), it is beginning to be seen both as a focus of family activities and as a
resource. An understanding of its status as a resource, of course, goes back to
the ‘uses and gratifications’ research in the 1950s (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955),
but despite their interest in the primary group, their research centred on the
individual, and on the individual within the context of a reference group which
was not principally the family, but rather the neighbourhood or the community.
There are a number of themes within these discussions which I wish briefly
to address here, though I will return to them more fully in Chapter 6. One can
approach the argument in one of two directions. The first is from the point of
view of the family. In this case the issues concern television’s role as a
component of a family system. The pattern of use of television within a family

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Television and Everyday Life
will have consequences for the way in which the family constructs and sustains
itself as a social unit in time and space.
The other is from the point of view of the medium. In this case the issues
concern the construction and reconstruction of television through the differential
patterns of activity or passivity, choice, interest, commitment or attention, that
frame and fragment it, and thereby contain and define its impact within the
family. In both sets of often interweaving discussions, the concerns have been
with the family as a system and as a context for media consumption, a system
and a context powerfully inflected by the domestic politics of gender and age
as well as by a sensitivity to ethnographically derived details of the social uses
to which television is actually put.
From the point of view of the family the starting point for a discussion of
television is its status within a rule-governed social environment (Goodman,
1983; Lull, 1980a) in which television carries the burden of a number of
different functions within the family. An understanding of how the family
incorporates television into its patterns of daily activity is, argues Irene
Goodman (1983), a good point of entry for understanding the family system as
whole, in the same way as mealtimes might once have been. Drawing too on
family systems research she argues that the use of television is a function of a
constantly evolving family unit; television can and will be used as ‘a companion,
scapegoat, mediator, boundary marker between family members, to schedule
other activities, as a reward or punishment, as a bartering agent, and so on…By
studying the role that TV plays in the realisation of these other purposes, we
are in effect looking at TV use as a tool for understanding family interaction’
(ibid., 406). But more than that, by looking at television use in this way we are
also in effect insisting on a much more powerful mediatory role for the family
in relation to television content than otherwise (see Brody and Stoneman, 1983).
This, in turn, has profound implications for our understanding of the power of
television in modern society, for in granting the family (or household or other
primary group) such significance we are identifying a cultural space in which
the media’s messages are themselves mediated.
This line of research has been pursued by a small number of scholars,
principally working within an ethnographic, interpretive, tradition. James Lull
has pioneered an approach and pursued empirical investigations in the United
States and in China (1980a and b; 1988; 1990) which have led him to offer a
typology of television’s functions within the family. His work provides a
touchstone for enquiries into the systematic and systemic relationship between
television and family life.
Other studies have drawn attention to the relationship between television
and family time (Bryce, 1987), television and family gender relations (Morley,
1986) and television, more broadly in the context of family process (Rogge
and Jensen, 1988).
Jennifer Bryce explores families’ use of television through a framework of

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Television and a place called home
39
temporality derived from Edward Hall (1973). His distinction between
monochromatic time (emphasising schedules, segmentation and promptness)
and polychromatic time (characterised by several things happening at once)
provides the basis for a study designed to enquire into television’s integration
into the particular temporalities of different families. An understanding of the
dynamics of the distinct character of a family’s temporality provides a clear
route, Bryce argues, into an understanding of television’s place in family life:
Television viewing, like all other family activities, cannot escape the power
of the family’s organisation of time… The sequencing of viewing, its place
in the mesh of family activities, reflects a choice, an organisation, a
negotiation process about which very little is known.
(Bryce, 1987, 122–3)
Whereas Jennifer Bryce focuses on the quality of time use within the family,
David Morley (1986) focuses on the quality of gender relations within the family.
Two concerns link them. The first is with the way in which a dominant pattern
of social organisation in the family structures the household’s relationship to
television, and the second concerns the relationship between the private
expression of time and gender and its public articulation. Morley explores gender
and power within the family. Across a whole range of finely tuned dimensions
of viewing practice (the power and control over programme choice, viewing
style, the planning or unplanning of viewing, the amounts of viewing, television
related talk, programme and channel preference, solo and ‘guilty’ viewing) he
finds a significant difference between men and women in the families he studies.
He interprets this in an important way, arguing that such differences are not to
be related to biology but to the particular character of gender relations that have
emerged within patriarchal society, as a result of which the home itself has become
highly gendered. Men dominate the television at home because home is where
they relax, where they are looked after, and where, after a long day’s work, they
bring their own publicly legitimated masculinity into the woman’s working
domain. That gender is a significant factor in the domestic relations around the
television set is undeniable, but as Morley himself acknowledges (1986, 174),
not by itself and not unproblematically. The stage a family has reached in its
life-cycle, the significance of age, class and ethnicity as well as gender, and the