Television and Everyday Life

particularities of family history and culture make the situation a much more
complex one than he begins to describe.
This complexity is approached in a most instructive and enlightening way
in a study reported by Jan Uwe-Rogge and Klaus Jensen (1988). They, too,
take a systems approach in their study of German families, but do so both by
casting their net to include family history, biography and family myth (see
Byng-Hall, 1982) and by taking into account a family’s relationships to
technology in the home more broadly. Their families are perceived to live in
complex material, symbolic and constantly changing but routinised and

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Television and Everyday Life
ritualised, domestic settings. Their use of the media is a product of that
environment and cannot be understood apart from it. Families construct for
themselves their own media world, a display of their own competence as media
consumers and of their knowledge and appreciation of programmes and
technologies. Rogge and Jensen (1988, 103) draw attention to the way in which
the imaginary worlds of the media can become a primary experience, becoming
substitutes for missing elements in ‘the emotional and interpersonal spheres’.
They also draw attention to the ways in which fundamental changes in the
social position of the family, for example unemployment, or life events, will
affect the patterns of media use within it. They pay particular attention to the
situation of the single parent family. They suggest that an understanding of the
family’s use of the media must be based on an understanding of two aspects:
its content and its form. In relation to the first:
media activities can be understood as an attempt to construct a meaningful
relationship between the media program and reality as actually experienced.
Conscious, subconscious, or preconscious wishes play an important role in
the way people use the media. The media are interpreted against a background
of everyday life as it is lived and experienced; they are used to cope with
everyday problems, either in the main or in the short term.
(Ibid., 1988, 94)
The media are, they suggest, entirely taken for granted. As such they become
functional, part of the family system. Family members feel unable to live without
them. They become the focus of a great deal of emotion. ‘People seek contact
with the media partly because the media appeal to and allow access to feelings
such as fear, joy and insecurity…the media provide remedies for loneliness;
they are used to create “good” feelings and to define human relationships’
(ibid., 95).
Television becomes, then, a member of the family in a metaphorical sense
but also in a literal sense insofar as it is integrated into the daily pattern of
domestic social relations, and insofar as it is the focus of emotional or cognitive
energy, releasing or containing tension for example, or providing comfort or a
sense of security. It also becomes a member of the family insofar as it is
expressive of the dynamics of a family’s interaction, the dynamics of gender-
or age-based identities and relations, or the dynamics of its changing position
in the world, as children grow up and leave home or as heads of families
become unemployed or die.
But the internal structure of the family is no more a product of life within
the private space of home than are their media. And the phenomenology of
home and the social life of families still leaves at least two dimensions of the
domestic world unaccounted for. The first is the representation of the family
on the television screen itself. The second is the role of the household as an
active participant in the economic, social and cultural life of the public sphere.

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Television and a place called home
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