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,
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