Television and Everyday Life

MEDIATION
Mediation theories are those that privilege the medium itself as the critical site
for the construction of the audience. In this sense the audience becomes a
dependent variable, a consequence: it is the product, the creation of the media.
Such theories and perspectives focus on the dynamics of mediation and extend
along a continuum which begins with the audience as well nigh invisible and
ends with the audience as effectively the only thing that can be seen, but still
in a sense a product. Mediation-based theories can, as we will see, construct
the audience as both passive and active, and of course as they move towards
seeing the audience as active they cross the border between mediation and
reception theories. Where they differ, and crucially differ, is where, once again,
they locate their emphasis.
In discussing them I want to distinguish four non-discrete levels of mediation,
each of which provides the starting point of a different conception of the
audience, by privileging one of its dimensions. The first three, based on a
technological, an ideological, and a cultural conception of mediation, tend
towards analyses of television’s influence on the audience as long-term and
fundamental. The fourth, which sees the decisive moment of mediation in the
text, offers a different temporality and therefore a more complex relation
between the medium and its audience.
Technology
Technology-based theories of mediation offer the most fundamental
sociogeology of television. The work of McLuhan, and following him Walter
Ong, finds television’s power in the particularities of its technological
characteristics, generating a powerfully intrusive environment—an electronic
space—which is universal and irreversible in its consequences:
Most technology produces an amplification that is quite explicit in its
separation of the senses. Radio is an extension of the aural, high-fidelity
photography of the visual. But TV is above all an extension of the sense of
touch, which involves maximal interplay of all the senses… The TV image

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On the audience
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reverses this literate process of analytic fragmentation of sensory life…
The tactile mode of perceiving is sudden but not specialist. It is total,
synaesthetic, involving all the senses. Pervaded by the mosaic TV image,
the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy.
(McLuhan, 1964, 332–4)
McLuhan’s now-familiar rhetoric constructed the audience, implicitly, as merely
an effect of the mediation of television. With television came a whole new
kind of sensory experience, omnipotent and unconstrained by society or culture.
Viewers of television were the slaves of the message of television, at the mercy
of a transformative medium of communication, which above all shifted the
ground from a literate to an oral culture. A linear culture of the fragmentary
became an inclusive mosaic culture of integration—the global village—at every
level of social life.
It is an argument picked up, though with some modifications, by Walter
Ong (1977, and above). Ong offers a parallel but more subtle account which
sees television as being responsible for the breaking up of the closed systems
associated with writing and print, a breaking up which has major consequences
for our perceptions of the world:
Television blurs the fictional with the real on a scale previously
inconceivable. It does so not through deliberate choices made by executives,
directors, writers, technicians, performers or viewers, but rather of its very
nature. The ‘tube of plenty’ has generated an other-than-real world which
is not quite life but more than fiction.
(Ong, 1977, 315)
Ong is saying that it is television’s peculiar capacity to present presence and to blur
the live and the staged, the real and the imagined, the spontaneous and the rehearsed,
that marks it as an open system (as compared to the relatively closed system of
writing and print). Television is narcissistic, but also participatory. While its audience
is displaced and in a real sense a fiction, the identity of experience that a single
shared viewing creates is a powerful force for community. The key to Ong’s position
is his view of television as a phenomenon 
sui generis,
irreducible to society or
culture. Television has a nature.
There are two slightly different ways of reading this. The first is to see in it
a technological determinism in which the viewers are at best epiphenomenal.
The other, slightly weaker version, is to recognise, as I think Ong himself does
(see Silverstone, 1991b), that the issue is not a simple matter of determination,
but of a new set of demands that accompany new technologies, demands of
both sender and receiver, new (or fewer) skills, as well as a different relationship
between message and referent.
The issue however in relation to the audience is easy to put. There are no
audiences. Transformations occur simultaneously with the emergence of new
technology both supra-consciously and unconsciously—a kind of Jungian

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Television and Everyday Life
coincidence of technology, myth and psyche, though without any, save the most
mechanical, attention to the processes, particularly the psychodynamic processes,
that link them. It is a view that appears, as I have already noted, in many of the
critiques of the influence of television, critiques that do not involve detailed
consideration of content, or if they do involve it, do so once again in terms of its
dependence on the prior significance of the medium (e.g. Mander, Meyrowitz,
Postman). This view does, however, involve, and this I think is important, a fix
on the relationship between the medium and its viewers which is geological in
its time-scale. Imperceptible but cumulative and fundamental changes take place
in the audience’s relations to the media, and in relation to each other, through
their reception and reading, but not directly as a result of these activities. They
take place as a result of a more or less total immersion in a technologically shifted
and shifting culture. When we talk about the influence of television and other
media on our everyday lives, this is an important dimension, one often overlooked
by empirical investigation (for obvious reasons) or misunderstood.