Television and Everyday Life

sine qua non
of social life. In this sense everyday
life is a continuous achievement (Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1969) more or
less ritualised, more or less taken for granted, more or less fragile, in the face
of the unknown, the unexpected or the catastrophic. Indeed the catastrophe is
by definition that which breaks through the line that bounds anxiety and contains
trust (Doane, 1990). And since trust is what emerges (or does not emerge)
through the mediated experiences of social life, in the dynamics of child
development and in the ongoing accomplishments of everyday interaction, a
concern with its preconditions and possibilities must be a central component
of any analysis of the role of the media in everyday life.
I want to pursue this argument now a little further, by integrating into it a
more focused concern with television and other media. In so doing I will offer
an account of the dynamics of the relationship between media and everyday
life that hopefully avoids all but the most quintessential of the dichotomies
and centres on three pivotal dimensions of that relationship, which I shall call
agency (referring to process), modernity (referring to content) and domesticity
(referring to context).
AGENCY
Anthony Giddens (1984) defines his sociology through, 
inter alia,
the centrality
of agency, by which he means the capacity for historically situated reflexive
and purposive behaviour. It is a component of a sociology which is sustained

---

166
Television and Everyday Life
and mobilised in a critique of the implications of ontological passivity in the
pessimisms of Christopher Lasch (1977) and Richard Sennett (1977) (a
pessimism that has its equivalence in the writings of some of those I have already
considered in this chapter). Agency involves both individual and collective
actions, whose consequences are not, he argues, limited only to micro-social
settings:
If we do not see that all human agents stand in a position of appropriation in
relation to the social world, which they constitute and reconstitute in their
actions, we fail on an empirical level to grasp the nature of human
empowerment. Modern social life impoverishes individual action, yet
furthers the appropriation of new possibilities; it is alienating, yet at the
same time, characteristically, human beings react against social
circumstances which they find oppressive.
(Giddens, 1991, 175)
This characterisation raises of course more questions that it can hope to answer
(in relation to the particular characteristics of modernity; in relation to the
meaning and reach of empowerment) but nevertheless it is perhaps worth
observing that if this reflexivity and ‘empowerment’ is a fundamental
constitution of social life 
sui generis,
then to suggest that it is a particular
product of certain forms of mediation or popular culture makes no sense. And
equally if social life is by definition the product of action, then to talk of passivity
in relation to viewing behaviour, once again, begs the question.
But what is the question? It seems to me that the question is that of what an
earlier generation of sociologists would have called ‘the taken for granted’ in
social life, and I, for want of a better term, wish to call its ordinariness.
4
By that
ordinariness I mean the more or less secure normality of everyday life, and our
capacity to manage it on a daily basis. As Scannell and Cardiff have argued, this
ordinariness (which is sociologically and culturally differentiated by region or
nation) is something that had to be recognised, addressed and embodied in the
increasingly democratised 
forms
of talk progressively delivered by the BBC.
They have argued that it was through an emerging but insistent communicative
ethos that this normality was inscribed in broadcasting talk and through that
talk reinscribed into the culture of the everyday (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991,
178). But the 
forms
of talk are only one element in the mediation of the ordinary
that broadcasting in particular has been so (but never entirely) successful in
accomplishing. Behind the forms of talk are the forms of thought, order and
expression that provide the content of the media and which provide the basis
for agency, for our capacity to act in the ordinariness of everyday life.
I have argued on a number of occasions that the ordinariness of everyday
life is sustained within our society, as within others, by forms of culture which
it has been most easy (but still intensely problematical) to call myth (Silverstone,
1981; 1988). Mythic structures and functions within contemporary

---

Television, technology and everyday life
167
communications can be identified, and arguments about their significance
sustained, as long as it is recognised that myths, like so much in culture, are
Janus-headed. They provide in their narratives and in the formalities of their
delivery within ritual or on neo-ritualised occasions, a framework for the
creation and sustenance of ontological security. These narratives explore,
through both form and content, the fundamental aspects of human existence:
origins, mortality, the relations between culture and nature, the relations between
the sexes. But recognising this also requires an equivalent recognition that the
form and content of a mythology of a given society can only be sustained
within an ideology, and through ideology the particular values of dominance—
coded—encoded—disguised—will be represented (see Hall etc.).
5
Mythic forms of communication, often recounted in highly charged ritual
times and spaces, clearly demarcated the more or less sacred times from the
secular ordinariness of everyday life. Yet they could be considered as always