Television and Everyday Life

essentially,
in constant and productive
tension (see Murphy, 1972).
My arguments attempt to specify some of the elements of this precarious
but compelling tension. Their plurality is not just a matter of weakness. Theory
must be plural and open if it is to survive the challenges of the real and if it is,
more specifically, to accommodate the contradictory and fragmenting world
of late capitalism. What I am attempting in this book is a layered analysis of
the structure and process of a set of complex and constantly changing
relationships: television as medium, television as technology and television
constructed and constrained by the rules, roles and rituals of the taken for
granted yet entirely insistent everyday world. My view of these
interrelationships takes the form of a kind of matrix: articulated through layers

---

Preface
xi
of ontology and individual psychology, domestic and suburban spaces, and
industrial and technological structures, all of which are related, both in their
collusion and contradiction, through the dynamics of consumption. Television,
I argue, has to be understood in relation to all these things, because everyday
life is formed through these things.
There is one possible contradiction in my own arguments that does need
identifying more precisely, however. It lies in the focus on television itself.
The ESRC PICT research is actually framed as a study of information and
communication technologies in the home. I have myself argued that
television is no longer an isolated media technology, (if ever it was) but one
increasingly embedded into a converging culture of technological and media
relationships that also involve computing and telecommunications. In this
sense this book offers an historically transitional account. Television is its
focus, certainly and justifiably, because television is still our focus—the
focus of so many concerns about its power and influence and its place in our
everyday lives.
I am conscious, however, that the arguments of this book might appear to
become all too quickly an historical curiosity; that the dramatic changes in
and around television technology and its regulation have already made much
of what I have to say irrelevant and inaccurate. It is possible. It is possible if
one believes that the whole range of present and future delivery systems—
individualising, fragmenting and alienating as they plausibly might be—are
indeed going to impact upon society like cultural napalm, burning their way
through the soft and vulnerable tissues of a living, human, world. But, as I
argue, new technological forms are not simply received, nor do they remain
unchanged in their confrontation with the everyday. There is then a media
politics to be pursued which must acknowledge that both security and
creativity within an increasingly diverse and intrusive media environment
are possible and desirable, even if they are, apparently, increasingly difficult
to achieve.

---

Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time coming, but it is hopefully none the worse for
that. Various parts of it have been read by Sharon Macdonald, Anthony Giddens,
Marilyn Strathern, James Donald, Andy Medhurst, Janice Winship and Nancy
Wood. I thank them all for their suggestions and comments. Some of the ideas
have developed in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching both at Brunel
and Sussex, and I am intensely grateful to all my students who have criticised
and asked the difficult questions. Thanks too to those who participated in the
HICT project at Brunel: Eric Hirsch, David Morley and Sonia Livingstone,
and to Leslie Haddon, Research Fellow on the second phase of the project at
Sussex. Thanks finally to Jane Armstrong, who commissioned the book at
Routledge, and to Rebecca Barden who patiently waited for it. And thanks to
Nathan Field.
The first chapter, ‘Television, ontology and the transitional object’, has
appeared in