Television and Everyday Life

bricoleurs,
but our
bricolage,
even in a post-Fordist world of flexible specialisation, is the product
of a standardised, if not standardising, material and symbolic environment.
The suburbanisation of the culture and society of the twentieth century is
one which, in its fundamental structure, is sustained by the existing forms and
content of television. It can be suggested that boundaries are denied in both;
differences are conflated in both; public and private spheres are elided in both;
nature and culture are merged in both; realities and fantasies are confused in
both; and power is exercised (but also resisted) through both. In the next three
chapters I will explore, in more detail, some of the dimensions of this: through
an examination of television as technology, of television and consumption and
of the present state of research on the television audience.

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Chapter 4
The tele-technological system
The arrival of ice in certain fishing villages in Sri Linka bought new-found
wealth to the traditional fishermen, now that their fish could be transported to
inland markets. Yet their villages remained remote, boasting no electricity, no
roads, no piped water. Despite the lack of what we would regard as some of
the essential basics of everyday life, a number of the richer fishermen invested
their new-found wealth in television sets, garages for their houses and water
cisterns for their roofs. Why did they do it? Why did they, in particular, install
television sets that could not be watched? There are many possible explanations.
The anthropologist (Stirratt, 1989, 107) who reported this behaviour suggested
that this was an example, exaggerated, absurd maybe, of something we all
know about: a kind of conspicuous consumption, an aping of middle-class
values. But another anthropologist (Gell, 1986, 113–15) offers a different view.
He suggests that the television was certainly conspicuously consumed, but
that this consumption spoke of their own lives and of the labour that went in to
the earning of their new wealth. The television symbolised all that their own
lives were not: opposed to the messy, precarious, smelly, technological and
economic uncertainties of their daily routines, the television—‘a smooth dark
cabinet of unidentifiable grainless wood, geometrically pure lines, an inscrutable
gray face, and within, just visible through the rows of little holes and slots at
the back, an intricate jungle of wire, plastic, and shining metal’ (Gell, 1986,
114)—a television without sounds and pictures—became the embodiment both
of modernity and of their own achievements.
Yet another version of life in a Sri Lankan fishing village is offered by
Stephen Hill (1988). In this account it was not ice but the mechanisation of the
fishing boats and the introduction of nylon nets which transformed the local
economy, dragging it into a cash economy, bankrupting most of the poorer
fishermen, undermining traditional social relations and creating a microcosm
of the social structure of the capitalist society of which they had now become,
unwittingly, a dependent part:
Originally within the Sri Lankan villages there was willing acceptance of

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The tele-technological system
79
the new technologies of mechanised boats and synthetic fishing nets. Both
technologies appeared to provide greater ease of labour, greater wealth and
greater power. But neither technology could be 
integrated
into existing
productive practices or stocks of knowledge…behind the immediate artefacts
stood the modern industrial production system that villagers had to depend
upon for the new production practices to survive.
(Hill, 1988, 78)
Technology, it can be seen, does not come naked. It does not come neutral.
Nor, indeed does it come simply or straightforwardly. For technology arrives,
dramatically in the case of the Sri Lankans, stealthily perhaps in our own case,
carrying on its back a burden of social, economic and political implications,
and carrying in its baggage bundles of material and symbolic string which tie
those who use it into systems of social relations and cultural meanings, which
are as disguised and unwelcome sometimes as they are obvious and welcome.
And television is, certainly, technology. Watching it is not just a matter of
watching a window on the world, as if somehow the glass of the screen provided
an innocent vision of the world untarnished by the politics of representation.
Nor is watching it necessarily a submission to the irresistible forces of dominant
ideologies and political manipulation. Watching television draws the viewer
into a world of ordered meanings, ordered by and within an increasingly global
network of institutional and cultural systems: systems which include the
increasingly sophisticated and converging technologies of information and
communication—the screens, satellites, fibre-optics, computers of an emerging
information age; systems which include the multinational institutions that
increasingly control the production and distribution of the programmes and
software on a global scale; and systems which include the internationalisation
of programme content, wherein hybrid cultural products are produced through
co-production deals for worldwide distribution or national products are simply
and relentlessly exported to cultures that have few means of resisting them.
But the systems also include the domestic, the suburban and the local, where
the certainties of domination become the uncertainties of resistance, as
audiences and consumers overlay their own meanings on the hardware and
software of television technology in an always unequal, but constantly engaged,
struggle for control.
I want, in this chapter, to explore the significance of television as technology
in and for our everyday life. Television is no longer, if ever it was, isolated
from other media of information and communication transmission, either at a
global or at a domestic level. It is no longer possible to consider television as
a cultural apparatus or as a cultural industry without considering it alongside
the supporting and interweaving technologies and political and economic
structures that integrate it, both in production and consumption, into a more
complex cultural and industrial whole. Equally it is no longer possible to

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80
Television and Everyday Life
consider the texts of television without considering their status as technologies,
potentially or actually transformative of social and cultural relations, any more
than it is possible to consider the technology of television without considering
its status as a text, inscribed by, and inscribing, the meanings of dominant and
subordinate cultures alike.
In structural terms the arguments here will draw on, but also cut across,
those offered in the first three chapters of the book. In those chapters I enquired
into television as a dimension of the ontological, domestic and suburban
environments of everyday life. Here the enquiry will be on television in all of
those domains, but as technology; as what I want to call the tele-technological
system.