Television and Everyday Life

THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY
Technology is, of course, as problematic a term as television is. Recent work
in the sociology and history of technology has, however, provided a framework
for the analysis of the significance of technology in the modern world which
leaves behind much of the crude theorising of a technological determinist cast.
Instead, it favours a view of the production and consumption of technology
which is firmly embedded in the social, cultural, political and economic matrices
of industrial society. The effects of technology—which in many cases may
appear to be determining other aspects of social life—are not of themselves
simply, or only, technological. Technologies are themselves effects. They are
the effects of social, economic and political circumstances and structures,
decisions and actions. These in turn define, in their development, their
implementation and their use, technologies’ meaning and power.
Such a view of technology—and one that informs my own arguments—
involves therefore a consideration of technology not simply as an object or as
an artifact. It involves a consideration of technology as both social and political
and as both material and symbolic. It involves a consideration of technology
as being a part of, and not separated from, the social institutions that produce
and consume it. It involves a consideration of technology both in its determinacy
and its indeterminacy. And it involves a consideration of television in just
these terms, as a technology which is also a medium, and as such doubly
inscribed by, and inscribing, social and cultural meanings. The fishermen of
Sri Lanka, in their embrace of television alongside the other technologies of
the modern age, are not just embracing a series of objects which are in one
sense or another seen as functionally or symbolically necessary or desirable,
they are embracing a system: a system of values, practices, politics which will
certainly change their lives but will do so in a way which is both general and
generalisable, as well as unique to them. Technology, in this view, is the site of
an (albeit often unequal) struggle for control: for the control of its meanings
and for the control of its potency.

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I have already noted that technology has to be seen as more than simply
an artifact or a machine. In Martin Heideggar’s (1977) formulation, which
for all its obstruseness is nevertheless extremely suggestive, technology
becomes 
techne,
and techne becomes 
poiesis
. Techne refers to all the arts
and skills that go into the making of technology; and poeisis itself is seen as
a bringing forth, a revealing and a challenging of reality. Technology
becomes then not just a matter of hardware, but both a set of human
activities and a set of knowledges. These knowledges are ‘technical’ in the
sense that the techniques of which they consist are ‘a roundabout means of
securing some desired result’ (Gell, 1988a, 6). The objects become
processes, the hardware becomes software, the fixed meanings and the
determining effects become subject to human vision and control. And
technology becomes a matter of unlocking, transforming, storing,
distributing, switching about and regulating knowledges and practices.
1
Such a conceptualisation of technology runs the risk of becoming
indistinguishable from knowledge as such, since thought itself can be seen as
technical if this broad definition is rigorously adhered to. Yet it is this lack of
boundary around the idea of technology that is, paradoxically, important; for it
insists on seeing both technology and its various conceptualisations as being
vulnerable to social and historical differentiation. It insists on not taking
technology for granted. This way of understanding technology in general can
also be applied to the media in particular, as Carolyn Marvin (1988, 8)
points out:
Media are not fixed natural objects; they have no natural edges. They are
constructed complexes of habits, beliefs and procedures embedded in
elaborate cultural codes of communication. The history of media is never
more or less than the history of their uses, which always lead us away from
them to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate.
Technologies, then, and television is no exception—though it is, perhaps,
exceptional—are both symbolic and material objects. But they are objects that
are constructed through a whole range of socially defined activities, in
production and consumption, in development and use, in thought and in
practice, and cannot be understood outside their systematic embedding in the
political, economic and cultural dimensions of modern (and pre-modern)
societies. As Langdon Winner (1985, 30) also points out:
The things we call ‘technologies’ are ways of building order on our world.
Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain
possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously
or not, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for
technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate,
travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by

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Television and Everyday Life
which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated
and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.
Television is part of that project of building order in and on the world, as I
have already pointed out in Chapter 1. But television has a number of qualities
which (together with other communication and information technologies) make
it a distinct kind of technology and create distinct problems when it comes to
understanding its significance for everyday life.
Raymond Williams (1974), once again, provides a starting point, since he
saw clearly how powerfully etched the technology of television was within the
institutions of broadcasting, and how powerfully etched these institutions were
within the political and economic structures and agendas of the modern State.
They now, of course, transcend them. Perhaps the first thing to note is that
television is neither a static nor an isolated technology. It is not static in that
both the machine itself and the institutions which it embodies and in which it
is embedded are constantly changing. Television has developed from a
cumbersome, ugly box for the reception of flickering black and white pictures
(but always useless without both a system of electrical power and of programme
production and transmission), to a still developing receiver of colour and stereo,
broadcast, narrowcast and information services. Soon it may well be
transformed once again by digital compression, and high-definition and
interactive technical innovations. It is not isolated either. Increasingly the
television is becoming integrated into, becoming an essential part of, what is
often (but perhaps mistakenly called) the ‘information age’: an age in which
the various technologies defined by broadcasting, telecommunications and
computing, are converging and offering the promise (or the threat) of an
integrated information and communication environment in and through which
McLuhan’s vision of the global village may yet become a reality. This
convergence, visible both in the structures of multi-national organisations
(Golding and Murdock, 1991) as well as in the interconnections of technology,
the social and technical relationships and discourses, in the household
(Silverstone, 1990), provides an increasingly complex environment from within
which to make sense of television in everyday life. Equally, though, this
convergence as well as the consequent complexity, provide increasing
challenges for the State when it comes to regulation. And Heideggar, as we
have seen, considers regulation an essential aspect of techne.
The particularity of television, as technology, consists however in its
status as a medium of information and communication. There is no need to
accept the full force of McLuhan’s other famous catchphrase—the medium
is the message—to recognise that the mass media do have a particular claim
on the technological culture of the modern world. This claim consists of
what I want to call their double articulation, particularly in and through the
moral economy of the household. I will have more to say about this later, but

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for the moment I want to use the notion as a way of identifying something of
the uniqueness of television (together with the other media) as technologies.
Put very simply, television is doubly articulated into a household because its
significance as a technology depends on its appropriation by the household
both as an object (the machine itself) and as a medium. As an object it is
bought and incorporated into the culture of the household for its aesthetic
and functional characteristics, and it is displayed (or hidden) in the public or
private spaces of the household, and collectively or individually used. As an
object the television becomes both an element in a national and international
communication network and the symbol of its domestic appropriation. As a
medium, through the structure and contents of its programming as well as
through the mediation of public and private spheres more broadly, it draws
the members of the household into a world of public and shared meanings as
well as providing some of the raw material for the forging of their own
private, domestic culture. In this sense, through its double articulation, the
medium does become the message, though that message is not pre-given by
the technology. It is worked and reworked within the social circumstances
under which it is both produced and received (see below, and
Ferguson, 1990).
That this double articulation requires the active involvement of the
consumer of television (as well as other technologies) is evidenced by the
need for such technologies to be domesticated by the household which
receives them. By domestication I mean something quite akin to the
domestication of the wild animal: that is a process by which such an animal
is accustomed ‘to live under the care and near the habitations of man’, a
process of taming or bringing under control, a process of making or settling
as ‘a member of the household; to cause to be at home; to naturalize’ (OED).
Technologies, and television and television programmes must be
domesticated if they are to find a space or place for themselves in the home.
That process of domestication starts, of course, in the production process
(‘user friendliness’, giving audiences ‘what they want’ are common enough
characterisations); it is continued in the marketing and advertising, but it is
completed in consumption (see Chapter 5). Through these various stages
both the object and services, hardware and software, become (or do not
become) accepted and acceptable. The history of technologies is a history, in