Television and Everyday Life

particular consumption oriented culture of bourgeois society.
5
The motor car
is the focus of a whole range of material and symbolic communicative relations:
with implications for, and effects on, everything from urban design to our
sense of excitement. It fosters hierarchies and performance (we compete within
and through the motor car); it is consumed as a sign, as a status object; it has
its own code, the Highway Code:
It is an unimposing technical object, depending on relatively simple functional
requirements…, and structural requirements…, and [it] figures also in a simple,
unimposing functional and structural social complex where it plays an
increasingly important part; it gives rise to an attitude (economic, psychic,
sociological, etc.), assumes the dimension of a complete object and has an
(absurd) significance; in fact the motor-car has not conquered society so
much as 
everyday life
on which it imposes its laws and whose establishment
it ensures by fixing it on a 
level
(levelling it).
(Lefebvre, 1984, 101, italics in original)

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The tele-technological system
87
The motor car, as the leading object of modern civilisation has ‘not only
produced a system of communication but also organisms and institutions that
use it and that it uses’ (ibid., 103).
My argument is, of course, that television can be seen to have an equivalent
status to the car as a Leading Object in high-modern or post-modern society,
by virtue of just such a system of attributes: television is a relatively simple
technical object defining in use, and being defined by, a whole network of
communication channels, both formal and informal, institutionalised and
quotidian; it can be seen (as Baudrillard, for example, sees it) as the centre
of a system of substitutes (eroticism, adventure, reality, contact); it is
consumed as a sign, as a status object both in itself and through its
communications (the consumption of programmes to be shared and
discussed); and it has its own code, in the broadcasting schedules, in the
systems of moral and political regulation and in the various guidelines for
media producers. Television too is a great leveller, providing in its
programming and in the standardisation of its technologies (the micro-
differences of packaging and latest gadgetry notwithstanding) a profound
and basic substrate for the conduct of everyday life.
6
The car and the television are both manifestations of the same sociotechnical
processes. Both provide a material and a symbolic expression of something
quite specific: the uniqueness of their technical arrangements and functions.
Both also provide something quite general: their status as the centre and
articulating principle of a system of technical and cultural relations which are
both historically defined and socially sustained. It is their systemic quality
which is the key, a system which includes both objects and actions, actors and
structures, artifacts and values, all of which together are both determined (by,
and in relation to, other systems) and determining (we are bound by them to a
greater or lesser extent). What the roads are to the motor car, broadcasting is to
television. The networks of institutional dependencies supporting and being
supported by both are equivalent. Yet television takes that systematicity one
step further. It also transcends it. Whereas the car becomes the focus of
mediation—cars are symbols and the objects of much symbolic and
communicative work—television is constituted as a medium 
sui generis
. And
as such, and through recent technological developments, some aspects of its
systematicity are being broken down. Narrowcasting provides a fragmentation
of the experience of television (a kind of ‘off-road’ technology) but it is still
dependent on an extensive support structure of cultural as well as technical
relations.
The tele-technological system consists, then, of a multiplex of relationships
constructed and reconstructed psychodynamically and sociologically in
domestic and suburban environments, each of which, in its own way, is systemic.
It consists in (as I shall be describing in the next section) the interrelationships
of artifacts (convergences), mediations (textualities), and regulations (controls)

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88
Television and Everyday Life
that define the conditions of its possibility as a communication technology in
modern society. It consists in and through the dynamics of consumption as the
operational process (see Chapter 5) of modernity. And it is created by, and
incorporates, the television audience (Chapter 6) which is constituted at the
interface of technology and everyday life (Chapter 7).