Television and Everyday Life

particularly, but by no means exclusively into the Third World (Tunstall, 1977;
Boyd-Barrett, 1977)—media imperialism—is perhaps only the tip of a cultural
iceberg in which not just the specific programmes but the models of genre and
the format of Western (principally US) television have equally wide currency.
Television news, for example, is in some senses at least, the same 
product
almost
everywhere. The game-show is, equally, ubiquitous. The European response to
Dallas
was, in part, to create, in 
Chateauvallon
and 
Schwarzwaldklinik,
their own
equivalents (Silj, 1988). Increasing budgetry pressure on, as well as the perceived
demand for, and profits to be gained from, the big blockbuster documentary series,
have led to an increased number of international co-production deals, generating,
it is often claimed, a kind of a cultural anaesthesia: yet another hybrid in which
cultural differences are elided in a homogenised text. And, finally, the creation of
a network of products and texts—what Fiske describes as the intertextuality of
the media—defines yet another converging environment, of which television
programmes, the secondary newspaper and magazine discourses around the actors,
the characters and the interweaving of their public and private lives (Meyrowitz,
1985), and the interconnections of trademarked products, songs, videos and books
are all expressions. Running through all of this, of course, is the ubiquity of
‘commercial speech’, the advertisements, which are the true delivery systems of
the modern media.
There are many arguments, of course, that this media totalitarianism, this
process of commercial and cultural globalisation, is leaky. The flexible
specialisation—‘choice’—inscribed into the structure of post-Fordist regimes
of media and information production, as into other commodity production, is
one way of understanding a kind of cultural diversification. And in the context
of the globalisation of media form and content we can recognise the ‘reverse-
flow’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1991; Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992) and the
indigenisation of cultural commodities (Miller, 1992), as individual cultures
assert their own status and negotiate with the products of the multi-nationals,
as well as providing, perhaps most significantly in music, alternative offerings
which run counter to, and sometimes influence, the dominant trends in otherwise
predominantly Western mass-produced culture. Both of these dimensions of the
map of contemporary culture could be seen as high- or post-modernity’s
vulnerability, and in much recent cultural theory that is how it does appear. And
it is central, too, to my own argument that this overweening system must itself
be understood within a wider frame of cultural difference and more than token
resistance.
In this the problem is stated but not resolved. The system itself is not without
its contradictions, its weaknesses and its licence (Thompson, 1990). Equally,
there are numerous opportunities to, and examples of, our capacity to counter,

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Television and Everyday Life
to work with, and to transform its products. Nevertheless any discussion of the
tele-technological system as a whole must be prepared to acknowledge where
the locus of its power lies, and any project which seeks to construct a theory of
the place of television in everyday life must take this as central. The freedoms
that we have to choose and construct our own media environment; the
mechanisms that we adopt, the tactics that we pursue in integrating the products
of mass communication into our own lives, at whatever level, are all crucial.
But it should not be forgotten that in the processes of mass consumption we
are swimming in a sea not of our own creation. Almost all of us can indeed
swim. Most of us will swallow water. A few of us will drown.