Television and Everyday Life

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINATIONS
There is one final, but vital dimension of the globalisation of the media still to
be considered. It concerns the technology itself. The development of satellite
communication is, from one point of view, a radical innovation in terms of the
speed at which huge quantities of information can be transmitted around the
world. But from another, it is merely the latest development in the process of
the electronic delivery of information that began with the telegraph.
Tracing the implications of these developments for social and cultural change
has been, consistently, contentious. Many of the discussions are cast very much
in technologically determinist terms, and many refuse to consider the social
and cultural influences that lie behind the emergence of these new technologies
and inform their reception. Yet, equally, many of these discussions are highly
suggestive, above all because, paradoxically, they do insist on isolating or
privileging media technologies, and in that isolation and privilege they raise
important questions about their significance in a way that is relatively free
from the determinations of the polity or economy.
I would like now, briefly, to follow this line of reasoning as a way of opening
up, once again, the phenomenology, as well as pursuing the politics, of the
tele-technological system.
There is a familiar line of theorising about the significance of electronic
media stretching from Harold Innis, via Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and
Joshua Meyrowitz, which insists, in a more or less unqualified fashion, on
registering their transformative effects on human sensibilities and social
structures. McLuhan’s infamous (and actually often misunderstood) catch-all,
‘the medium is the message’, acts now more as a symptom of a misleading
generalisation—of how not to think about the media—than as a statement
which has any serious claims to empirical relevance. Yet the potential, a potential
often, if not always evenly, realised, of media to reach down to the roots of
social life and individual psychology is, as I have argued in Chapter 1, not so
easily dismissed. Nor is this potential, even in these accounts, always pursued
in isolation from a consideration of the political and economic context in which

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the technologies emerge and on which they are argued to have such a
powerful effect.
Indeed, as James Carey (1989) points out, Harold Innis’ pioneering discussion
of media in terms of space and time was undertaken both within a concern for
the political implications of changing media environments and within a
framework exploring the interrelationship between technology and economic
and social change. Originating in his study of the Canadian paper industry, an
industry increasingly dependent on decisions being made in newspaper-producing
cities all over the globe, Innis came to realise the extraordinary importance in
changes in communications for the organisation of empires. For Innis however,
the decisive boundary was not between mechanical and electronic means of
communication, but between a pre- and post-print-based culture.
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The emergence
of printing marked the transition between time- and space-based societies:
Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as
parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development
of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less
durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are
suited to wide areas in administration and trade… Materials that emphasize
time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while
those that emphasise space favour centralization and systems of government
less hierarchical in character.
(Innis, 1972, 7)
Time-binding cultures stress history, continuity, permanence. Their symbols
are based on and in trust: myths, rituals, tradition, religion. Their values and
communities are rooted in place. Space-binding cultures stress land as real
estate, voyage, discovery, movement, and expansion. Science, bureaucracy
and reason provide both their structure and symbol. And in the realm of
communities, space-binding cultures create ‘communities of space:
communities that were not in place but in space, mobile, connected over vast
distances by appropriate symbols, forms, and interests’ (Carey, 1989, 160).
But, Innis argues, it is through their ability to manage the biases of both
time- and space-based media that empires survive. Radio has once again shifted
the bias of communication towards time (Innis, 1972, 170), and once again
posed huge management problems for empires and nations. And, it can be
suggested, television has reinforced this, as recent events in which television
seems to have been a central facilitator in the breaking down of communism
(and the reassertion of national and regional identities) in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union have demonstrated.
This shifting media-based phenomenology of time and space is not without
its contradictions in Innis’ account. For while it is clear that radio (and television)
create a transforming environment for empires based on print, and appear to
be providing something of a return to a time-based culture, it is a time-based

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culture paradoxically based on this occasion not on the durability of parchment,
clay and stone, but on the dramatically enhanced ephemerality of the widely
broadcast spoken word and visual image. This betokens a return to oral culture,
and Innis values that as a potential counter to the bureaucratising and centralising
forces of the modern State, but it also suggests to him (and to Carey, 1989) a
strain towards the reinforcement of the illiberal trends set in motion by print.
This contradiction is not fully worked out.
Yet are radio and television different in their biases to print, as Innis and, following
him, McLuhan (1964) and Meyrowitz (1985), seem to believe? Or are they, as
Carey argues, (merely) an extension and reinforcement of existing power relations?
Maybe one would need to see the emergence of electronic technologies as offering
a new synthesis: operating within deeply entrenched political and economic systems,
but acting in a number of different ways to shift the balances within contemporary
culture away from the more or less clearly defined stabilities of a print-based society
towards a new kind of orality, powerful in its implications, above all insofar as it
affects the basic character of communication in the modern world.
This is a position taken by Walter Ong (1971) in his attempts to describe
contemporary technologically defined culture in terms of what he calls
secondary orality:
This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory
mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present
moment, and even in its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate
and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and
print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment
and for its use as well.
(Ong, 1971, 299)
Secondary orality is another hybrid. Ong insists that the new technologies
have a transformative potential, but it is regressive, opening up by virtue of the
spread of images and voices, forms of storytelling and forms of formulae, a
new collective culture different in focus and effects from the individualising
tendencies of print.
Yet another version of this thesis is that offered by Joshua Meyrowitz (1985).
His argument is a relatively simple, and by now an unsurprising, one. Television,
he suggests, not uniquely, but preeminently, has transformed our social and
cultural environment. It has transformed the relationships between public and
private spheres and between physical and social spaces. It has, in addition,
profoundly affected the normally clear boundaries which separate the sexes,
the generations, the powerful from the powerless. It has made the world visible
and accessible in dramatically new ways. The changes that television has
wrought continue. They have a dynamic all of their own, returning us to a
form of social and cultural experience which Meyrowitz claims is akin to that
of hunters and gatherers: politically egalitarian, discriminating little between

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play and work, living more and more of our lives in public, hunting and
gathering information rather than food. What Meyrowitz misses, of course, is
any sense of the other side of this technological coin (its ‘double life’: de Sola
Pool and see Thompson, 1990) or any indication of the possibility of negotiation
or resistance. He is equally blind to questions of power and cultural difference.
As I have suggested, paradoxes abound in all these accounts. The forces for
the institionalisation, the centralisation and consolidation of media power are
expressed through the vertical and horizontal integration and internationalisation
of media industries. Their close alliance with national and international interests;
the capacity of these institutions to dominate technology’s ability to extend its
reach, to speed up the movement of information and to exercise control over
time and especially space, are all important factors in this exercise of power.
But they have to be set against what the media-centric theorists regard as the
biases, the messages or the effects, of these changing media beneath or beyond
the political structures; potentially transforming (or threatening to transform)
sensibilities and social relations as a result.
Centralising or decentralising, conservative or radical, oral or literary,
progressive or regressive; perhaps not surprisingly, media-centric accounts of
social and cultural change continue to be tantalisingly inconclusive. The texts
of technology remain, at least in part, open. Television quite clearly offers new
horizons and new opportunities, and as one component of an electronic network
of information and communication technologies, provides the means for, and
emerges as the result of, fundamental transformations in our relationships to
time and space. Yet these media biases are ambiguous and open precisely
because, for the most part, they are still (albeit unevenly) framed by the political
and economic strategies of the powerful, and are vulnerable to the tactics of
everyday life—vulnerable to the dynamics of their appropriation into domestic,
local and regional cultures (see de Certeau, 1984).
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Ambiguous and uncertain or not, and the ambiguities and uncertainties do
not lie only in the regimes of production or in the institutionalisation of power
within nation states, television and other media embody both socially systemic
and technologically systemic dimensions which interact with each other, and
with other dimensions of social and technical reality. As Marjorie Ferguson
(1990, 155) points out:
Clearly changes in the public use and private consumption of new
communication systems and services have implications for how we
comprehend time-space relations and priorities. Despite the technological
ease with which electronic media seemingly render time transparent through
instantaneity or culture opaque through quasi-universality, such mediations
do not necessarily provide new sets of categorical certainties or universal
meanings about duration or distance.
What seems more probable is that increased internationalism in all forms

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of communication overlays both the current, local ideas about time and
space, and the earlier, sensory-based epistemologies where what was directly
experienced…defined the world with alternative definitions and meanings.
This is an important point. It opens up for examination, once again, the complex
nature of the tele-technological system. The system has a separately identifiable
technological component and 
qua
technology (as a system and as a service)
television offers, at every level of its incorporation into everyday life, a potential
for the systematic reorientation of time and space relations and perceptions.
But this has to be set against an understanding of that capacity in relation to
the significance of other technologies and in relation to the specific, and often
determining, contexts of both production and consumption. These contexts
are, together, international, national, local and domestic.
Let me return, for the last time, to the Sri Lankan villagers. In buying their
fishing nets, their motor boats and their televisions, they were buying not just
objects but a whole slew of economic, political and cultural relationships and
values—a technological system. This initial example is an extreme but a very
clear one. The consequences of their purchase of new boats and new nets
included the emergence of hierarchy and an exploitative structure within village
life; and above all they included dependence: dependence on machines,
involving the loss of traditional skills. Down the route created by technology,
literally sometimes the road or the communication channel (television much
more dramatically than radio or the newspaper), modernity thunders in all its
chameleon colours (see Betteridge, 1992). Inscribed within the texts of
technology are all the hieroglyphs of State and commercial power, all the more
visible in the confrontation between First and Third World countries, but no
less significant in our own. As Stephen Hill (1988, 65 and 75) observes:
The text that is presented to us in machines is ‘written’ in the sense that it is
embodied, autonomous, not derived from immediate life-world cultural