Television and Everyday Life

participation, but from sedimented meanings and stocks of knowledge that
are ‘objectified’ in the machine.
(p. 65)
technologies introduced from a more instrumentally powerful culture into
traditional society ‘burn like a cigarette on a silken fabric’ into the wholeness
of the cultural patterns that existed before.
(p. 75)
Arguments derived from the study of Third World cultures as well as, principally,
from the study of basic industrial or mechanical technologies, should be treated
with caution when applied to our own culture and to communication and
information technologies. Hill argues a strong case. It is dramatic and persuasive
but it can be qualified in a number of ways. First, the arrival of new technologies

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The tele-technological system
97
does not always nor does it immediately involve substantial change in the social
structure or cultural values of those receiving it. This has been shown to be the
case in both pre-literate (Sahlins, 1974) as well as modern societies (Thrall, 1982).
Indeed, arguments about the emergence of new household technologies in the
First World have focused on how they have reinforced, for example, the domestic
division of labour (Cowan, 1989). Second, the use of new technologies, even
something as taken for granted now as television, has to be learnt, and in the learning
both technology and culture may change. Third, information and communication
technologies have, as de Sola Pool points out, a double life; and they are, in my
terms, doubly articulated. Both medium and message are open to appropriation
differently and in multiple ways. Televisions may all look more or less alike, but
they will be placed in different domestic and other spaces, accorded different
significance, and above all will be watched or used differently: each member of
an audience, each user, taking away something that is both general and particular
from what they see and hear (Lieber and Katz, 1991).
It is to this last but crucial aspect of the tele-technological system—its
domestication—that I now want to turn.