Television and Everyday Life

particularly in situation comedies and soap operas, as well as of course, in the
advertisements, was designed to provide a set of cultural tools for the
accommodation of the new medium.
These aspects of television: the medium’s integration into the emerging
post-war economy of commodification and suburbanisation; the role of
programme planning and scheduling; and the particular characteristics of
situation comedy as a domestic genre, together provide a kind of ideological
template for the definition of gender roles and a particular—middling-class—
model of family life. This has been analysed by Haralovich (1988), Boddy
(1986) and Modleski (1984). I have already discussed certain aspects of these
arguments in Chapters 2 and 3. Each of these accounts stresses, as does Spigel,
how crucial the construction of gender was to the domestication of television.
Women returning to the home after their war-time draft into male working
environments had to be resocialised into a family role and a family structure
that seemed to have changed little from at least the idealisation of the Victorian
middle class. The woman at home was the key to the success of the household
as a consuming unit, but also of its viability as a component of the system of
production. She had to stay at home and provide the material and moral
wherewithal for the support of her husband, the producer in the formal economy.
Television was potentially a distracting threat, but also potentially an
opportunity for education and socialisation.
But television was only one element in a system of political, architectural
and commercial relations which separately and together imposed a version of
highly gendered social life, which is now taken so much for granted. The
suburban family sit-com during the 1950s and on into the 1960s made a
significant contribution to ‘the construction and distribution of social knowledge
about the place of women’ in society (Haralovich, 1988, 39).
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Television and Everyday Life
These various accounts of the gendering of television as technology and its
embeddedness in a system of overweening cultural and material relations beg,
however, some important questions. These questions do not necessarily
undermine the force of the analysis but do require a consideration of the empirical
dynamics of television, as technology and as medium, as it is incorporated into
the daily lives of families and households. The biography of television, just as
much as the biography of other technologies, is marked by a degree of uncertainty
and openness that these accounts tend to gloss over. Its place in the home, its
domestication, just as much as the construction of individual identity, of which
gender is a crucial but not the only element, is something that cannot be understood
exclusively from the analysis of public texts, be they the television programmes
themselves or the marketing strategies designed to order the world in such a
way as to make television acceptable. There is an indeterminacy in the tele-
technological system just at the point where television crosses the threshold of
the public and the private spheres. And this indeterminacy is registered as much
in the litter, and litany, of failed or transformed technologies as it is in the conflicts
within the negotiation and renegotiation of domestic gender relations in the daily
lives of family members (Silverstone, 1991).
The gendering of the tele-technological system is, therefore, a dialogical
process, built out of a dialogue between publicly defined relations inscribed
into the design and marketing of all technologies, television included, and
privately negotiated relations inscribed in and through the patterns and
discourses of everyday life. There is little doubt that the gender relations
constructed around the television, in the control of the remote (Morley, 1986)
or in the competence around the video recorder (Gray, 1987, 1992), or indeed
in the ownership and use of the computer (Haddon, 1988) or the telephone
(Moyal, 1989), express a gendered division of labour in turn expressive of the
dominant gendered structures of modern society (Cockburn, 1985). But there
is equally little doubt that the gendering of technologies is not irrevocably
fixed within the technologies themselves, nor does it determine how or by
whom they will be used (see Livingstone, 1992). A woman’s (and also a man’s)
relationship to the television (Hobson, 1982) or to the telephone (Rakow, 1988;
Mayer, 1977; Moyal, 1992) is a function of woman’s status and role in the
household, certainly, but that itself can only be understood both with regard to
the dominant structures in which masculinity and femininity are defined in the
public sphere and their particular character within, from the point of view of
the household, its moral economy. It is also important to note that the gendered
nature of the tele-technological system must also be understood through the
mesh of class and ethnicity and through the dynamics of age and stage in an
individual’s or household’s life-cycle.
The domestication of television is therefore itself a complex process that can
be understood both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. In phylogenetic terms
the story of television’s domestication is the story of the emergence of a technology

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The tele-technological system
103
and a medium within a particular set of historically defined social, political and
economic conditions. That emergence required the interplay of a number of
different discourses operating within a number of different fields: the design of
the equipment, its marketing, the scheduling and the content of the programmes,
the coincidence of urban, architectural and domestic design, changes in the
division of labour, and something I have hitherto taken quite for granted: an
increase in disposable income. In ontogenetic terms the story of television’s
domestication is the story of the changes and persistences in domestic relations:
the suburbanisation of social life, but also the particular character of a household’s
own domesticity in which distinctions of class, ethnicity, location, religious
identity and so on inform and define the conditions for any and every technology’s
appropriation into the home. These two dimensions of the domestication of
television operate together, as I have suggested, dialogically. Insofar as television
is appropriated into a given household or other environment it is involved in a
struggle for control and identity, both by the household itself in its involvement
with the world beyond its front door and by the individuals within it. For television
to find its place, and for television programmes to find their place, in the home,
literally to be accommodated, then the interrelationship of these two levels
needs to be understood.
I began this chapter by implying that the tele-technological system was in
reality a number of overlapping and interweaving systems, drawing its
coherence and its strength from the tension between technological, political-
economic and domestic environments and pressures. This is now how I hope
it appears. Television is not simply an open window, nor is it an open sluice; it
is not innocent and it bears the scars of its production and its position in the
modern world system. We who receive it, who buy the latest technologies as
well as making do with the old, who watch the latest programmes as well as
the reruns; we confront a medium with a history and biography. We have little
control over the first but some considerable control over the second. The tele-
technological system is therefore the product of the relations and determinations
of both production and consumption.
The challenge for media research in general and television research in