Television and Everyday Life

‘TECHNOLOGIES’
We have reached the point where ‘consumption’ has grasped the whole of
life; where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode;
where the schedule of gratification is outlined in advance, one hour at a
time; and where the ‘environment’ is complete, completely climatized,
furnished, and culturalized. In the phenomenology of consumption, the
general climatization of life, of goods, objects, services, behaviours, and
social relations, represents the perfected, ‘consummated’,
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stage of evolution
which, through articulated networks of objects, ascends from pure and simple
abundance to a complete conditioning of action and time, and finally to the
systematic organization of ambiance, which is characteristic of the drug-
stores, the shopping malls, or the modern airports in our futuristic cities.
(Baudrillard, 1988, 33)
Technology has a double reference in the work of Jean Baudrillard. The first is
its literal appearance in the post-McLuhan critique of the effect of electronic
technologies on culture. And the second is metaphorical, for it can be suggested,
as the above quotation indicates, that consumption is seen by Baudrillard as
some form of technology (see Douglas and Isherwood, 1979 and below, who
also talk of the technology of consumption): as a totalising machine at work in
the transformation of society. Media and consumption are crucially interrelated
in Baudrillard’s early writings (I leave to one side much of his later work). The
phenomenology of consumption is expressed through an equivalent
phenomenology of the media, a phenomenology dominated and subsumed by
the sign, its proliferation, the merging of reality and fantasy, and the resurrection
of the real in the symbolic.
There are three elements within Baudrillard’s analyses of technology and
consumption on which I want to focus, knowing that in doing so I do injustice
to the expansiveness of his critique (as well as glossing over its contradictions
and exaggerations)
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. The first is his consideration of the television as an object.
The second is his reformulation of the slogan that the medium is the message.
And the third is his characterisation of consumption itself as an operating and
defining characteristic of (post-)modern society.

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Television and consumption
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As part of an analysis originally published in 1969 in which he attempts to
relate the social function of objects to a class-based analysis of practices, which
is in turn a way of opening up the question of consumption, Baudrillard draws
attention to the significance of television as an object. He remarks that a television
can be bought for two different reasons: as an object itself, and, as such, a claim
for status or membership in which possession is an indication of ‘recognition,
of integration, of social legitimacy’. This, he suggests, is its status in lower-class
households, which are to be contrasted to middle- and upper-class households
in which the television is bought not for what it is but what it can do. The extremes
are those of television as the site of a ritual practice, an object whose value is
defined by its exchange value; and those of television as the site of a rational
cultural practice, a medium whose value is defined according to its usefuleness:
There are those for whom TV is an object, there are those for whom it is a
cultural exercise: on this radical opposition a cultural class privilege is
established that is registered in an essential social privilege.
(Baudrillard, 1981, 57)
Of course these two discrete marks of social status are never present in their pure
state (though Baudrillard implies that the classes are). What is interesting however
is his recognition both of the significance of objects as indicators of class position
(see Bourdieu, 1984 and below) and that significance, in turn, as a function of the