Television and Everyday Life

particular, in what Stephen Heath calls ‘its seamless equivalence with social
life’ (Heath, 1990, 267). The everyday escapes, and in that escape television
escapes too.
In this chapter I want to approach television from as basic a level as it seems
possible and reasonable to do. Watching television and discussing television
and reading about television takes place on an hourly basis: the result of focused
or unfocused, conscious or unconscious attention. Television accompanies us
as we wake up, as we breakfast, as we have our tea and as we drink in bars. It
comforts us when we are alone. It helps us sleep. It gives us pleasure, it bores us
and sometimes it challenges us. It provides us with opportunities to be both
sociable and solitary. Although, of course, it was not always so, and although
we have had to learn how to incorporate the medium into our lives (Spigel, 1990,
1992) we now take television entirely for granted. We take television for granted
in a way similar to how we take everyday life for granted. We want more of it
(some of us); we complain about it (but we watch it anyway); but we do not
understand very well (nor do we feel the need to understand) how it works, either
mechanically or ideologically (Hall, 1977, 325). Our experience of television
is of a piece with our experience of the world: we do not expect it to be, nor can
we imagine it to be, significantly otherwise (Schutz, 1973, 229).
The palpable integration of television into our daily lives: its emotional
significance, both as disturber and comforter; its cognitive significance, both
as an informer and a misinformer; its spatial and temporal significance,
ingrained as it is into the routines of daily life; its visibility, not just as an
object, the box in the corner, but in a multitude of texts—journals, magazines,
newspapers, hoardings, books like this one; its impact, both remembered and
forgotten; its political significance as a core institution of the modern state;
this integration is both complete and fundamental.
Some part of an explanation for that completeness can be sought through
an examination of the writings of those who have attended to the structure
and dynamics of everyday life, even if they have not focused on the role of

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4
Television and Everyday Life
the mass media as such in those dynamics. In what follows in this chapter I
will draw on some of that literature, specifically in relation to what I think
are three key and interrelated contributions to the study of the
phenomenology of the social world as they bear on the experience of
television. The first is Anthony Giddens’ account of the relations between
consciousness, self and social encounters in his attempt to characterise the
structuration of everyday life. Here I will focus on his various discussions of
what he terms the problem of ‘ontological security’. The second is
D.W.Winnicott’s psychoanalytic account of the emergence of the individual
and in particular of his discussions of transitional phenomena and potential
space. Third, and to some extent synthetically, I will discuss some of the
literature that addresses various aspects of the routinisation of social life,
specifically in relation to tradition, ritual and myth.
A word of caution is in order. Beginning an argument about the status of
television in everyday life in this way, that is through attention to what I have
already described as the fundamental or basic levels of social reality, runs the
serious risk of becoming reductivist and essentialist. It can be read as claiming
that all aspects of the phenomenon of television can be (must be) related to
this level of social reality. It can also be read as implying that an explanation of
a complex social and historical phenemonon lies not in the realm of action and
cultural variation but in the murky waters of physical or biological necessity. It
then becomes an easy step to talk about television as if it was fulfilling certain
fundamental human needs (which of course to some extent it does) and social
functions (which equally of course it does). But the implication of this might
be that we can only see television in its immutability: we are condemned to
seeing it as invulnerable to criticism, and because it is so deeply engrained in
the social world, unchanging and unchangeable.
This is not what I intend or hope to achieve in this chapter or in the book as
whole. What I am doing, of course, is offering an account of the presuppositions
about human nature which underlie my argument, as they underlie—though
normally fairly deeply buried and unexplicated—the explanations of most social
phenomena. My argument, in relation to television, is that it is precisely because
television has colonised these basic levels of social reality that we need to
understand it better. Without that understanding we will mistake the basis of
its power and misjudge the difficulties in changing or controlling it. But equally,
a concern with these fundamental levels of social reality is generated, and I
believe warranted, precisely as a result of those social and historical conditions
which are, arguably, threatening them. I am not implying that because television
is so deeply embedded there is nothing we can do to change it, or that political,
economic and social factors of a more tangible kind are not equally crucial for
understanding its significance. On the contrary. It is because it is so deeply
embedded, and because those political, economic and social factors are
themselves so powerfully interwoven in television’s existence that we need to

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Television and ontology
5
give even greater attention to the medium as a complex and multiply determined
force in modern society—for better and for worse. I will return to these issues
in the final chapter of the book.