Television and Everyday Life

Commodification
I have already referred to commodification as a core process in the establishment
and maintenance of capitalism, and to the more or less constructive logics
which are embodied in commodity exchange, constructive in the sense that
they are are, or can be, open to the creative work of the consumer. Such a view
involves seeing commodification not just as linear or imposed, but as cyclical
and dialectical.
Commodification, then, refers to the industrial and commercial processes
which create both material and symbolic artifacts and which turn them into
commodities for sale in the formal market economy. It also refers to the ideological
processes at work within those material and symbolic artifacts, work which
defines them as the products and, in varying degrees, the expressions, of the
dominant values and ideas of the societies that produce them.
One might consider commodification as the beginning of a trajectory which
ends (see below) in conversion. But that would be a mistake, for although it is
easy to exaggerate the situation, it is nevertheless clear that consumption must
be seen as a cycle, in which the dependent moments of consumption
(imagination, appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion)
themselves feed back, especially the last, to influence, and some would argue
particularly in a post-modern context, to define the structure and the pattern of
commodification itself (Featherstone, 1991; Lash, 1990).
To see consumption as cyclical in this way is both to challenge the
overdetermination of the cultural industry which members of the Frankfurt
School insist upon, and at the same time to qualify the kind of romanticism
embodied in Miller’s phrase ‘the actual brilliance’ of the consumer. It also
involves a rejection of many of the dichotomies that mark discussions of
consumption, and in particular that dichotomy which expresses the opposition
between alienation (in the commodity) and its negation (through appropriation).
The consumption cycle, perhaps more of a spiral in its dialectical movement,
acknowledges that objects not only move in and and out of commodification
as such (see Kopytoff, 1986) but that their status as commodities (and their
meaning as a commodity) is constantly in flux. Objects can be, and are,
simultaneously commodities and non-commodities. The de-alienating work
of the consumer feeds back into the commodification process and informs it,
while that process of commodification itself facilitates the activities of
consumption (see Hebdidge (1988) for an analysis of some aspects of
this process).
The cycle requires, therefore, a consideration of the dynamics of, and
interrelationships between, the various elements of the consumption process.

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Television and consumption
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And it also provides a focus on the particular role of television—object of
production as technology and as medium—as a primary facilitator (principally
but not exclusively through advertising) of consumption.