Television and Everyday Life

CULTURAL SPACE IN GENERAL AND TELEVISION IN
PARTICULAR
Potential space—the space in which identities are formed with or without the
involvement of transitional objects, in an environment of trust or the absence
of trust—potential space is the place in which the seeds of culture are sown.
But Winnicott acknowledges that the seeds are sown in paradoxical ground:
the essential feature in the concept of transitional objects and phenomena
…is 
the paradox, and the acceptance of the paradox:
the baby creates the
object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a
cathected object…we will never challenge the baby to elicit an answer to
the question: did you create that or did you find it?
(Winnicott, 1974, 104, italics in original)
This is a fundamental paradox indeed. It runs right the way through any and
every discussion of culture or creativity. And it runs very powerfully through
all discussions of the role of television and of the television audience. I will
return to it in my last chapter. For the moment, however, it is important to note
that while we may not wish to question the child, we do have to question the
implications of that paradox as it works its way through the experience of culture
and especially the experience of television (see Hodge and Tripp, 1986, Ch. 3;
though note that theirs is substantially a cognitive-Piagetian based analysis).
The present question however is this. What is it about television that
makes it such a potentially significant transitional object? The question is a

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Television and ontology
15
reasonable one because television, like string, is neither an infinitely
malleable nor a neutral object. In his pathological engagement with the
string, the boy in Winnicott’s case study used something which already had
both a practical and a symbolic significance. Television also comes pre-
packed as it were: a complex communication of sound and image with
already powerful reality and emotional claims.
Perhaps the first observation to be made is that television will become a
transitional object in those circumstances where it is already constantly
available or where it is consciously (or semi-consciously) used by the
mother-figure as a baby sitter: as her or his own replacement while she or he
cooks the dinner or attends, for whatever length of time, to something else,
somewhere else. The continuities of sound and image, of voices or music,
can be easily appropriated as a comfort and a security, simply because they
are there. Television’s availability, then, is clearly one aspect, but there is
also another.
Winnicott’s account of the creation of the transitional object depends on a
kind of reality testing in which the infant is presumed to follow a sequence in
relation to it. The sequence begins with the infant’s relating to the object, then
‘finding it’, and then, at least in fantasy, destroying it, but since it survives
destruction (it exists despite all my efforts to deny it) it can be used, adored
and depended upon. Television survives all efforts at its destruction. It is, in
Williams’ (1974) terms, in constant flow, and switching it off (in anger, in
frustration, or in boredom) does not destroy it. We can switch it on again and
it demonstrates its invulnerability and its dependability. Any challenge we might
make to its content, our rejection or acceptance of its messages is, I want to
suggest, based in this primary level of aceptance and trust. Television is, as
many observers have noted, constantly present. It is eternal. This quality of
the medium is one that also guarantees its potential status as a transitional
object even for those who may have grown up without it. My argument, of
course, is not that television is outgrown. On the contrary it can and does
continue to occupy potential space throughout an individual’s life, though
obviously with different degrees of intensity and significance.
But this capacity to provide a permanent presence and, in so doing, a
colonisation of potential space is not simply a function of the quality of the
technology. Many technologies, particularly communicating or informing
technologies (Young, 1986; Turkle, 1986) do indeed have the capacity to
generate a degree of dependence, security and attachment in a similar way to
television; each case is potentially both creative and addictive. But these
attachments are over-determined by the content of the media, and in television’s
case through its schedules, genres and narratives. Television is a cyclical
phenomenon. Its programmes are scheduled with consuming regularity. Soap
operas, weather reports and news broadcasts, perhaps above all, provide a
framework for the hours, days and weeks of the year (Scannell, 1988).

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16
Television and Everyday Life
There is what I might call an ontological circle in play. The regularity and
sequentiality of television programming is often justified on economic grounds
(Smith, 1976), and while evidence suggests that it is rare that an individual will
watch every episode of a series (Goodhardt, Ehrenberg and Collins, 1975) or
every news broadcast, there are profound economies of scale and scope to be
had by a continuing run within television. These economies can of course
themselves be understood as a response to the deeply felt needs of audiences
and viewers for continuity; needs that are in turn made more pressing perhaps
by virtue of the increasingly stressful or threatening world in which we live; a
world which is, of course, for most of us only seen on television. So those needs
are being massaged or reinforced by the programmes themselves which, in almost
every case, are involved in the creation and mediation of anxiety and in its
resolution. For example the weather, the most consistently watched television
programme (Mellencamp, 1990), provides constant reassurance (even in times
of bad weather) both of the ability to control the elements (albeit only through
talk and graphics and, particularly on US weather shows by reporters who rival
air hostesses both in their claims for the ownership of the object, ‘I have today a
few clouds for you’, and their ability to project confidence), and to encourage
or reassure the viewer that tomorrow will be (basically) all right. Likewise in
the case of soap opera; soaps have been understood as constant masticators of
social realities, provoking and reassuring within a complex narrative and through
the medium of strong and identifiable reality claims (Livingstone, 1990).
But it is the news, I think, which holds pride of place as the genre in which
it is possible to see most clearly the dialectical articulation of anxiety and
security—and the creation of trust—which overdetermines television as a
transitional object, particularly for adult viewers.
News has long been recognised (Wright, 1968, 1974) as a genre whose
function is reassurance as well as surveillance. In a fascinating study of a
fascinating situation, Turner 
et al.
(1986) have charted the role of the media in
contributing to the social reality and security of those living on or alongside
the San Andreas Fault in California. The study was undertaken before the
recent (1988) earthquake, but it reveals a finely balanced cycle in the news
programming of anxiety generation (mostly in terms of reporting the latest
predictions or ‘scientific’ evidence in relation to possible future movements of
the fault) and reassurance (in which scientific experts are debunked or the
tension resolved in some other way). This is, of course, an intense example of
the essential tension within the news: both in the narrativity of anxiety creation
and resolution and in the dominance of form over content (‘How come they
call it news if it’s always the same?’ asks a child in a