Television and Everyday Life

particular on its impact on those—women and children—who are, at various
stages of their lives, literally housebound. ‘Television, and other electronic
media’, he suggests, ‘bring [the hostile society of the outer world] into the
home and change both the public and domestic spheres’ (ibid., 223); and again:
‘Television…now escorts childen across the globe even before they have
permission to cross the street’ (ibid., 238).
This has, Meyrowitz argues, a particularly significant impact on gender
identities and relationships since what is being brought into the home, and
what the ‘home’ can now reach is the public world of men and masculinities.
What is involved is a breaking down of boundaries—those between the sexes
in what he terms a ‘situational androgyny’, and those between public and private
spaces. The home is no longer, if it ever was, the preserve of women, nor an

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unambiguously female domain. Television, together with other electronic
media, dislocates place from space and as a result ‘the home has, in many
ways, become a part of the larger world which we have merely “roofed over
and lighted fire in”’ (ibid., 225).
These are familiar and provocative arguments involving, as they do, an
inflection of McLuhan’s idea of the global village. For the same idea, and the
same ideal, are embodied in both village and home. Both are addressing the
problem of reach and our media’s effect on it. However the elisions are
unacceptable. So too, in both McLuhan and Meyrowitz, are the scale of the
generalisations and the profligacy of the conclusions. Extension of reach does
not necessarily involve greater control, nor is reach itself an unambiguous
concept, for it is the quality of the contact—the quality of the touch—that
surely is the issue.
And at issue too are the claims that can be made on behalf of television that
it can and does have the power to shift such deeply engrained values and
habits. It will consistently be my argument throughout this book that such a
position, though it contains elements of plausibility, is untenable as it stands
(see Ferguson, 1990). To be convincing it requires properly to be integrated
into the phenomenology of television, and into an understanding of the variety
of experienced and empirical worlds—in this case the home—in which it is
received.
Home and hearth is perhaps a less contentious matter. Whereas arguments
around television and reach plausibly have to do, almost entirely, with its status
as a medium, the ‘hearth’ can be seen to be something which is created both by
the physical existence of the TV as an object, often at the focal point of the
family room, and by its programming; that is, in the more or less conscious
efforts of the early broadcasters, both on radio and television, and particularly
in the UK, to create an atmosphere conducive to the sustenance of home (Frith,
1983; Scannell and Cardiff, 1991).
Broadcasting means the rediscovery of the home. In these days when house
and hearth have been largely given up in favour of a multitude of other
interests and activities outside, with the consequent disintegration of family
ties and affections, it appears that this new persuasion may to some extent
reinstate the parental roof in its old accustomed place, for all will admit that
this is, or should be, one of the greatest and best influences on life.
(C.A.Lewis, 1942, quoted in Frith, 1983, 110)
As Simon Frith argues, the power and pleasures of early broadcasting lay in its
ability to flatter, to deceive, to create through the modes of its address the
familiar: familiar voices at familiar times received, it was presumed, in familiar
places, and providing a substitute, perhaps, for the stories read beside the fire.
Hearth and reach in these arguments are not easily assimilated concepts
since they refer to quite contradictory aspects of television’s contribution to

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Television and a place called home
31
home and domesticity. Lewis seems to be making two presumptions. The first
is that existing homes and hearths provide a safe container for broadcasting;
the second is that broadcasting also provides a safe container for the home.
But the extension of reach is, as Meyrowitz notes, not just a matter of safety. It
is likely to change existing patterns and values of home life, and, potentially, is
even more threatening to the security and comfort of the hearth.
New forms of television delivery systems, as well as multiple receivers in
individual households, are likely of course to change even this.
Finally to the question of home and identity, and television’s role within
that. These are big issues, and perhaps more even than before, concern needs
to extend beyond the confines of the domestic. Increasingly it is being argued
that questions of identity, and the relationship between identity and location,
space and place, are crucial ones in a fragmenting world of migration,
dispossession and post-colonialism. Identity is an essentially contested concept,
meaning different things to different people at different times, and shifting its
significance geographically, historically and socially. We might wish simply to
postpone such a discussion completely, recognising both the complexities and
pluralities associated with the term, except that, in the domestic context of
home, there are a few things that can still usefully be said.
Television provides a link between home and identity in a number of ways,
both in its status as a domestic object and through its mediation of images of
domesticity which can be seen to be reflective or potentially expresssive of
images of home. As Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981, 144) suggest:
The importance of the home derives from the fact that it provides a space
for action and interaction in which one can develop, maintain and change
one’s identity… The home is a shelter for those persons and objects that
define the self; thus it becomes, for most people, an indispensable symbolic
environment.
Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton are concerned with the meaning of
objects in the home (see also Dittmar, 1992). With arguments that echo those
of object relations theory, they identify the important role media technologies
play in helping adolescents ‘solidify their selves through control of psychic
processes’ (Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981, 118). In their
discussion of television, however, they muddle relations to the set, as an object,
and relations to it as a medium, to its programmes, so their conclusions about
its status in the home are confused and confusing. Insofar as its significance as
an object is concerned, they report a high valuation of it, particularly in relation
to sense of self (and particularly for men). However their judgement that
televisions are not good vehicles for binding people to their own past because
of the rapid obsolescence of a TV set, mistakes the significance of medium
and message and completely underestimates both the role of television as a
status object in the home (Leal, 1990) and the capacity of memories of television

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Television and Everyday Life
programmes to provide a basis for individual reflection and a shared sense of
the past.
Television also provides images of home, homemaking and domesticity
(Haralovich, 1988), which in turn can be seen to provide an, albeit highly
ideological, resource for individual and domestic identity formation within the
home. Haralovich, in particular, shows how images of the homemaker (‘the
housewife’, though the shift in terminology is instructive) in soaps and sit-coms
(and in advertising) in the early years of post-war television in the United States,
provided an ideology of domesticity which would encourage women to accept
a gender identity appropriate to their required role in society; a role supported
and sustained both through changes in domestic architecture and the further
development of the suburb (see Chapter 3 below) and her mobilisation as a
consumer into the post war economy (see also Chapter 5 below).
These aspects of television’s role in the construction of home extend beyond
the phenomenological, and involve a much wider range of concerns. For home
is not just an abstraction and, idealised or not, successful or not, it is produced
by individuals within families or other domestic arrangements; within dynamic
and complex social units and for the most part behind closed doors.
FAMILY
‘Television today is an integral part of the family household—almost another
member of the family’ (Gunter and Svennevig, 1987, 4). But what, in this
context, is the family?
If home can be considered a phenomenological reality, then family can be
considered a social one. For David Schneider (1980) the family is a unit of
sexual reproduction and as such distinguishable from other social units
consisting of relatives. Wilson and Pahl (1988), on the other hand, argue that
families can be considered as an action set, a source of social solidarity and
gossip and also as a very practical source of material help in coping with
problems. Families also provide social identities and basic social coordinates
for their members (ibid., 249). Quoting Pitkin (1985, 16), they suggest that
‘The family is not a thing to be understood in its composition so much as it is
a system of relationships that change over time’; the study of the family should
be the study of process. And they conclude that the family should be understood
in the terms in which family members themselves define it.
There is no doubt that actually trying to define what a family is is quite an
impossible undertaking (see Bernardes, 1986; Wilson and Pahl, 1988). Equally
impossible is the likelihood of reaching a conclusion about its significance
and status in contemporary society, fought over as it is ideologically, fought
through as it is socially.
Fragile or fraught in any individual case though it may be, the family is
nevertheless the social unit in which most of our early consumption of media

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takes place. The relationships that define it, the myths, stories and values that
sustain it, the conflicts or crises that threaten it, provide one of the basic social
environments in which individuals struggle, on a daily basis, with the problems
of everyday life. When media consumption takes place in the family, therefore,
it takes place in a complex social setting in which different patterns of cohesion
and dispersal, authority and submission, freedom and constraint, are expressed
in the various sub-systems of conjugal, parental or sibling relationships and in
the relationships that the family has between itself and the outside world. These
relationships are played out in variously cramped or expansive, highly
differentiated or undifferentiated domestic spaces; and they are played out
through variously organised or disorganised, routinised or chaotic domestic
temporalities. They are played out in public and they are played out in private.
Patterns of media consumption—especially television viewing—are generated
and sustained within these social, spatial and temporal relations.
Families create homes and live in households. And it is on the family that
much recent research on television has been focused (Morley, 1986; Lull, 1988,
1990; Hobson, 1982). This research is beginning to take seriously the
significance of the family as a socio-cultural unit of some complexity, and has
sought to understand the use of television within a context of gender relations
(Morley, 1986), within the family as a commmunicative system (Lindlof and
Traudt, 1983) and in psychodynamic terms (Rogge and Jensen, 1988).
Yet these researchers need to recognise, though some do not, that families
are problematic entities, not only in terms of their composition but also in
terms of their changing character in modern society. In the UK, for example,
only 32 per cent of household units consist of families in the sense of containing
adults with children, and while this is still the single largest household unit
statistically, it remains the case that around two-thirds of households contain
social groups (or individuals) that do not fit the model of the nuclear family.
Lone-parent families are rapidly growing in number. So too is the number of
households of only one individual.
Equally the boundaries around a family are not clear cut. I have already
noted, following Wilson and Pahl (1988) and Bernardes (1986), that the family
should be seen as a dynamic social entity extending, potentially and actually,
beyond the confines of house and home and really only to be understood, both
historically and dynamically, as a process (see Bott, 1971). Researchers in
television and the family are also beginning to recognise this and talk of
interpretative communities (Lindlof, 1988) to indicate that even at the level of
television watching family relations extend into non-kinship networks. Families
must be seen as being embedded in a wider set of social relationships, just as
the activity of watching television is embedded in the social relationships of
the family.
In a review of systems theory and family theory, based principally, but highly

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Television and Everyday Life
suggestively, on the literature in family therapy, Gill Gorell Barnes offers a
characterisation of the family as a system in the following terms:
[as] the patterning of intimate relationships organized over time. In the
process of organization, certain behavioural sequences will be selected and
conserved and others ruled out. Over time, the sequences within the pattern
will be associated with perceptions, thoughts and feelings which constrain
members of the family in different ways. The more that the group interact
on a regular basis around certain repeated events, the more it is likely that
systemic aspects of pattern influence their interrelationships.
(Barnes, 1985, 226)
The perception of the family as a system, while it accurately identifies a primary
characteristic of any ongoing social entity, is a perception which is not confined
to family therapists. It is not unproblematic of course, for in any individual
case it is precisely the status of the individual family as a system which is
often at issue. But it provides, potentially quite precisely, a framework both to
describe and to analyse a family’s uniqueness both as a viable and as a
vulnerable social unit, and of course it provides a framework for the comparison
of families one to another (see Minuchin, 1974). Above all it offers a route for
inquiring into the rule- and role-governed nature of family life and into the
ongoing capacity of a family to present itself to itself and others as more or
less coherent, more or less self-contained, more or less special.
It is this capacity to regulate and order its own inner life that defines, for
David Reiss (1981) the central element in his comprehensive attempt to provide
a model for understanding the family. That capacity is in turn predicated on
the sharing of a basic set of core assumptions about the world, assumptions
which are shared despite disagreements, conflicts and differences between
members of the family. Indeed Reiss suggests (1981, 1) that membership of
the family is itself based in an often unconscious or inexplicit acceptance of,
and a belief in, these abiding assumptions.
Reiss’ approach to the family is one which is guided and informed, of course,
by his therapeutic interests. But perhaps rather more strikingly than many other
similarly derived approaches, it takes seriously not just the differential capacity
of families to manage and sustain themselves as social units as a result of their
internal structures and dynamics, but also the relationship the family has with
its immediate social and cultural environment. This relationship, Reiss argues,
is essentially a dialectical one in which the family is active in its transactions
with a dominating social world: ‘Our approach accords considerable
adaptability and creativity to the family itself, at the same time recognising the
enormous influences and strong forces in its social world’ (ibid., 4). The central
component of the Reissian model is therefore the attempt to conceptualise (and
for clinical purposes also to operationalise) what it is that makes a family a
family. But it does so without insisting on a rigorous boundary around it (often

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a problem with systems-oriented approaches); it also recognises that family
construction and maintenance is an ongoing project sustained in and through
the dynamics of social relations both within the household and outside it.
Reiss comes to understand the family through the notion of paradigm.
Drawing, as so many have done in other fields, on Thomas Kuhn’s use of the
term in his attempt to characterise the history and epistemology of science, he
describes the family paradigm as the ‘central organiser’ of the family’s shared
constructs, sets, expectations and fantasies about its social world. Each family’s
transactions with its social world is, he suggests, guided by its own paradigm,
and families can be distinguished one from another—by the differences in
their paradigms (ibid., 2). Family paradigms are the product of, and embody,
the families’ particular success (or failure) in weaving from the raw materials
of their contradictory experiences and their conflicting emotions a more or
less consistent basis for action (ibid., 379). In the therapeutic setting, Reiss
argues, this perception allows the clinician to address the family’s own
conception and construction of the world as a basis for understanding family
life and, presumably, for intervention. In the context of the present argument it
provides another element of the framework for understanding the crucial
significance of the social and cultural setting in which television is received.
However before considering this directly in more detail, I need briefly to
return to Reiss for an important discussion of the centrality of the management
of space and time as factors in the ability of families to create and sustain their
family paradigm.
In a complex but fascinating analysis Reiss distinguishes between family
ceremonials (both consecration and degradation ceremonials) and what he calls
pattern regulators. The first are infrequent but highly significant ceremonies,
charged with feeling, symbolic, episodic, but requiring a high level of family