Television and Everyday Life

particular character of contemporary mass media, its domestication, and an
active engagement in public life: the compatibility or incompatibility between
democracy and consumerism. Paddy Scannell (1989) argues that public service
broadcasting, at least in the UK, has provided a framework for a genuine kind
of public involvement in public life; in its reasonableness, not in its rationality.
Public service broadcasting creates, in its variety, and above all in its mode of
address—in its domestication of the public utterance—what he calls a
communicative ethos in which a relaxed conversational style of presentation
provides the basis for a particular production of the essential elements of
contemporary public life:
The world, in broadcasting, appears as ordinary, mundane, accessible,
knowable, familiar, recognizable, intelligible, shareable and communicable
for whole populations. It is talkable about by everyone. This world does not
exist elsewhere. It is not a reflection, a mirror, of a reality outside and beyond.
It is one fundamental, seen but unnoticed, constitutive component of
contemporary reality for all.
(Scannell, 1989, 152)
In this version of public culture, public utterances are domesticated and
correlatively the domestic becomes part of public culture (ibid., 143).
Broadcasting, in its provision of information and ideas, images and stories
provides the stuff of everyday life: its gossip and its glue. Here is a new kind
of—genuine—public sphere, according to Scannell, but a public sphere that is
constructed at the local level, albeit with materials provided nationally or globally.

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
69
The suburb is where this culture is supposed to take shape. And this public
culture is essentially suburban. Understanding it is not a matter, as Habermas
and others have argued, of opposing a politics of the public sphere to the politics
of consumerism, in which participation in a democracy is replaced by