Television and Everyday Life

POLITICS OF THE SUBURB
Perhaps it is no accident that Jean Baudrillard (1983) opens his account of the
particularity of television’s significance in an age of simulation—an age in
which signs and representations gain the status of reality in an endless play of
mutual reference—with a discussion of American television’s long running
saga of the Loud family, broadcast in 1971. The subject of a television-verité
experiment, the Louds were presented as a typical (or typically hyper-real)
three-garage, five-children, well-to-do, Californian family whose everyday life
would be faithfully reproduced on television: filmed by a camera which watches
as if it were not there, and watched by an audience which is not there but
which 
is
there by virtue of that very camera (the knotted torture of the syntax
here echoes the knotted torture of the simulation). ‘Where is the reality in all
of this?’ Baudrillard asks. And the answer: everywhere and nowhere. It is
absorbed, leached, in the eternal display of images, commodities, spectacles
and representations, all of which owe their significance and insignificance to
the insidious merging of medium and message in the mass media’s new
tyrannical hold on contemporary (and now post-modern) culture:
Television, in the case of the Louds for example, is no longer a spectacular
medium. We are no longer in the society of spectacle which the situationists
talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which
this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the
merging of the medium and the message is the first great formula of this
new age. There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now
intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer be said
that the latter is distorted by it.
(Baudrillard, 1983, 54)
In the example of the Louds (and later in a similar series in the UK) a version
of suburban life was reproduced, mirrored in the lens of the ‘unlying’ camera
and the ‘faithful’ screen: more real than real. The family, in both the American
and the British examples did not (‘in fact’) survive the experience. Yet the
suburban family, Baudrillard seems to be saying, is the perfect fodder for a
medium whose meaning is the denial of meaning; for a medium whose most
powerful affect lies in its denial of the difference between public and private

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76
Television and Everyday Life
worlds (see Meyrowitz, 1985); and for a medium that, in its broadcast form,
fundamentally hybridises culture.
Baudrillard’s characterisation of the medium of television, and of the post-
modern culture which he sees as having been created by it, involves the blurring
of the essential (or essentially modern) distinctions that I have already noted
as those that the suburb is also challenged with blurring. The culture which
television, 
inter alia,
creates is the culture of the suburb, already the site of an
homogenised, depoliticised culture: a domestic culture that is no longer private;
a public culture that is, through the media, domesticated; a politicised culture
without power; an informed and informing culture without information.
Baudrillard has been justly criticised for the scale of his generalisations, his
technocentrism, his pessimism and his lack of attention to the sociological,
political and historical factors that would actually need to be applied to any
adequate analysis of the relationship between media, culture and society
(Kellner, 1989, 72). As Margaret Marsh (1990, 188–9) points out in her study
of the rise of the American suburb:
Americans have moved to the suburbs since the early nineteenth century,
but living in the suburbs meant something different in each period of
suburban growth… From the fringe communities of the early nineteenth
century to the ‘technoburbs’ of the late twentieth, the relationship of the
city and the suburb has been changing… The residential suburbs of the
1950’s, which sheltered nuclear families with young children in racially
homogeneous enclaves, were the culmination of more than a century of the
creation of a set of political and cultural beliefs. That era is over.
Both suburbs and the media are changing. With respect to the first, Marsh
points to yet another suburban paradox. Alongside the consolidation of suburbia
within American society comes not only its increasing physical and cultural
distance from the city, but also its ‘urbanisation’ as homogeneity has given
way to heterogeneity, and as the family and community ideals of the
predominantly middle class are breaking down. Running through these changes,
and profoundly influencing them, has been the changing status of suburban
women, who are increasingly involved in the workforce, and are increasingly
unlikely to be part of a nuclear family.
With respect to the second, the media, it is possible to point to an equivalent
fragmentation, at least at the level of technology and delivery systems. The
coherence that broadcasting offered both to the suburban community and the
community of suburbs, is also beginning to break down. Satellite, cable and
video provide—at least superficially—an increasingly heterogeneous television
culture, unconstrained by the schedule or over-arching reach of ‘national’
culture.
Yet these changes can easily be exaggerated. The forms of life that have
sustained the suburb throughout its long and varied existence, as well as the

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
77
cultural forms that have sustained television, are not simply going to disappear.
Nor can they. For they are both of a piece with the suburbanisation of culture
which provides an essential link, I believe, between modernity and post-
modernity. This hybrid culture, paradoxically both sterile and creative, which
no longer offers us the security of boundary and difference is, as Marilyn
Strathern has argued, sustained and supported by technological developments
and technologies’ trespass on natural (p)reserves.
And politics in and of the suburb is still, mostly, a domestic politics of self-
interest, conformity and exclusion undertaken within political structures which
are, mostly, barely recognised, let alone challenged. It is a politics of anxiety.
It is a politics of defence. The suburbanisation of the public sphere has produced
a politics of invulnerable vulnerability, a fragile web of technologically mediated
strands of information and illusion. Participation of a kind may have been
substantially enhanced by the mediation of national and international agendas,
by access to the public and private lives of those in power, by a constant critique
and analysis of the issues of the day, but the terms of that participation and the
possibilities for its realisation are very much in question, and very much the
product of the essential tensions of media, culture and power in contemporary
everyday life.
Equally, the choices that are made from the offerings of broadcast television,
out of which individuals, to a greater or lesser degree, construct their own
cultural identities and which become core components of their daily lives, are
all cut from the same cloth. We are all, to some extent,