Television and Everyday Life

particular structures and systems of everyday life (see Chapter 7 below) but
also the relevance of the systems model (and the actor network) both to the
production of technology where it has been most consistently applied, and to
its use or its consumption where it has not.
3
This in turn suggests, quite properly, that in relation to even a single
technology—the electric light, the telephone, or the television—it is possible,
necessary even, to consider not a single system of socio-technical relations,
but a number of such systems which are all, potentially, interrelated. One such
attempt to do this is offered by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1987) in her study of
the history of the introduction of home heating in the United States.
Cowan takes as her focus the consumer, and in particular the potential
consumer of the domestic stove, who failed to materialise in the eighteenth

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Television and Everyday Life
century in the United States, but who, despite little change in the ‘technology’,
did materialise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
4
She argues that what
turned the stove into an acceptable and accepted technology was not so much
to do with technical innovation 
per se,
but with a change in the organisation of
the industry which resulted in a major reduction in its cost. The success of the
stove depended on, among other things, reductions in the price of coal, the
emergence of both individual and multiple consumers, and the involvement
(eventually) of the gas utility companies in their retail.
Her model of what she calls the ‘consumption junction’ consists of a number
of more or less concentric (but also overlapping) circles with the consumer—
an active decision-making, system-defined and system-defining, actor—at the
centre. The particular character of the network system changes through time,
of course, as the elements, the institutions and the practices themselves change
through time. Together what they signify is a sense of the structured complexity
of social, political, economic and technical relations, which must be understood
in their interrelationship if the activity of the consumption of technology (no
less than that of production) is itself to be understood.
Yet there is more to be said. Cowan’s account is limited both in terms of the
generalisability of her case-study technology, but more significantly because
she fails to consider technology as a symbolic as well as a material good. It is
this second aspect of technology as a social system that I want now briefly to
address.
The symbolic aspect emerges quite clearly in a very differently oriented
analysis of technology, that of Henri Lefebvre (1984). Lefebvre undertakes,
within the framework of a critique of bourgeois culture and society, an excursion
into the realm of the motor car: what he calls the epitome of ‘objects’: the
Leading Object. He defines the motor car as an example, a sub-system, of the