Television and Everyday Life

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE SAVAGE MEDIUM
The globalisation of the media—its political, economic and technical reach
and implications—is only part of the story of the tele-technological system. To
focus on it alone engenders the risk of producing a kind of seamless robe,
whose train is unruffled and unsnarled by the unevenness and friction of a
complex, diverse and contrary world of lived relations. Many versions of
innovation theory, political economy and cultural analysis have this quality.
They are seductive, of course, but the seduction should be resisted. Why?
Principally because we need to know about cultural difference and cultural
variation, and because we can recognise, historically and contemporarily, the
capacity of societies and social groups, both large and small, to work with the
products of an over-arching colonial, religious or media-based system, and through
that work to transform and domesticate it. Not always of course, and not always
necessarily very successfully. But the world is full of examples of the ways in
which both nations and households do produce something other, something novel,
at the conjunction of, and in their transactions with, the products of an imposing
system.
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This will be my theme for the remainder of this chapter and the next.
At this point, taking a focus both on technology—as object and as text—
and on our capacity to tame those objects and meanings, to make them our
own, I want to explore the notion of domestication, through a concern with
what I will call (following Kopytoff, 1986) the various biographies of television,
and through a concern with issues of gender and control.
Marilyn Strathern (1987) understands domestication as being a matter of
subordinating objects to ends of one’s own and thus to one’s subjectivity.

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Domestication is, indeed, about bringing things under control, but as Eric Hirsch
(1989) points out it is also about the expression of the subjectivity of those
who are involved. Domestication does, perhaps literally, involve bringing
objects in from the wild: from the public spaces of shops, arcades and working
environments; from factories, farms and quarries. The transition, which is also
a translation, of objects across the boundary that separates public and private
spaces is at the heart of what I mean by domestication. Through it, objects and
meanings are, potentially, formed and transformed. Some objects, some
technologies, some meanings, are more amenable to domestication than others.
All are in a state of alienation until that boundary is crossed and the claim
associated with their appropriation made. Some of us will have more resources:
more patience, more money, greater skill, for this task than others. We will not
always be untouched by the effort. Yet the end point of any work of social
production and reproduction is this transaction between the private and the
public sphere (Appadurai, 1986; Parry and Bloch, 1989). I have already
discussed this in terms of the moral economy of the household, and I will
develop the position embodied in that notion in more detail in the next chapter.
However, in the context of the present discussion, the domestication of
technology refers to the capacity of a social group (a household, a family, but
also an organisation) to appropriate technological artifacts and delivery systems
into its own culture—its own spaces and times, its own aesthetic and its own
functioning—to control them, and to render them more or less ‘invisible’ within
the daily routines of daily life. Both the potential inscribed within the technology
as object (and the meanings of the texts that are conveyed), as well as the resources
available to the group, are material for understanding how any given transaction
or set of transactions takes place. As Daniel Miller (1987, 175) suggests:
All…objects…are the direct product of commercial concerns and
industrial processes. Taken together they appear to imply that in certain
circumstances segments of the population are able to appropriate such
industrial objects and utilize them in the creation of their own image. In
other cases, people are forced to live in and through the images held of
them by a different and dominant section of the population. The
possibilities of recontextualisation may vary for any given object
according to its historical power or for one particular individual
according to his or her changing social environment.
Domestication, as Daniel Miller implies, is an elastic processs. It stretches all
the way from complete transformation and incorporation to a kind of begrudging
acceptance, and from total integration to marginalisation. But what links both
extremes is the quality of the work involved, the effort and the activity which
people bring to their consumption of objects and their incorporation into the
structure of their everyday lives.

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Objects and meanings—television and its texts—have their own lives. Their
individual histories: the histories of the technologies, of the products or
commodities, of the individual objects and of the transmitted meanings, all
contribute to the particularity of a technology as object and to its changing
status within public and private spheres. Once across the threshold of the
domestic spaces, of course, those lives continue, played out in the microsocial
and cultural environments of the home. And, equally, they are prepared for in
their production and marketing. The particular route that each object follows
as it runs its life-history from inception to obsolescence (an obsolescence no
longer only defined by the emergence of a replacement product, but also by its
altogether more unpredictable death in individual use) not only illuminates its
own biography but also throws a light onto the culture and cultures through
which it moves.
Things, objects, technologies, texts, have biographies, therefore, in the same
way that individuals do. However their lives are not just a matter of change
and transformation. Through those changes and transformations, in their birth,
maturity and decline, they reveal the changing qualities of the shaping
environments through which they pass. As Igor Kopytoff (1986, 67) suggests:
The biography of a car in Africa would reveal a wealth of cultural data: the
way it was acquired, how and from whom the money was assembled to pay
for it, the relationship of the seller to the buyer, the uses to which the car is
regularly put, the identity of its most frequent passengers and of those who
borrow it, the frequency of borrowing, the garages to which it is taken and
the owner’s relation to the mechanics, the movement of the car from hand
to hand and over the years, and in the end, when the car collapses, the final
disposition of its remains. All of these details would reveal an entirely
different biography from that of a middle-class American, or Navajo, or
French peasant car.
In a sense, of course, Kopytoff is only telling half of the story. For crucial to
the biography of this car in Africa is also the narrative of how it was produced,
and for whom, how it was marketed and sold, and how those processes
illuminate the relationship between producing and consuming cultures.
Some of these issues emerge in recent work on the early years of
communication and information technologies, particularly the television
(Spigel, 1989, 1990, 1992; Haralovich, 1988; Boddy, 1986), but also the radio
(Moores, 1988), the telephone (Marvin, 1988; de Sola Pool, 1977), the VCR
(Keen, 1987) and the home computer (Haddon, 1988). Much of the more
detailed work, particularly of the biography of these technologies once they
have crossed the threshold of individual homes and households remains to be
done (but see Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992).
Lynn Spigel (1992), in the study (from which I have already drawn) of the
emergence of television in the US during the immediate post-war years, charts

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its representation through an analysis of advertisements and articles appearing
in women’s home magazines. Television’s appearance was by no means trouble-
free nor without anxiety. Prompted, as it was, by the rapid expansion of suburban
development during the ten or so years after 1945, it provided a focus for the
expression (and the attempted resolution) of the new contradictions of public
and private worlds, of gender roles and domestic space that became increasingly
visible in the dispersed and hybrid world of Levittown.
The placing and watching of television in the new ranch-style and openplan
homes of those years became a central preoccupation. The significance of
television in the family, and its capacity to bring families together or to tear
them apart: its effect on gender roles, reinforcing in its imagery and in its
marketing the domesticity of the stay-at-home housewife, and threatening to
undermine the authority of the father, these were constant themes in the popular
literature of the time. Television spawned supporting technologies and created
new spaces: TV dinners, the TV lounge, the open plan itself, labour-saving
household technologies, all were designed in one way or another to integrate
television into the spaces and times of the household and above all to legitimate
its presence, to make it invisible, to make it safe for children and families to
watch, and to turn it into a decorative object—in short to domesticate it.
Along the way various still-born technologies were tried to make the whole
process more manageable. Spigel reports two of the more bizarre: the TV oven
in which a screen was incorporated into the cooker so that television could be
watched without disturbing the meal-times or women’s domestic chores; the
‘Duoscope’, a television with two screens set at right angles designed to enable
two different programmes to be watched simultaneously, thus relieving the
tensions surrounding programme choice. Yet these technologies were merely
premature. The multiple-set household, the television on the kitchen table (the
old black and white displaced by the more recent colour, stereo, or satellite-
connected set from its central place in the sitting room), the video recorder,
have all provided the means whereby many of those early anxieties and
preoccupations have been resolved. As Spigel (1990, 93) herself remarks:
While the Duoscope never caught on, the basic problematic of unity and
division continued. The attempt to balance ideals of family harmony and
social difference often led to bizarre solutions, but it also resulted in
everyday viewing patterns which were presented as functional and normal
procedures for using television. Popular discourses tried to tame the beast,
suggesting ways to maintain traditional modes of family behaviour and
still allow for social change. They devised intricate plans for resistance
and accommodation to the new machine, and in so doing they helped
construct a new cultural form.
Spigel is telling the story of a new medium, a medium which, from the very
beginning was also a commodity, and in its double articulation into the

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households of post-war America became also a means for the further
commodification of everyday life. The biography of television begins here (of
course it actually begins much earlier, in the development of the technology
and the development of the broadcasting system created to provide radio), and
it is sustained, at so many different levels, in the continuous production and
reproduction of objects and meanings: internationally, nationally; in public
and in both commercial broadcast and narrowcast distribution systems; in homes
and in everyday talk and gossip. It is interesting to note, in Spigel’s account,
that it was the object—the television itself—which was the site of so much
concern, as if it were believed that it was enough to ‘place’ it in the spaces and
times of the home for it to be made safe. Perhaps this is a little misleading, for
as Spigel herself analyses, the moral panics around the content of television
were also much in evidence. They too had to be resolved, and the challenges
they appeared to present to public and private morality firmly dealt with. Yet
the dependence of anxieties over content (the ‘message’) on anxieties over the
object (the ‘medium’) is clear; so much so that much of the content itself,