Television and Everyday Life

INCORPORATION
Through the idea of incorporation I want to focus attention on the ways in
which television, like other technologies and objects, is used. Technologies
are functional. They may be bought with other features in mind and they do
indeed serve other cultural purposes. They may become functional in ways
somewhat removed from the intentions of designers or marketers. Functions
may change or disappear (for example in the case of those home computers
originally bought for educational purposes which have become games machines
or relegated to tops of cupboards or backs of wardrobes) (see Kopytoff (1986)
on the biography of the object, and Chapter 2 above). To become functional a
technology has to find a place within the moral economy of the household
specifically in terms of its incorporation into the routines of everyday life.
That incorporation may release time for other things (see Gershuny, 1982); it
may facilitate ‘control’ of time, for example in the time-shift capabilities of the
video or the microwave; it may simply enable some times to be better spent,
for example in the use of the radio as a companion for the tea-break, or as part
of the routine of getting up in the morning.
Whereas a concern with objectification principally identifies the spatial
aspects of the moral economy, incorporation focuses, among other things, on
its temporalities. Once again it is in research on television that this is most
clear, and I have discussed this already in some detail in the last chapter in
relation to the various ways in which broadcast television provides a framework
both for the household’s involvement in the sequencing of public time, and for
the sustaining of domestic routines through the broadcast schedules. I argued
there that these dimensions of television’s temporality were subject to their
incorporation into a household’s temporality by virtue of that household’s own
clocking and temporal orientation (Silverstone, 1993).
Incorporation into the moral economy of the household also brings to the
fore questions of age and gender, as well as questions of the visibility and
invisibility of technologies. Technologies are incorporated into the household
as expressions of gender (see Gray, 1987 and 1992 on the VCR) and age
differentiation, as well as reinforcements or assertions of status. Teenagers
will create a wall of sound in their bedrooms with their stereos. Battles will be
fought and won over control of the remote switch for the television (Morley,
1986) or of the source of power for a whole room full of information and
communication technologies (Silverstone and Morley, 1991). Ownership and
use of the computer will follow and reinforce a family’s gendered culture of
technology (see Livingstone, 1992).

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Television and Everyday Life