Television and Everyday Life

Conversion
Whereas objectification and incorporation are, principally, aspects of the
internal structure of the household, conversion, like appropriation, defines the
relationship between the household and the outside world—the boundary across
which artifacts and meanings, texts and technologies pass as the household
defines and claims for itself and its members a status in neighbourhood, work
and peer groups in the ‘wider society’.
The metaphor is a monetary one. Meanings are like currencies. Some are
convertible; others—private, personal meanings—are not. A household’s moral
economy provides the basis for the negotiation and transformation of the
meaning of potentially alienating commodities, but without the display and
without the acceptance of those meanings outside the home, that work of
mediation remains private: inaccessible and irrelevant in the public realm. The
work of appropriation must be matched by this equivalent work of conversion
if the first is to have any significance outside the home (see Douglas and
Isherwood, 1980; Bourdieu, 1984).
Television provides an excellent example of this. I have already suggested
that television is the source of much of the talk and gossip of everyday life
(Hobson, 1982). The content of its programmes, the twists of narrative, the
morality of characters, the stories behind the actors who play the soap-opera
characters, anxieties about the news, provide in many places and for many of
us, with greater or lesser degrees of intensity, much of the currency of everyday
discourse (Fiske, 1989a). Computer software has much the same status for
certain groups (from tele workers to adolescents) (Haddon, 1992). Telephone
conversations are as important as face-to-face conversation as a means of
transmission (Moyal, 1992). Discussions about a recent or future purchase, a
purchase prompted by television advertising perhaps, or by the particular culture
of neighbourhood or class, are similarly ubiquitous. Once again one can point
to the ways in which an integrated culture of communication and information
technologies, with television plausibly at its centre, works within households
and expresses the double articulation to which I have already referred:
facilitating conversion (and conversation) as well as being the objects of
conversion (and conversation).
Some individuals or households, of course, will resist (or not acknowledge)
this aspect of the transactional system, and sometimes, as in the case of the
satellite dish (Brunsdon, 1991; Moores, 1993), enforced display might prove
to be a mixed blessing. But equally, the conversion of the experience of the
appropriation of meanings derived from television, for example, is an indication
of membership and competence in a public culture, to whose construction it
actively contributes.
This final point brings us back full circle. For the cycle of consumption
requires that the commodifying process, embodied in the activities of
technologists, designers, market researchers and advertisers, as well as through

---

Television and consumption
131
the industrial structures themselves, take cognisance of the work done in
objectification, incorporation and conversion. Market research is of course
precisely an attempt to tap into this moment in the consumption cycle. There is
no necessity to exaggerate the significance of consumption on the dynamics of
commodification, but there is no need to underestimate it either. Increasingly
technologists, increasingly the industries as a whole, are responding to the
declared variations of taste culture as well as the particular responses to
new technologies.
My discussion of consumption has been designed to do a number of related
things. The first is to place it as a central motivating and mobilising dynamic at
the heart of contemporary culture and society: to see it as both the oil and glue
of structure and agency within everyday life. The individual, the domestic, the
suburban and the techno-industrial are interrelated through consumption, where
commodification and appropriation meet and are negotiated. Through
consumption we articulate not just something of significance about our identity,
but we draw, however vulnerably, the boundaries between public and private
spaces and times. In this sense consumption is the operating principle, too, of
the construction of an individual household’s moral economy, and it provides
the linking mechanism for a household’s integration into, and separation from,
the values and ideas of the public sphere. Television is both object and facilitator
of this dynamic and transcending process: a technology in every sense of the
word operating its insidious magic—its own poesis—through the endless
normality of its daily communications.
Consumption is then at the heart of mobile privatisation: its content as well
as its form: interweaving illusion and reality, commodification and possession,
passivity and activity, in a web of social, cultural and economic relations which
remain in essential tension. That tension—the tension of dependence and
freedom, integration and isolation, which is so powerfully revealed within
consumption practices—is one which now needs to be pursued further, only
this time in relation to the television audience.

---

Chapter 6
On the audience
The history of television studies has been one of constant agitation, quite
properly, around the question of the medium’s influence. There have been
arguments aplenty. The pendulum has swung between competing positions.
The unfathomable complexities of the audience’s significance (and how to
understand it) have been raised by those defeated by what, on the face of it,
seem to be both the most obvious and the most important questions of all:
does television have any influence; does it matter what people watch?
Recent reviews (Curran, 1990; Morley, 1989; Fejes, 1984; Moores, 1990)
have documented the pattern and the disputes very well, though these
discussions sometimes seem to lose sight of the audience itself, perversely
preferring methodology to substance. We have been offered accounts of the
conflicts between behavioural and critical approaches, and pluralist and radical
approaches. We have had illustrations of the usefulness of different
methodologies and discussions of arguments about convergence and
revisionism. As Ien Ang points out (1991), the audience has become increasingly
problematic, not just for academic researchers, for whom it has tended to
become de-reified to the point of invisibility, but also for commercial concerns,
for whom it must be re-reified for them to maximise their share of it.
My argument in this chapter is based on a perception of audiences as
individual, social and cultural entities, and as, in Janice Radway’s terms,
‘nomadic’. Even as television audiences move in and out of televisual space
they are, literally, always present and in the present. Television audiences indeed
live in different overlapping but not always overdetermining spaces and times:
domestic spaces; national spaces; broadcasting and narrowcasting spaces;
biographical times; daily times; scheduled, spontaneous but also socio-
geological times: the times of the