Television and Everyday Life

4
THE TELE-TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM
1
‘The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a
setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that
the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is
transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is
distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing,
distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never
comes to an end’ (Heideggar, 1977, 16).
2
This is evident even in Michel Callon’s original formulation: ‘The actor network can
thus be distinguished from the traditional actors of sociology, a category generally
distinguished excluding any nonhuman component and whose internal structure is rarely

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Television and Everyday Life
assimilated to that of a network. An actor network is simultaneously an actor whose
activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine
and transform what it is made of (Callon, 1987, 93; and see Callon,
1986, 20ff.).
3
Knut Sørenson (1990, 17–18), in his study of the motor car in Norway, makes two
additional points in relation to actor-network theory in its strong form. The first is that
it underestimates the significance of ‘extra-scientific and technological’ institutions
and the second is that it underestimates the resilience of the established network
structures to subsequent actor initiated changes.
4
‘Such an analysis—focused on the consumer, extending its causal reach into other
socio-economic realms, open to various criteria for “betterness”—seems to me to be
essential in making sense out of the history not only of stove technology, but of all
technologies’ (Cowan, 1987, 273).
5
‘What is…significant is the place of the car in the only global system we have identified,
the system of substitutes; as a substitute for eroticism, for adventure, for living conditions
and for human contact in large towns the car is a pawn in the “system” that crumbles
away as soon as it has been identified’ (Lefebvre, 1984, 101).
6
On the motor car as a leading object, though not explicitly so, see for example: Barthes,
1972; Bayley, 1986; Flink, 1988; and for a national study of the emergence of the
motor car as a socio-technical system, see Sorenson, 1990.
7
‘Postmodernism is both a symptom and a powerful cultural image of the swing away
from the conceptualization of global culture less in terms of alleged homogenizing
processes (e.g. theories which present cultural imperialism, Americanization and mass
consumer culture as a proto-universal culture riding on the back of Western economic
and political domination) and more in terms of the diversity, variety and richness of
popular and local discourses, codes and practices which resist and play-back systemicity
and order’ (Featherstone, 1990, 2).
8
A number of recent publications have reviewed these various trends, both in relation to
the specific circumstances of Europe (e.g. Siune and Truetzschler, 1992) and more
widely, (e.g. Mattelart 
et al.,
1984).
9
See Eisenstein (1979, 704) ‘Since the advent of movable type, an enhanced
capacity to store and retrieve, preserve and transmit has kept pace with an
enhanced capacity to create and destroy, to innovate and outmode. The somewhat
chaotic appearance of modern Western culture owes as much, if not more, to the
duplicative powers of print as it does to the harnessing of new powers in the
past century.’
10
It is equally dangerous, of course, to pursue the opposite line: that is to discount
television (and other media) as immaterial to the kinds of social and cultural changes
currently being considered. This is what Lodziak (1986, 190–1) appears to be
arguing when he suggests that: ‘television’s “capturing of time-space” [is]
something other than it…appears. Our time-space is already “captured” as a
consequence of economic and state practices in a context which has been heavily
shaped by those practices.’
11
Bastide (1978) on the religions of Brazil; Parry and Bloch (1989) on money; Ferguson
(1990) on media technology; de Certeau (1984) on everyday life; Hebdige (1988) and
Miller (1987) on contemporary culture, all address, from one point of view or another,
this issue. In doing so they pick up a familiar theme in anthropology (e.g. Redfield,
1960) and history (e.g. Burke, 1978) which seeks to explore the relationship between
the great and the little tradition.
12
Haralovich (1988, 39–40) offers an analysis of ‘a historical conjuncture in which
institutions important to social and economic policies defined women as home-makers:
suburban housing, the consumer product industry and market research. 
Father Knows

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Notes
181
Best
and 
Leave it to Beaver
[two US sit-coms of the period] mediated this address to
the homemaker through their representation of middle class family life. They
appropriated historically specific gender traits in a realist mise-en-scène of the home to
create a comfortable, warm and stable family environment.’