Television and Everyday Life

7
TELEVISION, TECHNOLOGY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
1
One needs to be careful here, for the concept of ‘objectification’ actually is a more
subtle and less evaluative one in Marxist theory, referring as it does to the basic processes
by and through which the structures of (everyday) social life are defined and maintained.
Agnes Heller’s (1984) discussion of everyday life takes as its starting point this more
basic sense of objectification and avoids the evaluative connotations implied by
‘reification’.
2
As it happens Fiske also offers a misreading of Lefebvre in the same chapter, offering
an edited quote from 
Everyday Life in the Modern World
which excludes from a
continuous paragraph, Lefebvre’s reference to the work and power of ideology (Fiske,
1989a, 37; Lefebvre, 1984, 31–2).
3
‘Today’s consumer culture represents neither a lapse of control nor the institution of
more rigid controls, but rather their underpinning by a flexible underlying generative
structure which can both handle formal control and de-control and facilitate an easy
change of gears between them’ (Featherstone, 1991, 27).
4
Ordinariness might be opposed to the ‘popular’ (Fiske) and the ‘mediocre’ (Lefebvre)
as a way of characterising everyday life. It appears to me to be both sociologically
more accurate and evaluatively less extreme.
5
In my first excursion into these issues (Silverstone, 1981) I rather cavalierly and
incorrectly opposed myth to ideology in an attempt to distance an anthropological and
structuralist account of contemporary culture from a more politicised and, originally at
least, a literary one. It was a mistake.
6
‘Urban form is no longer designated by a line of demarcation between here and there,
but has become synonymous with the programming of a “time-schedule”… In this
realm of deceptive appearances, where the populating of transportation and transmission
time supplants the populating of space and habitation, inertia revives an old sedentariness
(the persistence of urban sites). With the advent of instantaneous
communications…arrival supplants departure: everything arrives without necessarily
having to depart’ (Virilio, n. d., 19).
7
Yet it is worth noting that the author of a recent history of the American suburb notes
that the suburb is becoming increasingly city-like: more diverse socially, and more
threatened by the cultural and environmental instabilities that have previously been
confined to the city (Marsh, 1990, 187).
8
John Fiske (1989a) and others have suggested that shopping malls also provide spaces
for their reappropriation through the tactics of the young or the disadvantaged. Such
activities, while they might signify the expression of alternative and contrary freedoms,
nevertheless do not alter the strategic significance of the mall as a domestic temple, as
a shrine to consumption.

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References
Adams, John (ed.) (1980) 
Institutional Economics: Contributions to the Development
of Holistic Economics,
Boston, Martinus Nijhoff.
Adorno, Theodor (1957) ‘Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture’, in Rosenberg,
Bernard and White, David Manning (eds) 
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America,
New York, Free Press, 474–88.
——(1991) 
The Culture Industry,
Bernstein, J.M. (ed.), London, Routledge.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1986) ‘The ‘Form’ of Substance: The Senate Watergate
Hearings as Ritual’, in Ball-Rokeach, Sandra and Cantor, Muriel (eds) 
Media
Audiences and Social Structure,
Newbury Park, Sage, 243–51.
Anderson, Benedict (1983)