TELEVISION AND EVERYDAY LIFE: THE CONTEXT OF VIEWING

TELEVISION AND EVERYDAY LIFE: THE CONTEXT OF VIEWING

One of the most important advances in recent audience work has been the growing recognition of the importance of the context of reception, specifically, in the case of television, the domestic context. Despite frequent moral panics about television and the family, we still know very little about how families as distinct from individuals (who, after all, mostly live in families or households of some kind) interact with and use television in their everyday lives, engaging in rule-governed activity. As we have argued elsewhere (Morley and Silverstone, 1990), the household or family, as the basic unit of domestic consumption offers the most appropriate context for the naturalistic investigation of the consumption and production of televisual (and other) meanings. In common usage, “watching TV” is the ill-defined shorthand term for the multiplicity of situated practices and experiences in which TV audiencehood is embedded. Moreover, we already know, for example, that “pure” television viewing is a relatively rare occurrence. Thus, Gunter and Svennevig (1987:12–13) quote surveys showing variously

50 and 64 per cent of viewers as reporting that they usually watch television while doing something else at the same time. Equally, having

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the set on, or the presence of people in front of the set can mean “a hundred different things” (Towler, 1986). In a similar vein, Bryce (1987) notes that “television viewing” is only “one possible label for

a variety of family activities” (Bryce, 1987:137). Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau (1984), Silverstone (1989:77) has argued elsewhere that

television is everyday life. To study the one is at the same time to study the other. There are TV sets in almost every household in the western world…. Their texts and their images, their stories and their stars provide much of the conversational currency of our daily lives. TV has been much studied.

Yet it is precisely this integration into the daily lives of those who watch it which has somehow slipped through the net of academic enquiry.

Our premise, therefore, is that the analysis of broadcasting must be reformulated to take into account its inscription within the routines of everyday life and the interweaving of domestic and public discourses, which calls for the use of qualitative techniques. Both Bausinger (1984) and Grossberg (1987) offer useful general insights into the ways in which media content is integrated into everyday communication practices in complex forms of interdiscursivity. In particular, Bausinger (1984) reminds us that our analysis needs to deal not with any given medium in isolation, but rather with the “media ensemble” of the household. Moreover, he notes, any given medium is rarely used with full concentration. The media, in general, are an integral part of the everyday, so that the process of viewing or reading (beyond the immediate moment of consumption) is extended into a longer process of conversation and social dialogue through which media materials are “digested.”

Among previous empirical studies, Lindlof (1987) offers a fascinating collection of materials on media consumption from a naturalistic perspective (see in particular the articles by Bryce, Traudt and Lont, and Anderson). Brodie and Stoneman (1983) and Wolf et al. (1982), further, develop a contextualist perspective on television viewing within family interaction. Goodman (1983) develops a rules-based analysis of viewing from a “family systems” perspective derived from family therapy. Lull’s (1980; 1988a) work on family viewing, similarly, follows

a rules-based perspective, analysing viewing selection procedures and family communication patterns as part of a broad analysis of the social

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uses of television. From a feminist perspective, the work of Hobson (1982), Ang (1985), Brunsdon (1981), Radway (1984), Seiter et al. (1989a), and Gray (1987) pursues the gendering of media consumption practices in relation to various forms of feminine subjectivity. Morley (1986) offers an analysis of gendered viewing practices and family dynamics, which, while not using strictly ethnographic techniques, begins to explore the context of family life within which viewing practices must be understood. In our present research (Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone et al., 1989), repudiating technologically determinist arguments about the impact of new communication technologies on “society,” the questions include how household structure and domestic culture affect the perceived salience of these technologies, how these technologies are domesticated by their users (Bryce, 1987), and how the uses of technologies are shaped by the exigencies of their “local” environment (Lindlof and Meyer, 1987; see also Lull, 1988a, for an analysis of cultural differences in international television viewing practices).

If the activity of television viewing is a rule-governed process, 1 the primary concern of the ethnographer becomes one of explicating the rules which govern and facilitate this process. As Anderson (1987a:164) puts it, “family viewing, for example, is no more casual and spontaneous than the family dinner. It is accomplished by competent actors with great improvisational skill.” Family behavior around the dining table has long served as the focal point for an understanding of family functioning (Goodman, 1983). Thus, eating habits have been analysed in terms of the rules governing how people are organized around the table, the regulation of manners, the questions of who cooks, prepares, and serves different categories of food, and how meal-time conversations are managed. Goodman’s point is that, given the centrality of television in many homes, we can usefully make a parallel study of the rules governing family viewing—how the seating pattern is arranged, who watches what with whom, who chooses programs, and what kinds of talk are defined as appropriate during viewing.

The rules perspective returns us to the focus on everyday communication practices. Following Schutz (1963:59), we suggest that “the exploration of the general principles according to which man [sic] in daily life organises his experiences…is the first task of the methodology of the social sciences.” Such a phenomenological perspective implies systematically addressing audience activity in its natural setting, using qualitative methods as tools for the collection of

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naturalistic data, and giving priority to the analysis of categories that can be derived from the respondents’ own conceptual frameworks. The rules or logics-in-use of situated everyday behavior must be studied to understand how the various media are incorporated into, and mobilized within, private worlds. An understanding of family dynamics, of the structures of daily life, and of the family system (Gorrell-Barnes, 1985) is a necessary precondition for understanding the place of television (or any other communication technology) in the household.

The material and symbolic dimensions of television, thus, come together in the practices of everyday life which serve to display both goods and cultural competence, both in private and in public. If we are to make sense of the significance of such media-related activities, which, after all, are key to understanding contemporary culture, then we have to take seriously their varied and specific forms. From this follows the case for an anthropology of the television audience, and for a commitment to ethnography as an empirical method.