DOMESTIC COMMUNICATION: TECHNOLOGIES AND MEANINGS

9 DOMESTIC COMMUNICATION: TECHNOLOGIES AND MEANINGS

1 This is an edited version of a paper written with R.Silverstone, which appeared in Media, Culture and Society, 12:1 (1990). The paper arose from our work on a project entitled ‘The Household uses of Information and Communication Technologies’, conducted at Brunel University’s Centre for Research in Innovation, Culture and Technology, under the directorship of Roger Silverstone, as part of the research Programme in Information and Communication Technology funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The research involved a detailed ethnography of the technological and cultural dynamics of life within twenty families in south-east England, focusing on questions of ICT use, and patterns of media consumption in a context of technological and social change. Further details of the study are reported in R.Silverstone, E.Hirsch and D.Morley, ‘Information technology and the moral economy of the household’, in R.Silverstone and E.Hirsch (eds), Consuming Technologies, London: Routledge, 1992, and in R.Silverstone. ‘Beneath the bottom line: households and information and communications technologies in an age of the consumer’, PICT Policy Research Paper no. 17 (1991). Further details of the project (which continues) are available from Professor Roger Silverstone, now at the Department of Media Studies, Sussex University.

2 See B.Gunter and M.Svennevig, Behind and In Front of the Screen, London: John Libbey, 1987, p. 79.

3 See ibid., p. 84, on the role of video and computer technology in displacing conflict

over programme choice into conflict over alternative uses of the television set. 4 See ibid., p. 86. 5 As one trade commentator notes, ‘Whereas in 1980 TV was a family mechanism, it

now provides a more personal service for each of the various members of the household. Consequently, specific segments and programmes are now being identified as the sole domain for discrete audiences’, Marketing Review. June 1987, p. 15; quoted in R.Paterson, ‘Family perspectives on broadcasting policy’, paper to BFI Summer School, 1987.

6 P.Palmer, The Lively Audience, London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. 7 See S.Moores, ‘The box on the dresser: memories of early radio’, Media, Culture and

Society 10 (1988), and S.Frith, ‘The pleasures of the hearth’, in J. Donald (ed.), Formations of Pleasure, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

8 Lindlof and Meyer, op. cit., p. 2.

NOTES 283

9 J.Bryce ‘Family time and television use’, in T.Lindlof, (ed.), Natural Audiences, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987, p. 137.

10 ibid. 11 My argument is that, given the sheer amount of time in which the television set is

‘on’ in the main living-room of most Western households, television viewing (and other uses of domestic communication technologies) will be most productively examined in and through its integration with a variety of domestic practices. A number of examples can be offered which may illuminate the point: both Palmer, op. cit., and Leoncio Barrios (see his essay in J.Lull (ed.), World Families Watch Television, Newbury Park and London: Sage, 1988) have examined the variety of ways in which children integrate their television viewing into their play activity. In

a similar vein, Lull points to the integration, for many adolescents, of television viewing (or music) and homework and, for many families, the integration not only of viewing and eating, but of specific programme ‘slots’ and specific mealtimes (cf. Lull, op. cit., pp. 4 and 14–15). Similarly, Traudt and Lont offer a useful analysis of the ways in which parental monitoring of children’s television viewing needs to be seen as a key mode of their socialization practices (see P.Traudt and C.Lont, ‘Media logic in use’, in Lindlof (ed.), Natural Audiences, pp. 170 ff.; see also P.Simpson (ed.), Parents Talking Television, London: Comedia, 1987).

12 See J.Lull’s ‘Conclusion’ to Lull, op. cit.; E.Medrich ‘Constant television: a background to daily life’, Journal of Communication 26:3 (1979); R.Kubey, ‘Television use in everyday life’, Journal of Communication, Summer 1986; C. Lodziak, The Power of Television, London: Frances Pinter, 1987.

13 D.Noble; quoted in B.Keen, ‘Play it again Sony: home video technology’, Science as Culture 1:9 (1988). 14 e.g., Michael Green, Chairman of Carlton Communications, one of the most successful of the new generation of television entrepreneurs, was quoted as follows: ‘The philosophy that has driven me is that the television set is an underutilised force. Half of modern video’s output is not theatrical or entertainment, it is useful: how-to-do-it tapes, kid’s tapes. Did you know that there are more video outlets in Britain than bookshops? It is today’s form. I think of television as a manufacturing process. What is the difference between a television programme and this lighter?’, The Independent, 30 March 1988.

15 D.Milier, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 16 As Silverstone has argued elsewhere, ‘we ought to be interested in the relationship

between public and private “texts”, in the parallel and competing rhetorics (and mythologies) of the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless, in the cultural stratification of everyday life. And in this stratified world we need to establish how much room there is for doing what and by whom, in the transformations of fashion into style, commodities into objects, and broadcasts into action and gossip. It is in these transformations that we can gain a measure of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary culture and its asymmetries. And it is this formulation, rather than the classic “who says what in which channel to whom and with what effect” which should now orient out research’ (quoted in R.Silverstone, ‘Television and everyday life: towards an anthropology of the television audience’, in M.Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication: The New Imperatives, London: Sage, 1990).

17 See, for example, Schroder 1987; Jensen 1987; Jensen and Rosengren 1990 in bibliography.

284 NOTES

18 See J.Ellis, Visible Fictions, London: Routledge, 1982 and Ang 1987. 19 T.Bennett and J.Woollacott, Bondand Beyond, London: Macmillan, 1987; L.

Grossberg, ‘The in-difference of television’, Screen 28:2 (1987); N.Browne, ‘Political economy of the television supertext’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9 (1984).

20 See also Silverstone, op. cit. 21 C.Brunsdon, ‘Text and audience’, in E.Seiter et al. (eds), Remote Control, London:

Routledge, 1989. 22 ibid. 23 ibid. 24 James Anderson rightly points to the way in which ‘the interpretive process of

meaning construction does not end with the process of reception…. Meaning construction…is an ongoing process which reaches well beyond the moment of reception…we also (re)interpret media content retrospectively in the subsequent uses we have for it. Interpretation certainly begins in the practices of reception…. But further interpretation awaits an occasion in which media content is seen to have some utility’ (J.Anderson, ‘Commentary on qualitative research’, in Lull, op. cit., p. 167).

25 The theoretical background to this point is developed in Pêcheux’s concept of ‘interdiscursive space’ (see M Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, London: Macmillan, 1982).

26 M.McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. 27 P.Greenfield, Mind and Media, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 28 P.Collett and R.Lamb, ‘Watching people watching television’, report to the

Independent Broadcasting Authority, 1986. 29 See J.Lull, ‘The social uses of television’, Human Communication Research 6:3 (1980). 30 See Silverstone, op. cit. 31 See R.H.Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1987. 32 See Silverstone, op. cit., for a fuller treatment of these issues. 33 P.Rieoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1984. 34 See Boddy 1986, and Scannell 1988 in bibliography. 35 See Paterson 1987 in bibliography. 36 See C.Geraghty, The continuous serial’, in R.Dyer et al. (eds), Coronation Street,

London: British Film Institute, 1980; and D.Hobson, Crossroads: Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen, 1982.

37 D.Hobson and R.Wohl, ‘Mass communication and para-social interactions’, Psychiatry 19:3 (1956):215–29. 38 See Hobson 1982 in bibliography. 39 See I.Ang, Watching ‘Dallas’, London: Methuen, 1985. 40 See Morley 1980 in bibliography. 41 G.Lakoff and M.Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980. 42 J.Lewis, ‘Decoding television news’, in P, Drummond and R.Paterson (eds), Television in Transition, London: British Film Institute, 1985. 43 S.J.Smith, ‘News and the dissem mination of fear’, in J.Burgess and J.R.Gold (eds), Geography, the Media and Popular Culture, London: Croom Helm, 1985.

NOTES 285

44 M.de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 45 M.Douglas and B.Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. 46 J.Gershuny, ‘The leisure principle’, New Society, 13 February 1987; J. Gershuny and 1. Miles, The New Service Economy, London: Frances Pinter, 1983. 47 Cf.R.Pahl, Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. 48 See N.Garnham ‘Contribution to a political economy of mass communication’, in

R.Collins et al., (eds), Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, London: Sage, 1986. See also Hartley, op. cit., and J.Fiske, Television Culture, London: Methuen, 1987.

49 S.Hall, ‘Encoding/decoding television discourse’, reprinted in S.Hall et al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, 1981. 50 Miller, Material Culture, p. 175. 51 See Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods. 52 M.Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 53 Miller, op. cit., p. 212. 54 ibid., p. 156. 55 ibid., pp. 145–6.

PRIVATE WORLDS AND GENDERED TECHNOLOGIES

1 This paper has benefited from Roger Silverstone’s comments on an earlier draft, for which I am grateful. Parts of the paper draw on material previously used in a Brunel University Discussion Paper, ‘Families, technologies and consumption’, written jointly with Roger Silverstone, Andrea Dahlberg, and Sonia Livingstone. Other parts draw on material from ‘Families and their technologies: two ethnographic portraits’, written jointly with Roger Silverstone, which appeared in T.Putnam and C.Newton (eds), Household Choices, London: Futures Publications, 1990.

2 For the rationale for choosing to work with nuclear families (as the project did) rather than with any other types of household, see Morley and Silverstone 1990 in bibliography.

3 For a discussion on the methodological issues necessarily at stake in ethnographic work of this type, see Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1991 in bibliography.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

1 For a fascinating collection of essays exploring the social construction of temporality, see John Hassard (ed.), The Sociology of Time, London: Macmillan, 1990.

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WHERE THE GLOBAL MEETS THE LOCAL

1 The theoretical backdrop to the approach taken in this chapter is derived in some part from the work of Fernand Braudel (see especially his Civilisation and Capitalism: The Perspective of the World, London: William Collins, 1988). Most particularly, my emphasis here is on attempting to transcend the sterile dicho tomy, characterized by Immanuel Wallerstein, between, on the one hand, the limitations of the ‘idiographic’, empirical, ‘concrete’ perspective of both narrative history and classical anthropology and, on the other hand, the absurdities of the ‘nomothetic’ approach which has traditionally dominated the social sciences in their search for the transcendental laws of social life (see Wallerstein’s Unthinking Social Science, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, for an exposition of this argument). The attempt made here to reconceptualize the relation of the ‘micro-’ and the ‘macro-’ levels of analysis (to relate ‘event’, ‘conjuncture’ and ‘structure’, in Braudel’s terms) is in many ways parallel to that offered by the analyses collected together in K.Knorr- Cetina and A.V.Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro-and Macro- Sociologies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

2 See Seaman (1992) for a recent critique of ‘active audience theory’ which entirely fails to grasp the original point of the analysis of popular culture and media audiences. In the wake of the emerging critique of ‘populism’ in cultural studies, the pendulum of intellectual fashion seems to be swinging fast. A number of voices, besides Seaman’s, can now be heard issuing clarion calls for a return to the ‘old certainties’ of political economy and conspiracy theory and to models of imposed ‘dominant ideologies’ which seem to be quite innocent of any recognition of the complexities of the concept of hegemony.