Reading for Session 3 Seminar
Technologies of Everyday Life: A Narrative
Reading 1:
Roger Silverstone (1989) 'Let us then Return to the Murmuring of Everyday Practices: A Note on Michel de Certeau, Television and Everyday Life' in Technology, Culture and Society. Vol 6, Issue 1, pp. 77-94
Television, it might be suggested, is everyday life
- TVs are almost in every household in the western world
- They ca be found in bars, cafes, shopping malls etc.
- Their text and images, stories and stars provide much of the controversial currency of our daily lives.
- TVs fulfil our twin desires to influence and to decipher the consequences of that influence
...the most interesting and important work which has been conducted within audience studies in the last few years is that which has taken on board the questions raised about the flow of television, the positioning of the subject, the contextual determinations operating of different types of viewing of different media, alongside a close attention to the varieties of pattern of taste, response and interpretation on the part of specific members of the audience.
(Morley, 1987:28)
Daily life is not the domain of the manipulated mass, inert and passive; and consumption is not 'something done by sheep progressively immobilised and handled as a result of the growing mobility of media they conquer space.
(de Certeau, 1984: 165)
Everyday life is the site of 'guerilla warfare': of the oral against the literary; the voice against the text; the body against the machine; the consumer against the producer.
p. 79
We consume television not just in our relationship to the content of its transmission, but also in our relationship to it as a technology, as an object to be placed in our domestic environment and articulated into our private and public culture. Both sets of consumption practices involve us in some kind of creative work. Our individual and social identities are defined through them.
p. 80
The Scriptural and the Oral
Writing is a strategic activity of modern culture par excellence, occupying a place (the text on a blank page) in the exercise of power - the power to define, to organise, to control. Writing provides the model for the scientific laboratory, industry and the modern city (cf. Goody, 1977). Through writing, bodies (in fashion, car design, food) are defined, codified and controlled. Through writing (in the production of 'folklore', fables, history, in the sciences of language, in the definition of 'progress'), voices are incorporated into the dominant.
p. 83
On the other hand, the oral escapes and opposes. Voices and bodies express pleasure and pain. The oral occupies the spaces of experience and cultural memory: the spaces of everyday life. It lies outside and against the scriptural enterprise.
p. 83
The 'oral' is that which does not contribute to progress: reciprocally, the 'scriptural' is that which separates itself from the magic world of voices and tradition.
(de Certeau, 1984: 134)
de Certeau's celebrations of interstitial places no only allow us to think more critically about the precise role of television in the mediation between everyday life and the places occupied by the Other that is in science, politics or the generically inaccessible) but they also offer a possible route for the exploration of the relationship between television, as a medium, as institution and as technology, with its audience. Above all, the offer a possible framework for rethinking the problem of the television audience as a sociological and anthropological problem - and they hint at a possible methodology for dealing with it.
p. 84
Television and Everyday Life
The defensive/offensive tactics of television de Certeau discusses involve, above all, the construction, based of course on traditional forms and understandings, of boundaries and bridges, separating and linking the products of everyday life with the products of those whose places are guaranteed by the various institutions of contemporary society. Science, religion, law, politics, art and literature are mediated and transformed, converted and perverted, as they cross the border into everyday life.
p. 85
Television is both strategic and tactical, literary and oral, occupying both place and space. It displays in its narratives both the forms and the force of a moral and political order, and it provides in its rhetorics the raw material for the heterogeneous and indeterminant practices of the everyday.
p. 85
Television, Narrative, Rhetoric
TV must be understood as both the focus and expression of an enormous and endless amount of cultural work, in which the practices of the producers, the strategies of the texts and the practices of the receivers are all mutually implicated. TV creates the metaphors of everyday life in the models, the styles, the phrases which are the stuff of daily interaction, and it does so metaphorically, its texts standing in an 'as-if' relation to the reality to the words and image of its acts of representation.
p. 86
TV is a supremely rhetorical medium. Its texts reveal an extraordinarily complex interplay of figurative devices, inscribed in and through its word and images, and in their juxtaposition. Each television genre will develop its rhetorical strategies, of course, from the particular metaphors of the title sequence, to the stylistic minutiae of the figurative images and the tropes of commentary and dialogue. Its manifest variety, the endless profusion of novelty, the significant insignificances of form and character, in drama, in news and in documentary, mark TV as occupying the heartland of the rhetorical displays of contemporary culture.
p. 89
The rhetorical work of TV is indeed almost entirely understood, predictable and familiar, yet it can spark audience into creative work, to new thoughts and meanings, indeed into the new commonplaces of everyday life. (Billig, 1987)
p. 90
Reading 2:
Sarah Pink & Kerstin Mackley 2013) 'Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life' in Media, Culture & Society, Vol.35(6), pp. 677-691
We are concerned with how media are situated as part of the routine, habitual, tacit, normally unspoken sensitivities of everyday life in the home. This refers in part to how people use media content consciously to create the sensory and experiential environment of the home. Yet our main focus is on how, through mundane and not usually spoken about routines of everyday living, media are engaged for affective and embodied ways of making the home ‘feel right’.
p. 678
The practical re-workings of home-media technologies thus create the material context through which routine ways of switching on and off media technologies and content, and the temporalities that these actions operate in relation to, become part of how everyday life is lived. They thus become constituents of the experiential context of the processes through which media are used and through which their presence is ‘felt’.
p. 679
In media studies, the treatment of media as part of the routines of everyday life has been notably developed through a focus on domestication and appropriation. For example, concerning questions related to broadcast programming, David Morley has pointed out how media ‘do not simply have effects on the home, but have rather to be analyzed in terms of how they come to be embedded within pre-existing domestic routines’ (2000: 86) as well as integral to the ‘spatial geography’ of the home (2000: 90).
p. 680
To some extent, routine uses of media to make the home ‘feel right’ do involve using music, radio or TV to create the right ‘atmosphere’. Existing work shows how radio can create part of the ‘texture’ (Tacchi, 1998) and affect of everyday life (Tacchi, 2009), how music is used to create a sense of self and home (Pink, 2004, 2012b), and reveals ‘the imaginative consequences of experiencing temporal “elsewheres” when listening to the music of previous periods or dead performers’ (Keightly, 2012: 16, referring to Pickering, 2012).
p, 680
People ‘know’ how their lives are inextricable from media but their ways of knowing are often embodied and sensory rather than always linguistic. We learned how media are part of everyday routines, precisely because participants could tell or show us how. We argue that the relevance of understanding media from this perspective is two-fold: it enables us to comprehend the situatedness of media in everyday life in ways that acknowledge but go beyond the focus on its content; and, by showing us how media are part of the ways that the routines of everyday life emerge and change, it indicates how media might enable sites for intervention.
p. 682
We approach media in everyday life (here, in the home) through three related analytical prisms: environment/place; movement/practice; perception/sensory embodied experience. Each prism, which guides both the research process and the analysis of the materials, also represents a recent ‘turn’ in contemporary social theory. Our attention to a theory of place understands ‘place’ from two perspectives, both of which depart from the association of place with locality, as well as from the idea that place is the ‘occupation’ of empty space, to see it as what the geographer Doreen Massey has termed a ‘constellation of processes’ (2005: 41). Here place, seen in an abstract sense as a way to comprehend the home as an environment, can be understood as representing the coming together of the multiple processes and movements of things that converge in ways that are constantly shifting and changing, to constitute home. While homes do usually (and did in our sample) include the buildings we call a house, a house alone is not a home and thus does not singularly define home. Instead, our interest is in how a series of tangible, intangible, material, human and other flows become, as Ingold (e.g. 2008) puts it, ‘entangled’ in the constitution of home as place.
p. 683
Turning again to Ingold, through the idea that place is made through the entanglement of the lines of movement of persons and things (see Ingold, 2007, 2011), we can start to consider how, as people move through the home as a place, encounter other persons and things, they become co-implicated with them as their trajectories become entangled. This happens, for instance, with an iPhone, the television sets that are switched on and off as people coincide with them, other humans, breakfast, the ironing, and more as they circulate around/through the home.
p. 683
As the fieldwork developed, two related themes emerged: first, that people’s routes through the home emerged as purposeful and habitual; and, second, how digital and other media accompanied, accommodated, structured or necessitated these everyday routines.
p. 684
In the example of Alan’s home, media uses and switching technologies off at the socket were mutually sustaining activities; they also, however, created the home as a particular environment in relation to media being on/off. Media remain part of the home even when their content is not active. Therefore we might see their embedding in routines as being related to their changing and differing statuses, as being ‘off’, ‘on standby’ or actively mediating content. We have found, among our sample, that while bedtime routines vary in detail, in principle they involve patterns of switching on and off that signify a transition, making the home feel right at night.
p. 684
Media use is, moreover, embedded in what is a characteristic bed time routine of checking, switching off and switching on (usually) electric devices as media and other technologies, lighting and water are habitually used by many of the participants as they move through their homes on their way to bed, making place as they move. These routes and routines enable people to transform their home from an evening to a night environment in which they ‘feel right’ in part because the routine has been accomplished. Media thus play a role in this everydayness, and in making the night-time home feel right.
p. 685
‘On’ is not a fixed category when it comes to media technologies. Instead, the on/off-ness of media might be better thought of as being associated with a quality of the home feeling ‘right’, and this, we suggest, is produced at least in part by the routine ways in which switching on and off, timing and checking are achieved. Indeed although people switch media off in habitual ways, the question of if devices are switched off/on standby or charging, is usually related to the contingencies of the particular environments of which they are part and what people need to do in order to make the home feel right (including the need to accomplish practical things like charging laptops and mobile phones).
p. 686
Our theoretical interest is in advancing the argument that our lives have become ‘media saturated’ in the sense that it is not simply media content that is embedded in the ways we experience the world and make place on an everyday basis. Rather, we also make and experience place with media technologies by engaging their capacities to be on/off and as such helping create environments that ‘feel right’ in creative, diverse and innovative ways. p. 689
In different households media are embedded in bedtime and morning routines in different ways, media are on/off differently and people’s attentiveness to and relationships with content vary. Yet media are often inseparable from such routines and the routes of movement around the home required to complete them. These routines and routes are not fixed and unchanging, or unchangeable, they are part of the ongoing processes through which place is made.
p. 689
Television, it might be suggested, is everyday life
- TVs are almost in every household in the western world
- They ca be found in bars, cafes, shopping malls etc.
- Their text and images, stories and stars provide much of the controversial currency of our daily lives.
- TVs fulfil our twin desires to influence and to decipher the consequences of that influence
...the most interesting and important work which has been conducted within audience studies in the last few years is that which has taken on board the questions raised about the flow of television, the positioning of the subject, the contextual determinations operating of different types of viewing of different media, alongside a close attention to the varieties of pattern of taste, response and interpretation on the part of specific members of the audience.
(Morley, 1987:28)
Daily life is not the domain of the manipulated mass, inert and passive; and consumption is not 'something done by sheep progressively immobilised and handled as a result of the growing mobility of media they conquer space.
(de Certeau, 1984: 165)
Everyday life is the site of 'guerilla warfare': of the oral against the literary; the voice against the text; the body against the machine; the consumer against the producer.
p. 79
We consume television not just in our relationship to the content of its transmission, but also in our relationship to it as a technology, as an object to be placed in our domestic environment and articulated into our private and public culture. Both sets of consumption practices involve us in some kind of creative work. Our individual and social identities are defined through them.
p. 80
The Scriptural and the Oral
Writing is a strategic activity of modern culture par excellence, occupying a place (the text on a blank page) in the exercise of power - the power to define, to organise, to control. Writing provides the model for the scientific laboratory, industry and the modern city (cf. Goody, 1977). Through writing, bodies (in fashion, car design, food) are defined, codified and controlled. Through writing (in the production of 'folklore', fables, history, in the sciences of language, in the definition of 'progress'), voices are incorporated into the dominant.
p. 83
On the other hand, the oral escapes and opposes. Voices and bodies express pleasure and pain. The oral occupies the spaces of experience and cultural memory: the spaces of everyday life. It lies outside and against the scriptural enterprise.
p. 83
The 'oral' is that which does not contribute to progress: reciprocally, the 'scriptural' is that which separates itself from the magic world of voices and tradition.
(de Certeau, 1984: 134)
de Certeau's celebrations of interstitial places no only allow us to think more critically about the precise role of television in the mediation between everyday life and the places occupied by the Other that is in science, politics or the generically inaccessible) but they also offer a possible route for the exploration of the relationship between television, as a medium, as institution and as technology, with its audience. Above all, the offer a possible framework for rethinking the problem of the television audience as a sociological and anthropological problem - and they hint at a possible methodology for dealing with it.
p. 84
Television and Everyday Life
The defensive/offensive tactics of television de Certeau discusses involve, above all, the construction, based of course on traditional forms and understandings, of boundaries and bridges, separating and linking the products of everyday life with the products of those whose places are guaranteed by the various institutions of contemporary society. Science, religion, law, politics, art and literature are mediated and transformed, converted and perverted, as they cross the border into everyday life.
p. 85
Television is both strategic and tactical, literary and oral, occupying both place and space. It displays in its narratives both the forms and the force of a moral and political order, and it provides in its rhetorics the raw material for the heterogeneous and indeterminant practices of the everyday.
p. 85
Television, Narrative, Rhetoric
TV must be understood as both the focus and expression of an enormous and endless amount of cultural work, in which the practices of the producers, the strategies of the texts and the practices of the receivers are all mutually implicated. TV creates the metaphors of everyday life in the models, the styles, the phrases which are the stuff of daily interaction, and it does so metaphorically, its texts standing in an 'as-if' relation to the reality to the words and image of its acts of representation.
p. 86
 |
| p. 87 |
p. 89
The rhetorical work of TV is indeed almost entirely understood, predictable and familiar, yet it can spark audience into creative work, to new thoughts and meanings, indeed into the new commonplaces of everyday life. (Billig, 1987)
p. 90
 |
| p. 92 |
Reading 2:
Sarah Pink & Kerstin Mackley 2013) 'Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life' in Media, Culture & Society, Vol.35(6), pp. 677-691
We are concerned with how media are situated as part of the routine, habitual, tacit, normally unspoken sensitivities of everyday life in the home. This refers in part to how people use media content consciously to create the sensory and experiential environment of the home. Yet our main focus is on how, through mundane and not usually spoken about routines of everyday living, media are engaged for affective and embodied ways of making the home ‘feel right’.
p. 678
The practical re-workings of home-media technologies thus create the material context through which routine ways of switching on and off media technologies and content, and the temporalities that these actions operate in relation to, become part of how everyday life is lived. They thus become constituents of the experiential context of the processes through which media are used and through which their presence is ‘felt’.
p. 679
In media studies, the treatment of media as part of the routines of everyday life has been notably developed through a focus on domestication and appropriation. For example, concerning questions related to broadcast programming, David Morley has pointed out how media ‘do not simply have effects on the home, but have rather to be analyzed in terms of how they come to be embedded within pre-existing domestic routines’ (2000: 86) as well as integral to the ‘spatial geography’ of the home (2000: 90).
p. 680
To some extent, routine uses of media to make the home ‘feel right’ do involve using music, radio or TV to create the right ‘atmosphere’. Existing work shows how radio can create part of the ‘texture’ (Tacchi, 1998) and affect of everyday life (Tacchi, 2009), how music is used to create a sense of self and home (Pink, 2004, 2012b), and reveals ‘the imaginative consequences of experiencing temporal “elsewheres” when listening to the music of previous periods or dead performers’ (Keightly, 2012: 16, referring to Pickering, 2012).
p, 680
People ‘know’ how their lives are inextricable from media but their ways of knowing are often embodied and sensory rather than always linguistic. We learned how media are part of everyday routines, precisely because participants could tell or show us how. We argue that the relevance of understanding media from this perspective is two-fold: it enables us to comprehend the situatedness of media in everyday life in ways that acknowledge but go beyond the focus on its content; and, by showing us how media are part of the ways that the routines of everyday life emerge and change, it indicates how media might enable sites for intervention.
p. 682
We approach media in everyday life (here, in the home) through three related analytical prisms: environment/place; movement/practice; perception/sensory embodied experience. Each prism, which guides both the research process and the analysis of the materials, also represents a recent ‘turn’ in contemporary social theory. Our attention to a theory of place understands ‘place’ from two perspectives, both of which depart from the association of place with locality, as well as from the idea that place is the ‘occupation’ of empty space, to see it as what the geographer Doreen Massey has termed a ‘constellation of processes’ (2005: 41). Here place, seen in an abstract sense as a way to comprehend the home as an environment, can be understood as representing the coming together of the multiple processes and movements of things that converge in ways that are constantly shifting and changing, to constitute home. While homes do usually (and did in our sample) include the buildings we call a house, a house alone is not a home and thus does not singularly define home. Instead, our interest is in how a series of tangible, intangible, material, human and other flows become, as Ingold (e.g. 2008) puts it, ‘entangled’ in the constitution of home as place.
p. 683
Turning again to Ingold, through the idea that place is made through the entanglement of the lines of movement of persons and things (see Ingold, 2007, 2011), we can start to consider how, as people move through the home as a place, encounter other persons and things, they become co-implicated with them as their trajectories become entangled. This happens, for instance, with an iPhone, the television sets that are switched on and off as people coincide with them, other humans, breakfast, the ironing, and more as they circulate around/through the home.
p. 683
As the fieldwork developed, two related themes emerged: first, that people’s routes through the home emerged as purposeful and habitual; and, second, how digital and other media accompanied, accommodated, structured or necessitated these everyday routines.
p. 684
In the example of Alan’s home, media uses and switching technologies off at the socket were mutually sustaining activities; they also, however, created the home as a particular environment in relation to media being on/off. Media remain part of the home even when their content is not active. Therefore we might see their embedding in routines as being related to their changing and differing statuses, as being ‘off’, ‘on standby’ or actively mediating content. We have found, among our sample, that while bedtime routines vary in detail, in principle they involve patterns of switching on and off that signify a transition, making the home feel right at night.
p. 684
Media use is, moreover, embedded in what is a characteristic bed time routine of checking, switching off and switching on (usually) electric devices as media and other technologies, lighting and water are habitually used by many of the participants as they move through their homes on their way to bed, making place as they move. These routes and routines enable people to transform their home from an evening to a night environment in which they ‘feel right’ in part because the routine has been accomplished. Media thus play a role in this everydayness, and in making the night-time home feel right.
p. 685
‘On’ is not a fixed category when it comes to media technologies. Instead, the on/off-ness of media might be better thought of as being associated with a quality of the home feeling ‘right’, and this, we suggest, is produced at least in part by the routine ways in which switching on and off, timing and checking are achieved. Indeed although people switch media off in habitual ways, the question of if devices are switched off/on standby or charging, is usually related to the contingencies of the particular environments of which they are part and what people need to do in order to make the home feel right (including the need to accomplish practical things like charging laptops and mobile phones).
p. 686
Our theoretical interest is in advancing the argument that our lives have become ‘media saturated’ in the sense that it is not simply media content that is embedded in the ways we experience the world and make place on an everyday basis. Rather, we also make and experience place with media technologies by engaging their capacities to be on/off and as such helping create environments that ‘feel right’ in creative, diverse and innovative ways. p. 689
In different households media are embedded in bedtime and morning routines in different ways, media are on/off differently and people’s attentiveness to and relationships with content vary. Yet media are often inseparable from such routines and the routes of movement around the home required to complete them. These routines and routes are not fixed and unchanging, or unchangeable, they are part of the ongoing processes through which place is made.
p. 689
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