Views on Television and Domesticity

Behind and in front of the screen: television’s invovlvement with family life by Barrie Gunter and Michael Svennevig, John Libbey & company ltd, London, 1987

·         Pg51 ‘effects of tv… divided into 3 main categories:’ family life effecting children’s expectations, instructional to adults, impact on family member’s interaction and closeness

·         ‘current standard of living of family members [making dissatisfied] through its frequent portrayal of families who have limitless wealth and ultra glamorous lifestyles’

Gunter and Svennevig (1987) the ideology built into the differential representation for wealthy families, who are usually unhappy, compared to poor families who are usually seen as contented, ‘the significance of television families for the audience and the lessons about family life which they present can only be inferred

Open The box by Jane Root, comedia in association with channel 4

·         Pg 34 ‘many people have a highly emotional involvement with television’

·         ‘television, the viewers says, is a moving experience’

·         John Ellis in ‘Visible Fictions’ suggest that tv only requires ‘short bursts of attention’

·         Pg29 ‘struggling to concentrate through the filter of family activities’

·         ‘keeping the set switched on, without even trying to take in anything on the screen’ ‘becomes a filter behind conversations and domestic events’ ‘used like this…[tv is] a constant presence inhabiting the sitting room’

Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: visual culture and public space, duke university press, durham and London 2001

·         Pg1 ‘we leave the house-the store, the waiting room, the bar, the train station, the airport… sites of commerce bureaucracy and community, constituting the landscape of public life today’

·         ‘tv enters the everyday built environment under numerous guises’

·         ‘point of purchase video’ in stores

·         ‘we don’t always pay much attention to these various forms of ambient television… they can teach us a great deal about the power politics of spectatorship and commerce in contemporary public space’

·         ‘the screen serves site specific purposes, its placement and use carrying out local tasks and channelling larger socio-economic forces into the environment’

Make Room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America by Lynn spigel, The university of Chicago press, Chicago and London 1992

·         Pg1’its installation into the domestic space in the years following WW2. During this period the primary site of exhibition for spectator amusements was transferred from the public space of the movie theatre to the private space of the home’

·         Pg 2 ‘the more general obsession with the reconstruction of family life \AN DOMESTIC IDEALS… invested an enormous amount of cultural capitalto form a family and live out a set of highly structures gender and generational roles’

·         Pg 5‘women, however, are systematically marginalised in tv history.According to the the assumptions of currenthistorical pardigms, the woman is simply the receiver of the television text-the one to whom the advertiser promotes products’

·         Sitcom as a hybrid productlegitimate and vaudeville theatrical traditions

·         Bourgeouis sitting room as the site for the theatrical construction of the family

Televison and everyday life by Roger Silverstone, routledge, London, 1994

·         Pg 24 ‘providing in its schedules models and and structures of domestic life, or at least certain versions of domestic life’

·         ‘our intergration into a consumer culture through which our domesticity is both constructed and displayed’ – constant consumption fo television

·         ‘an element in the private culture of the home; gendered, aged, multiply dispersed in differently occupied spaces; differentially connected to a second technology’

·         ‘that domestic life, both in ideal and reality is…. A cultural and historical phenomenom… the creation of a bourgeouis class newly risen to commercial and cultural prominence in the early nineteenth century. That class was able to create and display a private world, sepearte from the world of affairs; a world in which personal pleasures and social preoccupations could be sustained and protected, shielded from the attentions of the public.

·         Pg 25 The interior ‘is still a place where the illusions of control… are fundamental, even in their absence’

·         ‘our interiors are not just physical spaces. They are social, economic, cultural and political spaces’

·         ‘running through the dynamic of these complex shifts and instabilities [of social relations of the family and change], informing them, supporting them, reflecting them, reflecting on them and reassuring us about them, is television’

·         ‘domesticxity itself is problematic. Our domesticity is the product of historically defined and constantly shifting relationship between public and private spaces and cultures’

·         ‘different dimensions of our domesticity as home, family and household’

·         Pg 26 ‘seen as breaking down’

·         ‘Home is a construct… It is the object of more or less intense emotion. It is where we belong’

·         ‘Attachment to place and being able to be placed are crucial elements in contemporary life, the more so as we begin to recognise how vulnerable and difficult our lives are becoming’

·         Pg 27 ‘places are human spaces, the focus of experience and intention, memory and desire.’

·         ‘Home is a relational concept’

Walter Benjamin 1976 (1983)

·         ‘The private citizen who in the office took reality into account, requires of the interior that it should support him in his illusions… from this sprang the phantasmagorias of the interior. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it he assembled the distant in space and time. His drawing room was a box in the world theatre’

Anne Buttimer(1980) home is intimately connected with ‘horizons of reach’ ‘the lived reciprocity of movement and rest, territory and range, security and adventure, housekeeping and husbandry, community building and social organistaion’

Giddens 1984 ‘reach’ is now disengaged from physical movement, Harvey 1989 it is infinitely extended through our involvement with the mass media

Doreen Massey, 1992 always ideological securities attached to the home

Barrett, 1980 ideological support of patriarchy embedded in the family

Heller 1984 ‘’Going Home’ should mean: returning to that firm position which we know, to which we are accustomed, where we feel safe, and where our emotional relationships are at their most intense’

David Seamon (1979) home as physical presence, familiarity, ritual, possession, control and restoration

Judith and Andrew Sixsmith 1990 –home divided into 3 experiential domains