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While reading this book for review, I was 'market researched' by a, until recently, pre-eminent media ratings company. The interviewer, sounding relieved at having found a 'grocery buyer' who was willing to do a survey, launched into the rationale for the research: it was an inquiry into the adaptation of 'advanced media technology' in Australian homes. She then asked me a series of anodyne questions about my media consumption, including whether I had internet access at home, had cable or pay tv connected, and if I had "a television set over one metre in size".
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This very timely interruption to reading TV Living made it beautifully apparent what a rare and valuable text this book is. Published in 1999, the book presents the findings of a unique study of the tv audience by the British Film Institute (BFI). This research was conducted by annual surveys of 500+ British viewers over the period 1991-96. Working against the kind of quantitative audience research (what rather than how we watch) most visible in commercial ratings, the qualitative approach of Gauntlett and Hill -- both media studies lecturers in the UK and BFI Research Fellows -- demonstrates the rich payoff of in-depth and longitudinal media research. The authors doggedly refuse to fit viewers into pre-determined categories, and they abstain from portraying even the most compulsive viewers as deviant media-manipulated junkies. In this, the authors quite radically defuse moral (that is, class) panics over media consumption, resisting any 'othering' of viewers who do not fit the ideal of the active and contemplative viewer, rationally choosing their balanced diet of uplifting educational programming. The authors instead use this panoramic data far more usefully to discuss the ways that patterns of media use (and disuse) fit with temporal structures of everyday life in the rhythms of work, housework, family interaction and wider social interaction. In doing so it builds on previous cultural studies of tv audiences (Morley, Ang, Brunsdon, etc), turning out a coherent and well-written set of thematic chapters that offer fresh insights into some of the most well-rehearsed themes in media and cultural studies: gender, identity, violence, news, and the social impacts of technology.
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The book's introduction reflects on the parallels between the BFI study and the popular 7UP series. TV Living is thus framed within the questions raised by the producers and real-life subjects of the tv series: themes of class, making do in everyday life, and belonging. (I wondered at this point if the book had been published a year or two later if The Royle Family might not provide a better tv equivalent).
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The first chapter discusses how television is used to mark and organise time in domestic space, and how the televisual is part of ritualised time. This is followed by chapters on news consumption and everyday life, social interaction, media technology in the home, and the elderly and retired audience. The two strongest and most original chapters finish the book, clearly emerging from the authors' research strengths in these areas: the representation of gender and violence.
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A telling portrait of work in (post-)Thatcherite Britain emerges throughout the study, as almost all the respondents describe how tv has helped them negotiate experiences of overwork, redundancy, under- and unemployment. Television is shown to be firmly embedded in everyday life as non-work activity -- even for people who actually work in media industries -- allowing access to powerful alternative spheres of fantasy, comedy, moral retribution and self-reflexive critiques of popular culture.
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For Australian readers, the discussion of the British reception of Australian soaps, and the differences between Neighbours and Home and Away will be instructive, perhaps partly allaying our fears of British neo-imperialism via our ABC. For Australians the strangeness of the comments of several viewers denouncing the homely Bill as an example of extreme media violence will also demonstrate how perception of risk and harm are radically contingent and reshaped across national boundaries.
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The book manages to weave the huge set of data (at one point the authors boast, with only mild flippancy, that they had to interpret two hundred times the data on which Ien Ang based her Dallas study) into a vivid array of evidence about the unpredictable uses of television. At its best, the book crystallises into something like a collaborative multi-authored work, with each subject talking back to the tv, and, in dialogue with the survey form, interpreting their tv viewing as meaningful and significant in the context of life changes. At its weakest points, however, the book becomes a kind of closed-world in which everything that happens in these peoples' lives is used as evidence or refutation of a fairly narrow set of academic media debates.
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While the authors claim to be very interested in 'theory', the literature they refer to begins and ends within a particular UK/US media/cultural studies trajectory. This study would have been a wonderful opportunity to 'use' the work of writers such as Bourdieu and Foucault on the social regulation of identity and negotiations of subjectivity to interpret a neat set of data on cultural consumption and the formation of taste. Some historicising of the concept of 'everyday life' would have been helpful to locate the study within debates around value and popular culture. Recent studies of post-colonial and transnational media imaginaries, such as those of Appadurai and Naficy, are also conspicuously absent. To their credit the authors do admit that questions of ethnicity and geography are lacking, and bracket these questions for another time and another volume of findings. These limitations aside, the authors interpret the diary entries within theoretical debates to show the fascinating ways in which media consumption is integral to, and negotiated within, the domestic in late modernity.
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One of its greatest pleasures, and one that media studies students will also partake of, is the ways in which the data is open to the reader, and invites comparison and debate on one's own viewing in relation to the people surveyed. At many points I identified myself, as well as family and friends, with familiar viewing habits and quirky responses to particular programs and genres. This is proof that through their focus on ‘everyday life’ the authors have managed to bridge academic, policy, industry and popular debates about media use. The writing demonstrates a keen sensitivity to the reader uninitiated in the technicalities of media and cultural studies. The relentless focus on the how of watching tv and the how we might do research about it opens up space for many further studies in this area. It also somewhat deflates media industries' fascination with how big and new our tv sets are (and how groceries might be better sold on them) in favour of a more nuanced relationship between watching, talking and thinking about tv as part of our everyday worlds.
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Details
Gauntlett, David and Annette Hill. TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life. London and NY: Routledge & BFI, 1999.
AUD $50.60.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Justine Lloyd. "Review of TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life" M/C Reviews 7 June 2001.
[your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/reviews/words/tvliving.html>.
Chicago style:
Justine Lloyd, "Review of TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life," M/C Reviews 7 June 2001,
<http://www.api-network.com/mc/reviews/words/tvlivingJoe D.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Justine Lloyd. (2000) Review of TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life. M/C Reviews 7 June 2001.
<http://www.api-network.com/mc/reviews/words/tvliving.html> ([your date of access]).
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