Chapter nine
The media in everyday family life:
Some biographical and typological aspects
It is a Sunday afternoon like any other in the Smith family: Robert Smith, aged 45, a truck driver; his wife Mary Smith, aged 40; and their three children Uwe, aged 5, Anna, aged 7, and Petra, aged 9. The family lives in a three-bedroom apartment.
I met Anna while doing some field research at a kindergarten. The children were asked to draw a picture portraying Sunday afternoon at home. The focal point in Anna's picture was the dominant father, sitting next to mother on the sofa with the three children in front of him, pressed up against his knees. On the table was the Sunday “coffee and cake,” and in the background, out of perspective, a television set showing Pinocchio could be seen. In the left-hand corner of the picture was a window, through which the outlines of a truck could be recognized.
The room in the picture exuded an atmosphere of security, warmth and intimacy. When I showed it to the mother, she made the following comments:
“Yes, that's the way things are in the afternoon at our place. Anna has certainly caught the mood. But what else can we do? Things are not so easy for us with my husband on the road all the time. Sunday is the only time we have to spend together. My husband doesn't want to go out, he wants something to take his mind off things because he has to be off again early on Monday morning.”
In a talk I had later with Mr Smith, he also confirmed that Sunday afternoons in the Smith family are usually devoted to the same routine, which he unquestioningly accepts as normal, namely to media activities. However, he did add in a tone of resignation: “Well, I know we should try to do something different really, in fact, we do now and then.” To this Mrs Smith remarked: “The last time we did something different was four months ago.”
On the whole, they talk very little. Mrs Smith is responsible for bringing up the children. Robert Smith has a lot of time for his own thoughts when he is on the road. “You see, you tend to do a lot of thinking to yourself and forget what it's like to talk to other people. It's a good thing we manage to get by without too much talking.”
Sunday afternoon presents no problem for the children. Here is what Petra has to say:
“We have enough time for playing during the week…. If we go out Daddy is always so jumpy. It's better at home. There we can have him all to ourselves …. It doesn't really matter what's on on TV. The main thing is that Daddy's home.’
Later on, Anna adds:
“It does matter. When Pinocchio's on, I get all excited and nervous, and when I can feel Daddy there things are not half as bad as they would be if I had to go through all that on my own.”
These extracts from my interviews with the Smith family may be used to illustrate some aspects which highlight the subjective significance which media activities have for the Smith family. The media have a definite place in the family interaction pattern. They structure the framework of family life, the external milieu, the demands imposed by the world of work, etc. When examining a family's media activities it is therefore not sufficient just to ask the usual questions, like “What effect do the media have on families?” or “How do families use the media?”
The way in which families use the media points, rather, in a different direction: it highlights two aspects of a family's way of negotiating their contact with the media, one that has to do with content and another that has to do with function. From the point of view of content, media activities can be understood as an attempt to construct a meaningful relationship between the media program and reality as actually experienced. Conscious, subconscious, or preconscious wishes play an important role in the way people use the media. The media are interpreted against the background of everyday life as it is lived and experienced, they are used to cope with everyday problems. The media are unquestioningly accepted as normal, they are something completely familiar. Their general ubiquity causes them to be allocated certain functions in people's everyday lives. The media form a part of the family system, a part many can no longer imagine living without. This is one of the principal reasons why media activities are characterized by emotional familiarity. People seek contact with the media because the media appeal and give access to feelings such as pleasure, fear, joy, and insecurity. The situations in which the media are used also have a high emotional value. The media provide remedies for loneliness, they are used to create “good” feelings or to define human relationships.
For this reason, everyday media activities within the family context cannot be reduced to a simple medium-receiver relationship. To ascertain the motivating factors of media use in everyday life, it is necessary, rather, to examine what significance is given and what functions are allocated to the media. It is also important to understand and record the needs and motivations of all members of a family. I should like to illustrate this by referring to the Smith family once more. Their media activities quite clearly reveal their wishes, value systems, upbringing methods, and everyday knowledge. They further show how difficult it is to alter unsatisfactory situations, especially when the objective structures hinder rather than encourage alternatives. Media activities and their possible alternatives cannot, therefore, be seen in isolation from the exigencies of the world of work and a family's concrete circumstances of life. It is equally important to take into account the communicative climate in the day-to-day life of a family or at the place of work. Also, the psycho-social, economic, and ecological background of a family's use of the media must enter into the analysis.
Thus, as a first point, we can ascertain that there is, in families, a connection between and a close interweaving of the need for communication and media activities at any given time. However, when establishing such homologies, it is essential not to overlook another aspect which I would now like to draw attention to. The word “new” now seems to be undergoing a kind of inflation in connection with the discussion of changes in information and communication technology. Media activities in families consist of the use of old and new media. To view the phenomenon solely from the point of view of change is to reduce illegitimately the complexity of everyday human activity, for if we take a closer look at the way families negotiate their contact with the media in their day-to-day lives it is obvious that their activities are characterized by permanence in change. In other words, it is not only the momentary need for communication that determines the everyday media routine, but also past experiences which extend their influence into present media activities. Let me illustrate this with an excerpt from an interview.
Helga Peters is aged 58, a secondary-school teacher, married with two children, aged 26 and 28. Both children have left home. In this part of the interview, Mrs Peters tells me about her contact with the media during her youth and childhood. For her there were only books, reading material of the more demanding type, visits to the theater, and concert-going. The cinema, popular magazines, and radio music were all frowned upon:
“This continual search for merit, this concentration on educative material has been the dominating trend throughout my whole life and, although I now see it as a bad thing, it strongly influenced the way I brought up my children. I passed on the values my father drilled into me…. Of course, it wasn't so easy to do this with my children as it had been with me, they broke out far more often than I had ever been able to, or dared to.”
The media habits Mrs Peters had acquired and lived during her youth and childhood also continued into the early years of her marriage:
“Take the cinema, for example. It's only in the last few years that my husband and I have taken to going to the cinema because it gives us pleasure and enjoyment and now it annoys me to see how much I've been missing…. It's exactly the same with television, radio, and books, this step away from having to find a justification for everything, away from this consumption of education and culture, to be able to admit to oneself that something was great and not to always ask like a little teacher — so, what beneficial effect did that have on us … ? There are some things that never even occurred to me until a couple of years ago, after the children had left home, but it was still a big step to take from thinking about a thing to actually doing it, and I haven't completely got out of my old habits and don't want to either because there are still a lot of things that were good … I was much more conscious of the ways I received what was offered…. Today, people tend more to just consume things, but on the other hand, I think that the pretentious attitude is just as bad.”
I would like to discuss this interview excerpt in terms of the change and continuity aspect. The way people use the media is something that is acquired during the course of an individual biography; it is the result of a long socialization in the family. A person's early experiences with the media, therefore, have a decisive influence on the way he/she negotiates his/her contact with the media later in life. Each person has a certain number of “media careers” in the course of a lifetime, e.g. in early childhood, during the school years, the beginning of adolescence, the first months in the first job or at college, the early years of marriage, etc. When looked at from the point of view of media careers, media activities can be seen to have two aspects: one which is dynamic and subject to change and one which stresses the permanent and more stubborn qualities of a person's behavior.
At this point, it is perhaps necessary to make some basic comments on the state of research into media activities in families. I would like to touch upon five main aspects. The two interviews from which I have quoted so far clearly indicate the complex nature of media activities. It quite often happens, however, that this many-sided phenomenon is collapsed into a linear model operating with concepts of effect or reward (What effect do the media have? or: how do people use the media?). Such models fail to account for the great differences in the way a program like Dallas or a quiz show is used as far as viewing and communication needs are concerned.
This leads us on to a further gap in current research. There has not been sufficient investigation into the areas of everyday life (particularly family life) in which the media make their influence felt. There has been much facile talk about families, about youth and children, but little attention has been paid to families' strategies of action or their ways of thinking. The theories they develop for coming to terms with everyday life and the knowledge they possess based on everyday common sense have not really been accounted for in audience research. Equally little regard has been paid to the close interrelationship between the work situation, leisure-time possibilities, socio-ecological determining factors, and the routines established in contact with the media. This complexity has not only been overlooked, but all too often completely ignored. It is therefore easy to understand why the research has by and large been restricted to a reduced way of seeing the phenomenon, namely as a situation in which families are threatened by the media. But anyone who wishes to describe changes in family life (due to whatever influences) must take into account the results of research into the sociology and psychology of the family. Only by integrating such data and the relevant research methods into our methodological approach are we able to do justice to the multidimensional problem we're facing.
Let me add a final point of criticism that pertains in particular to the dramatic changes we're witnessing in communication technology today. I pointed out that some of the research in this area has been too quick to argue with abstract typologies, assuming a theoretical “average viewer.” Anyone who asserts that TV consumption is on the rise in households with cable television is arguing both in the abstract and without making sufficient differentiation. Only when such trends are examined in relation to educational background, social class, conditions of work and living, to the psycho-social situation and the emotional climate, to the family history and the methods of upbringing adopted is it possible to make statements which approximate the actual changes in patterns of television consumption, and only on this basis can we develop more concrete pedagogic strategies which are in closer touch with day-to-day existence.
The attempt to develop an approach appropriate both to the methodological complexity of the problem and to the new conditions brought about by the advances in communication technology was made in the context of two research projects carried out between 1981 and 1986 at the University of Tubingen's Ludwig Uhland Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies, under Klaus Jensen's and my direction. In both projects our central concern was the changes in everyday family life brought about by the media. Within the framework of this overall objective, we attempted to provide as detailed an account as possible of everyday media use in the family unit. At the same time and on the basis of an adequate understanding of the new ways which families are developing for their media use, we also aimed at an accurate description of the more traditional structures of everyday media behavior.
Any understanding of individual and familial activities with regard to the media must be based on an interpretative paradigm which emphasizes the dynamic aspect of social situations and human actions. By employing such an approach we were able to account for the ambivalences and complexities of social reality, and to offer evaluations of the different meanings given to specific situations by our informants. Only by concentrating on an individual's strategies of meaning construction and rituals of action, i.e. the structural moments of subjective media reality, are we in a position to isolate certain interpretations as adequate out of the almost inexhaustible spectrum of possible ones. For the perceived meaning of a given object (and this includes media messages) can be conceived of as a point of intersection between a person's individual and social, biographical and contemporary situational contexts.
In order to do justice to the complexity of human actions in relation to the media, we need a method of hermeneutic interpretation. Applying such a method to the family in its specific set up as well as its broader social conditions enables us to describe those structural aspects which are relevant to the family's everyday media-related activities. Such an approach may be called hermeneutic and interpretative because it does not lose sight of the actual living situations. Rather, it relates media use to the concrete everyday world of a given family.
It is of course trivial to state that the family as such simply does not exist. Factors such as the material resources available or the kinds of occupations held by family members vary considerably from family to family. Another criterion for distinguishing between families is the family biography (e.g. its specific cultural traditions, communicative competence, emotional climate) which is unique in each case. At the same time, each family undergoes different cycles of development. Such cycles are characterized by continuity and change in communication and media habits. Taking all of this into account it stands to reason that an essential prerequisite for an adequate explanation of the everyday use of the media is an approach to the family that is based on system theory.
By family system I mean that all events and all activities (including those that have to do with television or the media) have a systematic character, that is all members of a family participate in these events with differing degrees of involvement. Examples are easy to find: the father who reads the newspaper at the breakfast table, ignoring the other members of the family; the mother who does not allow her children to watch television, but whose order is boycotted by her husband; the sports program on a Saturday which causes the family to postpone their evening meal together; the resulting discord; the television set running in the background to enforce silence or to make the stillness easier to bear.
By everyday family life I mean the familiar world of a family's experience, the world in which it lives. It is a world unquestioningly accepted as normal, a world whose general framework is taken for granted. This everyday life is not static, as is often assumed, but possesses a dynamic character. It encompasses the past, the present, and the future, as becomes apparent from the two concepts, family biography and family cycle. Everyday life is lived out in a field of tension formed by individual and family biographies, socio-cultural and social structures, and socio-historical processes of development.
This means that everyday knowledge (e.g. knowledge about the media) is never complete, although it is not something that can simply be changed at will. Thus, a new media program is interpreted against the background of existing opinions and a new family serial is compared with what is known about past serials of this type. I have thus alluded to a third concept. Each family constructs its own media world. This includes knowing about the media, for example which programs are available, how genres influence and affect each other. Media worlds are the product of meaning-making within a family. This alone is sufficient reason for looking at media activities and everyday family life from the point of view of the families themselves. In such a perspective, the media not only appear different from how they do to the researcher or the educator, they actually are different.
In the two projects above, we interviewed a total of 420 families. Even though our research emphasized the everyday use of the media in different types of households, our research design did not overlook the fact that the media-related activities of families are not only determined by the specifics of the family system, but also by other subsystems such as the world of work, club memberships, activities in organizations, kinship relations, circles of friends, etc. Our concentration on families did not preclude taking into account other social relationships or social factors. Rather, it provided the necessary focus, a focus which promised to yield insights into the integration and effect of transcendent structures. This means that the methodological design the two projects employed called for a multiple-level analysis. Therefore, the guiding principle of the narrative family interviews was to address the multiple aspects of concrete living situations and other realms of everyday life. Such a procedure and the data it yielded allowed us, during the interpretation phase, to bring to bear the different sets of data on a single family member and his/her biographical as well as present situation — a strategy which also helped to preserve the uniformity of our data material.
In sum, our approach may be described as qualitatively oriented field work, a type of research which relies on direct or indirect, systematic or unsystematic participant observation as well as on structured or unstructured narrative interviewing. In concrete terms, our methodology employed four separate components: the standardized questionnaire, the qualitative interview, participant observation, and, finally, a media journal (which I cannot comment on here). The questionnaire was handed out to each member of a given household; it served to generate basic statistical data. The qualitative interviews were done, as far as possible, with the entire family, for the presence of all household members during the interview yielded initial insights into the family's communication structures. Open questions encouraged the informants to supply specific information on their everyday lives. Asking precise questions and close observation allowed us to explore concrete behavioral patterns and concomitant cognitive-emotional styles which people have developed for their media use. It further helped us to understand how the use of the media intersects with other everyday activities and life-styles, which interactions predominate during the process of media assimilation, which media supplies are subjectively most important.
The overall objective of our data gathering was of course to subject linguistic utterances and observed behavior to interpretation in order to arrive at general statements about the structures of everyday behavior. Interpretation was, and this is important to emphasize, not limited to an individual and “unmediated” experience of the media. Rather, it was always directed at establishing links and connections between the individual phenomenon and the fundamental structure.
The cases I am now about to mention will help clarify the relevance and scope of the concepts I have just outlined. In these case studies I have tried to work toward establishing qualitative links between day-to-day life and a family's use of the media. Case studies are indispensable at this point in audience scholarship because they allow for the multilevel analysis I have just outlined, and because it is of course too early to make statistically relevant statements about the relationships between media-related actions and the various aspects of people's everyday worlds. The case studies have been selected out of a large number of families in order to illustrate typical trends.
Sandra Higgs, aged 31, is employed full-time at the public library. Peter Higgs, 35 years old, had a post as a civil engineer “before the firm went bankrupt.” They have two children, Harry and Heather, aged 7 and 5. The unemployment of Mr Higgs has its effects on all members of the household. These effects can be described by the terms “restructuring,” “reorientation,” and “functional change.” First of all, magazines “that were just bought on the side” are no longer read. The same applies to books: “Now I borrow more books from the library and don't buy so many for the kids. But they don't really miss that because I can always manage to borrow something,” comments Mrs Higgs when describing the change in the situation. A more noticeable change is the importance that television has now assumed for the members of the family. Before Mr Higgs became unemployed they had a very consistent attitude toward using the media, an attitude that tried to achieve a balance between educational and entertainment programs. Now “the box,” to use the words of Peter Higgs, has become increasingly important to compensate for boredom, dissatisfaction, stress, and tensions.
“I'mgradually getting to notice how much more important the box is becoming for me. It's not that I'mwatching that much more TV now, it's the kind of things I watch and the eagerness I lap them up with. Before, that would never have entered my mind…. What worries me is the way the box is beginning to occupy my thoughts so much … I would never have thought how quickly such a thing can get a grip on you without you realizing it…. Yes, and how difficult it is to get out of the habit again once you've got used to it… and then, of course there are the children who used to watch very little television. You should see the way they watch TV now - three months and you've got kids who are always glued to the box because you're always glued to it yourself.”
The two children were also torn out of their accustomed rhythm but they have now adapted to the new situation. Harry says: “Now I am allowed to watch more telly in the evenings too. Mum lets me.” But he also thinks that “Mum gets cross more than she used to. She loses her temper more,” which makes him feel sad.
Sandra Higgs has also observed the change in herself and has noticed that her daughter, on these occasions, becomes intimidated and withdraws to her room, sits down in her “cosy corner” and listens to her cassettes: “She obviously needs to retreat like that and probably feels quite OK. That's what I think, anyway. She knows that I love her.”
Mrs Higgs has also noticed something else:
“Lately Heather has only been listening to those daft programs, dreadful I would say. But of course I don't say it, but she rejects outright anything that is in any way linked with problems. Yes, and then sometimes she will just burst into tears when she's watching or reading something that's quite harmless. She has become a lot more unstable. That's her way of reacting to everything.”
Harry, too, increasingly tends to avoid anything in the media that is problem- or reality-oriented. According to Sandra Higgs, he uses the television “to kill the time.” Harry and Heather have developed an attitude that is geared toward compensation in their use of the media.
Unemployment changes the media routines, as far as both the quality and quantity of media activities are concerned. Media activities in the home, especially, assume a more central position. The television slips into the role of sole entertainer. To use the media increasingly means to relax and switch off, to escape depression and ward off boredom. The psycho-social and psychological strain which is a concomitant factor of unemployment hampers communication within the family and allocates a special entertainment function to the media. The dwindling of interpersonal communication which then follows is an expression of a lack of orientation, of discouragement, self-doubt, uncertainty and isolation.
Wendy Rees lives with her three children (aged 6,11, and 15) in an old block of tenements in the center of a big city. She has a two-bedroom apartment, has been separated from her husband for many years, and has an afternoon job as a cashier, which means that she does not arrive home from work until eight o'clock in the evening. “Irene, my eldest, looks after the children until then,” says Mrs Rees. In the mornings she carves wooden pendants for a boutique and works at home. “I need that,” she explains, “otherwise things would get me down.” When she is doing this work she listens to the radio,
“folk music or pop, then you don't feel so alone. Oh yes, and the news. I must always listen to the news, to see if anything has happened. Then I have to see the same thing on the telly or read about it in the papers. I'ma real catastrophe Jane.”
She laughs, but seems sad at the same time.
“Take the police report, for example. I think Irene should start to look at that, too. I always get shivers down my spine when I'mwatching that. Yes, it really gives me the shivers. I don't think I could face watching that if I was on my own. But you don't mind the bit of fear when there are two of you.”
The Reeses not only watch a lot of television; they also own a video-recorder. Irene comments:
“If the weather is bad or in winter or when there's nothing else to do, then the children already start watching the video in the afternoon, they look at those slushy, sentimental films or plenty of adventure films. Sometimes they will watch one after the other.”
Mrs Rees tries to persuade herself that this is nothing to worry about. She remarks: “I still think that's better than them hanging around doing nothing. Anyway, what else is there for them?”
Sometimes she punishes the children, especially John and Jimmy, by forbidding them to watch the television or the video. “But then, neither of them will talk to me. They've really got me where they want me. They know I don't like being on my own. I nearly always give in.” It's the same with the evening meal, which is nearly always eaten in front of the television when the evening news is on: “I think that's good for them. They can learn something from that.”
Mrs Rees tries to draw her children's attention in particular to catastrophes and accidents or to suffering and need.
“Sometime they've got to learn to take care and they should learn to realize that we don't have it all that bad. When we are all sitting there together nice and cosy, I feel like we're a real little clique.”
The way Mrs Rees uses the media, using them for her own particular needs and to define her relationship to the children, also became apparent in two other situations. She makes her children stay seated a long time at the table, showing them how much importance she attributes to the media in this situation. The television situation creates a bond between the children, induces an enforced intimacy and imposes a feeling of community with no words being spoken. John and Jimmy, in particular, have seen through their mother's rituals and have used them for implementing their own strategies for coping with everyday life. The children know that their mother cannot be consistent in carrying through her prohibition of the media.
Late in the evening, Wendy Rees watches her daily “video weepy”: “Then I can forget everything, but I have to be completely on my own, otherwise I can't really get into it.”
A few interpretative comments are in order here. In this case it is not the quantity but the quality of the media activities which is the problem. Television rituals mean not speaking, an enforced community; the television routine suppresses real conflicts or offers a superficial harmony. The example of the Rees family also illustrates how media programs compensate for emotional deficits and can act as a substitute for real experience; it shows how television is used to give expression to ideas of intimacy and closeness. There is also another important point to be made. The discussions on the new media have caused many of the older media to be forced into the background and disregarded. This, for example, is true of radio, which still plays an important part as far as quantity is concerned. From the point of view of the user, it often serves the purpose of offering a constant flow of background noise, helping him/her to avoid negative, depressive moods, and providing contact to the world outside the home, or replacing real communication partners. This is also true of other media. They are used to bring relief, but this superficial and short-term relief causes further problems because the silent community, thus engendered, veils the real problems and their resolution through dialogue. It thus hampers and finally cripples such dialogue.
At the outset I mentioned two levels of approach: the level of objective media reality, i.e. the significance the media have in everyday family life, and the level of subjective media reality, i.e. the fact that families structure their everyday lives on the basis of greatly varying ideas. In conclusion, I would like to highlight some trends issuing from the individual cases, thereby commenting on the level of objective media reality.
The mass media, with the rhythms and the weekly and daily schedules peculiar to them, have a formative influence on lifestyles and patterns of communication. But households and household members never make use of the whole media spectrum. Rather, they select, from the totality available, their own program which has its special significance for them. Here parental influence largely determines the genre preferences and media styles of children. Styles of media are not merely current styles, but are always biographically determined. A sediment of acquired knowledge helps structure the way in which the media are perceived in the present. The situations in which the media are received are generally characterized by ambiguity. Thus for one particular family, watching a detective program can mean entertainment and excitement, for another this experience can promote a group feeling, while for a third it can be used to compensate for an inner vacuum, stress situations, or feelings of loneliness. Media entertainment is also used for the sake of the alternatives it would seem to offer to mundane reality, for the space it provides for phantasies and daydreams.
I should now like to turn to the second level of analysis: subjective media reality. This has mainly to do with people's everyday knowledge about the media, the patterns of behavior adopted. They show the interrelation between individual day-to-day experiences and patterns of using the media. Here it is possible to pick out three trends that can be generalized: parents have opinions about the media, for example about the disadvantages of television or the merits of books, they have experiences with genres (“Sport is exciting,” “Dallas is wonderfully feeble-minded”). They understand the significance of the media in stress situations ("Just switch on the TV, then switch off yourself. Empty your mind"). Such conceptions are learned from early childhood, especially when the example of the parents shows them to be appropriate for coping with everyday life. Another aspect of subjective media reality is knowing about the significance the media have in day-to-day life; perhaps the television set is used as an instrument of power to assert certain needs and interests; films and music are used to compensate for loneliness, programs are seen to hide real conflicts. Media activities have long established themselves as a routine, a ritual, there is something typical, something ever-recurring about them: tuning into a certain radio station first thing in the morning, getting used to being given the time, reading strategies for newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio on the way to work, switching on the TV after returning from work, watching the evening news, Dallas on a Tuesday, the sports program on Saturdays, etc.
Thus, subjective media reality has many facets: on the one hand, the form taken by media activities expresses cultural orientation and day-to-day life-styles. Media activities can be defined as part of a way of life. On the other, media contact defines interpersonal relationships and the emotional and communicative climate in a family. Certain aspects of media use can illuminate defects or even skills in negotiating everyday family life. Finally, media activities can be seen as a fusion of the intentions behind the programs of the media and the experiences of the user.
The preceding is of course only a rough outline of the two research projects dealing with everyday family life and the mass media. Probably the most important insight we had in the course of our work on these projects was to realize that audience scholarship currently needs to press on with a medium-range theory which is able to link basic theoretical insights and practical field work in its analysis of media influences on society and families.