ABSTRACT
Before beginning this discussion of audience and schedules, it is worth noting that television is not only a delivery system for television content, but also a physical object that is embedded in the domestic household. It is important to consider not only what people watch, nor even which organisations bring television to the viewer, but also what the physical presence of a television within a household means. Television viewers’ experience of television is partly determined by their social positions in society, and differences between individual viewers and household audiences are significant within cultures and nations as well as between them. The uses of the television in the household, and the programmes watched on it, are affected by, and have effects on, the sense of social identity constructed by individual viewers and their fellow viewers. Keeping wedding photographs on top of the television, placing it prominently as a symbol of affluence, or concealing it inside a piece of furniture, might each tell us a lot about the household and how television supports or conflicts with that household’s self-image and self-presentation to visitors
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the present, public and private life, technology and everyday routines of behaviour, and the household’s family members and their absent relatives and friends. The study of television in this anthropological sense shows that it is not just programmes that are significant to television’s place in culture, but also the embedding of TV in everyday life as a way of understanding identity and community.
