ABSTRACT
An inquiry into the "audience" should be an inquiry not into a set of pre-constituted individuals, but into a set of daily practices and discourses within which the complex act of watching television is placed alongside others and through which that complex act is itself constituted. A family, fragile and fraught though it may be, in any individual case is nevertheless the social unit in which, for most of us, most media consumption takes place. The relationships that define it, the myths and values that sustain it, the conflicts and contradictions that threaten it, provide a basic social environment through which individuals struggle, on a daily basis, with the problems of everyday life. Homes and households are constituted within a domestic sphere that can only be defined in terms of its differential relationship to the public sphere. The moral economy of the household is both an economy of meanings and a meaningful economy.
