The Media, the City and the Suburbs

If television occasionally presents us with problematic and potentially disturbing events, nonetheless, by virtue of its modalities and its structure (and by means of the predictability and reliability of its scheduling), it also performs a reassuring function. The epitome of this is the 24-hour television news channel, which is reassuring by its very persistence – thus contributing, in Silverstone's terms, to our sense of ontological security, sustained through the presence of the familiar and the predictable. ¹ In a similar vein, in the context of a discussion with Doreen Massey on the relationship between space and the media, Karen Lury observes that “through its manipulation of space and time – in its linearity, repetition, circularity and implementation of a largely spurious authority – television often closes down or fixes social relationships”. ² In his analysis of television and everyday life, Silverstone argues that there is an elective affinity between television and the suburb. He argues that television is not simply the result of the suburbanisation of the world, but is itself responsible for the “suburbanisation of the public sphere”. ³ It is characterised for him by what he calls the suburban genres, par excellence, of soap opera and situation comedy, largely devoted to the representation and working through of the problems of domestic life. As Andy Medhurst argues, the secure rhythms of suburban life are textually mirrored in the safely predictable narratives of sitcom, and the very “newslessness of suburbia is a cornerstone of the vision of tranquillity that … [sells] the suburban dream”. ⁴ In this scenario, it is not just news per se which is troubling – in the fictional genres which Medhurst discusses, he notes that any element coming from outside the community (letters, phone calls, faxes) is liable to function in the narrative as the occasion of potential trouble.