ABSTRACT
Why study television? For starters, because it’s undeniably, unavoidably “there.” And, it seems, everywhere. What people do with television is a topic worth thinking about and studying because television enters into the everyday lives of so many different people in so many different places in so many different ways. Today, around the world, 3.5 billion hours will be devoted to watching television.1 But nowhere is television such an integral part of everyday life as in the United States. Ninety-two million homes in the U.S. have at least one TV set (98 percent of the total population). Nearly 70 percent of those homes have more than one set. More American homes are equipped with television sets than with telephones. Those sets are on in the average household for more than seven hours every day. Between seven and eleven P.M., Americans of every demographic, social, and economic group are spending most of their time in a place where a television set is playing. Nearly 60 percent of U.S. households now have cable television, and nearly three in four U.S. households with TV sets also own videocassette recorders. The family with a VCR rents an average of eighty-seven tapes each year from one of more than 30,000 tape rental outlets. The total value of these tape rentals already surpasses the total U.S. movie box office receipts. One in ten American families owns a video camera. Most Americans can-not remember a time in their lives when television was not a part of it. Babies as young as ten months have been observed to stop whatever they are doing when they hear the Sesame Street theme and to clap, bounce, and gurgle in anticipation of seeing their favorite puppet characters.
