ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the key ways in which media technology was popularised for home use between the late 1930s and 1970s. It shows how TV became a taken-for-granted homogenising force. It explores how these public concerns and wider popular discourses about home and family values influenced the TV's arrival into and colonisation of the home. Media technologies go through a process of enculturation or domestic appropriation after entering the home, comprising micro-social processes. William's concept of 'mobile privatisation' invokes the idea of media as a form of travel from the home. Referring to early TV in the US, Lynn Spigel explains, It gives people a sense of travelling to distant places and having access to information and entertainment in the public sphere, even as they receive this in the confines of their own domestic interiors. David Morley emphasises the power of media texts to bring public life into domestic cultures and to actually shape those domestic cultures as national cultures.
