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Of all the mass media television is the most intimately associated with domestic and familial life. Most television is watched at home, and the great majority of programs assume a family audience of some kind. The various activities that comprise "watching television" are complexly interwoven with other everyday domestic routines and provide a site for negotiating family roles and relations. The tendency of television producers to imagine potential viewers as belonging to and/or aspiring to form families has shaped television production in important ways: schedules are designed on the basis of socially conditioned assumptions about family life; television's modes of address include a distinctive, conversational style in which speakers position themselves as members or friends of the viewer's family; families or surrogate families figure prominently in the content of programming across a wide range of genres, including sitcoms, dramas, soaps and talk shows. Historically, television has both responded to and mediated perceived changes in family life. If much of the television produced over the network era was expected to unite family members as viewers, in the fragmented contemporary landscape, television also pursues profits by dividing families, with programs designed to appeal to specific family members and/or singles. In this course we will investigate both what viewers do with television in the context of family life and what television does with family, that is, how it has reinforced and reworked social discourses of family as a normative ideal.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-21-2005
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459