Installing The Television Set(1992)Lynn Spigel

Everyday Life Reader, Ben Highmore

Keywords

Technology, housing design, television set, advertisements,

outside and inside space, far-away places, living room theater,

domestic isolation, integration into social life, surveillance

Spigel :

She assumes that television as an everyday material object

is a signifiying media that continually figures and

refigures the environment.

She considers that television both reflects and constructs

social relations via both discourses and material practices.

Her aim is to reveal how the television both threatened

and supported dominant familial and gendered relations.

She sees the television role as a practice that both unites

and divides.

The others: Thomas Hutchinson, 1946 – Here is Television, Your

Window on the World.

The outside world can be brought into the home.

Charles Siepmann, 1950 – Television provides a maximum extension of a perceived environment with a minimum effort. Bringing the world to people’s doorsteps.

Television Technological Advance Housing design

The separation between private/female and public/male

The merging of outside and inside space

erasing spatial barriers

- like a futuristic structure

- indoors and outdoors are

merged with window walls.

- continuous living areas which

appeared to be extended into

interior space.

Technological advance Housing Design

ground for television’s introduction to the public

( through fairs, museum exhibitions, department stores, home magazines )

Technological advance Housing Design

ground for television’s introduction to the public

( through fairs, museum exhibitions, department stores, home magazines )

first appearence of television as a « global village »

Tv set with the picture of far-away places ( Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Newyork City as a background picture)

Television provides a view of outside spaces

The interest in bringing an illusion of the world into the home can be seen as part of a larger historical process in which the home was designed to incorporate social space.

television as a part of a home entertainment center. tv program is like a movie.

(family theater, living room theater, video theater and chairside theater)

woman’s problem of spatial confinement in the home Movie theater was not only an exhibition, it was also an arena in

which housewife was given to access to social life in public sphere.

The conflict between women’s domestic isolation and their integration into social life.

What the advertisements make the television considered as... A view of outside spaces

A public meeting hall ( the status of a theater date )

The sense of being there (picture and sound quality)

The furniture company, Kroehler advertised a living room furniture which

completely organized around the new TV center.

As a theatre so it requires a comfortable placed

audience with a clear view of the stage.

The camouflage of the tv set.

Making invisible to the outside

world.

Window on the world which could

not look back.

The theme of surveillance, tv

becomes an instrument of

surveillance. (disruptive effects on

the relationship between the

couple)

Extended eyesight

What the advertisements make the television considered as...

two points emerge for women continuum visual pleasure – displeasure was associated with interior decor.

visual pleasure – displeasure, was not associated with her gaze at the

set, but rather with her status as representation, as something to be

looked at by the gaze of another.

televison was depicted as a threat to the visual appeal of the female body in

domestic space.

A man who was fascinated with the screen image of a woman that his real life

mate remained thoroughly neglected by his gaze.

competition for male attention between women and television.

To sum up,

Magazines, advertisements and television programming

helped to establish rules for ways in which to achieve

pleasure and to avoid displeasure caused by the new TV. (on

going and historiographical problem)

Aesthetics ideals of middle class architecture and interior

design was shaped by the television.

Advertisements Advance of television The

change in everyday life. ( living styles, habits, etc.)