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Television and the Internet
``` [You may recall that my colleague Dan Schiller circulated an article on RRE on the political economy of the Internet's seeming convergence with television. In this draft chapter from her forthcoming book, another of my colleagues, Ellen Seiter, discusses the many cultural aspects of this convergence. Ellen is one of the foremost scholars of cultural studies, and she writes from long experience of fieldwork research on the uses people make of television in homes and schools. As so often with ethnographic research, this work explodes stereotypes about television and the people who watch it. The Internet and its users enjoy a different and frequently opposite set of stereotypes, and this alone would make it worthwhile to investigate the increasingly intimate connection between the two, both as technology and culture.]
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Television and the Internet
Ellen Seiter Professor of Communication Univ. of California, San Diego eseiter@ucsd.edu
Draft Version--do not quote without permission from the author
This work is forthcoming in the book Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press) in the series Oxford Television Studies, Charlotte Brunsdon and John Caughie, Editors.
Claims that the Internet will revolutionize communications ( as well as education, work life and domestic leisure) are now commonplace. Yet there is a danger that computer communications- -and by this I mean their uses, the discourses surrounding computers and the Internet, and research about them--will substantially buttress hierarchies of class, race and gender. One healthy corrective is to recognize the many parallels between television and the Internet, and incorporate the insights of television audience research into the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere, the articulation of gender identities through popular genres, the complexity of individuals' motivations to seek out media and the variety of possible interpretations of media technologies and media forms. Ethnography can offer a rich context of understanding the motivations and disincentives to using computers: an important research topic in a world in which non-users are likely to be labeled recalcitrants, technophobes, or slackers.
I will argue that it is what John Corner has called the "particularly ambitious form of interdisciplinarity" of media studies--its attempted, if not always successful, merging of criticism and sociology-- which holds a unique promise as a model for studying new media and new technologies (Corner, 1995). Most academic research on digital technologies is currently being produced by departments of library and information science, schools of business and management, education schools, and computer science departments. This research tends to emphasize information seeking and statistical patterns of usage, while ignoring perceptions about computers, the cultural contexts in which they are used, and the images, sounds and words to be found on computer screens. We need a means of touching upon the form and content of the Internet as well as the practices and motivations of computer users. We need to view the Internet from the perspective of its many parallels with broadcast media, maintaining a healthy skepticism about is novel qualities as a communication medium. We need to be alert to the ways that stereotyped notions of the audience are constructing a discourse around the Internet that privileges white, middle class males.
In this paper I begin by reviewing the ways that familiar forms of television are migrating to computer screens, while television, for its part, is busily promoting use of the Internet by television viewers. These connections between television and computers are taking place at the level of corporations, as Microsoft attempts to enter the mass market entertainment business by investing in media firms; of technology, as computers with television tuners and video stream capabilities become more commonplace; and at the level of form and content, as familiar forms and genres from television, radio and newspapers are tried out on the Internet, many of them sponsored by such giants of television advertising as Procter and Gamble and Nabisco. In the second section, I survey qualitative research on the use of computers in domestic settings among families, and trace the similarities between these findings and research on television watching in the home. I argue that television audience research is well positioned to help us understand the heavily gendered use of computers in domestic space. At the same time, research on computer use may help to push television audience research to a more thorough investigation of the connections between domestic and public uses of media, and to think more about television viewers as workers--and not only as family members or individual consumers. In the third section I look at the various work issues related to computer use, the increase of "telecommuting" and its implications for the study of communication technologies in the domestic sphere.
I. Television on computers
Television sets and computer terminals will certainly merge, cohabit, coexist in the next century. In 1996, computers with built- in television tuners became available as well as set top boxes to allow Internet access via television sets. Because of the proliferation of television sets throughout many homes, television sets and computers are increasingly likely to share space in the same room. Many people (most of my students, it seems) have become adept at watching television while using the computer. As personal computers proliferate in middle class homes, the boundaries between leisure and work time, public and private space, promise to become increasingly blurred (Kling 1996). As the Internet develops from a research-oriented tool of elites to a commercial, mass medium resemblances between Web sites and television programming will increase.
While the Internet can be used to organize users around political matters in ways unimaginable through broadcast television or small format video, it seems increasingly likely that commercialization of the Web will discourage activism in favor of consumerism and the duplication of familiar forms of popular mass media, such as magazines, newspapers, and television programs(Morris and Ogan, 1996). The World Wide Web reproduces some popular genres from television (and radio) broadcasting: sports, science fiction, home shopping clubs, news magazines, even cyber-soap operas with daily postings of the serialized lives of its characters. In fact, the most popular Web Sites, science fiction and soap operas and "talk" shows, represent the same genres that form the topic of some of the best television audience research( see for example Press (1993) Gillespie (1995), Jenkins (1992) , Shattuc (1997)). The much- publicized presence of pornography on the Internet also parallels the spectacular success of that genre on home video.
The prevalence of television material on the Web confirms the insight provided by media ethnographies of the importance of conversation about television in everyday life, and suggests that television plays a central role as common currency, a lingua franca. Television fans are a formidable presence on the Internet: in chatrooms where fans can discuss their favorite programs or television stars; on web sites where fan fiction can be posted; as the presumed market for sales of television tie-in merchandise. The dissemination of knowledge of the programming language for the creation of web sites (or home pages) unleashed hundreds/thousands of die-hard television fans eager to display their television knowledge--and provide free publicity for television producers. Hundreds of painstakingly crafted home pages have been devoted to old television shows, for example, one site devoted to the 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Johnny Quest, provides plot summaries and still frames of every Johnny Quest episode every made. In fact the Web is a jamboree of television material, with thousands of official and unofficial sites constituting television publicity, histories (with plots summaries of every episode ever made) cable and broadcast schedules, and promotional contests. Search engines turn up roughly three times as many references to television as they do for topics such as architecture, chemistry or feminism yield under 10,000. Apparently television was one of the first topics people turned to when trying to think of something to interest a large and anonymous group of potential readers--other Net users.
It would be a mistake, however, to see the rise of television material on the Internet exclusively from a fan or amateur perspective, because the connections between television and computer firms are proliferating. The association between television and the Internet has been heavily promoted at the corporate level by access providers eager to lure as sponsors companies that invest heavily in television advertising, and by others seeking sources and inspiration for the new Internet "programming" (Schiller, 1997). The software giant Microsoft corporation has acquired stakes in media entertainment companies, developed an interactive television network, and looked to television and film for the basis for entertainment "software" with a more "universal" i.e. mass market appeal. Microsoft's partnership with NBC to form the 24 hour news cable channel and an on-line news and information service MSNBC, is the most obvious example. Microsoft also has joint ventures deals with the cable channel Black Entertainment television and Spielberg's company DreamWorks SKG, and Paramount Television Group, leading to speculation that Microsoft is "morphing into a media company for the new millennium." (Caruso, 1996). Disney, now the owner of the television network ABC, is also one of the biggest interactive media producers in the world. America On-Line, the commercial internet and e-mail access provider, has followed a vigorous commercial strategy, which includes extensive coverage of television in all its familiar publicity aspects as well as encouragement of fan activity, to build a broad base of subscribers and to court advertisers. The A. C. Nielsen company, the television industry leader in audience ratings, has begun producing reports on Internet Users.
In 1996, Microsoft made the association to broadcast media explicit when it launched a revised version of its on-line service whose browser interface sends users straight to an "On Stage" section with six different channels, each hosting "shows."(Helm, 1996) The goal was to give users a better idea of what to expect from each program by standardizing its offerings, a strategy strikingly familiar from the history of early radio and television (McChesney, 1996; Boddy, 1992). Video-streaming, already a commonplace on the World Wide Web, has been implemented on Web Sites such as CNN's to replay the "News Story of the Week." Advertising industry analysts predict that animated advertisements on the Web will dominate in the years ahead.
Hardware and software manufacturers are scrambling to secure the market for sales to non-computer owners of devices that will convert the plain old television set to an Internet browser, or win the battle between the high definition TV sets favored by the electronics industry or the digital television/monitors favored by the computer industry. The computer position is that "consumers would rather have a cheaper box that would be either a computer monitor or a TV than have the less complicated, high-definition-TV set that the consumer-electronics industry favors (Auletta, 1997, 77)." Microsoft is exerting considerable muscle in political lobbying and industry influence over issues of digital television. (Bank and Takahashi, 1997). Gates's decision to purchase WEB TV for 425 million dollars and to announce this decision at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters is a significant example of this.
The relatively high penetration rates of home computers among the professional classes (including writers about computer issues) often give the false impression that everyone has a computer. The majority of homes do not have a PC, but, they do have a television). Therefore, the computer industry continues to eye television greedily as a future market. Microsoft has entered the cable television business, exploring set-top boxes and television programming; while Sega has developed Net Link for use with its video game system as a Browser. Sony and Phillips Consumer Electronics have formed a partnership to sell set-top boxes with a wireless keyboard and a printer adapter that can be plugged in to existing television sets and a telephone line for Internet access via the "WebTV network. Mitsubishi also plans to sell a set top box for use on the "DiamondWeb television" system. Sanyo and Samsung are also building Internet access into their TVs for the Japanese market. Sanyo's 28 inch model features a double window that allows viewers to watch television and use the Internet at the same time. Samsung's product features a television remote control that can take over some of the data entry features of the computer keyboard. (Loeb, 1996)
The extent to which Microsoft is explicitly using television and its mass appeal as a model for future endeavors was made explicit in a recent article by Ken Auletta about Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft. Microsoft realizes that "the skills that made Microsoft successful in software--technical proficiency, rapid response--are not transferable to what the company calls the content business, which relies more on a bottom-up rather than a top-down model." (Auletta, p. 76). The fact that personal computers are stuck at a penetration rate of about 36% has led computer industry people to eye television jealously, and to try to develop ways to link perceptions about computers to entertainment. At Interval Research Corporation, the think tank started by Microsoft's co- founder Paul Allen, the Explorers market research group has adopted the strategy of using television--a universally accepted domestic technology--as a model for the development of future communication technologies (Ireland and Johnson, 1995).
For its part, television plays a crucial role as publicizer of the Web and computer use. Television programs are already filled with references to computers and the Internet that both dramatize the importance of the new technologies and attempt to play a major role in educating the public about new media. Television's appetite for novelty, as well as its fears about losing viewers to computer screens, make computers one of its predictable obsessions. Silverstone and Hirsch are right track to point to the dual nature of communication technologies such as television sets and computers: "as quintessentially novel objects, and therefore as the embodiment of our desires for the new" which simultaneously act as "transmitters of all the images and information that fuel those desires."(1992, p. 3)
Computer references have gone far beyond the television character staring into the computer screen-- although this long-standing movie clich has been solidly established as a convention of television drama. Television commercials refer viewers to Web sites; call-in programs now ask that e-mail be submitted, as do television shows from Meet The Press to Nickelodeon's children's line up. MTV runs a daily program, Yak Live, where e-mails (reflecting the striking banality of much chatroom conversation) scroll across the screen below the music videos, Television news shows, especially docudramas and news magazines, have become so enamored of reproducing e-mail and Internet communications (which are both easy to capture on camera and lend a feeling of novelty and a sense of connection to the real world of viewers), that the practice has become a copyright/privacy concern among computer specialists (Lesch, 1994)
On-Line communications have been used both to support and to attack television shows and their sponsors. Television networks are exploiting e-mail and internet communications with audiences to gain feedback on script or character changes, to compile mailing lists for licensed products relating to shows, and to publicize tie- in merchandise. The creation of an Internet home page for the X- Files was credited with saving the show from cancellation after its first season. The X-files producers recognized the perfect synergy of its high demographic fans and the Internet and targeted its audience through the World Wide Web, a move that helped to both prove its audience share to executives contemplating axing the show, and generate more publicity for the program. Protests against television animate the on-line communications as well: Christian Right Organizations such as The American Family Association use the internet to organize protest against television sponsors of objectionable material (a list it calls "The Dirty Dozen") and "filth" (NYPD Blue).
Computer and Internet research can benefit greatly from television research on television flow and the use of remote controls, the installment of the television as a domestic object, and conversation around television . For example, the Internet poses problems similar to that of television "flow" (Williams, 1975), as Web "programmers" (especially those with commercial sponsors) attempt to guide the user through a pre-planned sequence of screens and links. While nearly every branch of the advertising industry is making moves to work on the Internet, anxieties are already rife about ways to measure consumers. At first, the number of "hits" a Web Site received were enough. Surveys revealed that half of all visitors to a Web Site did not even read the "banner" advertisements, and of those that did, less than half clicked on the ad. Even when they do click, "Most Web tracking software can't tell whether someone clicked on an ad but then changed his mind and stopped the transfer." Thus talk of hits given way to a preference for "impressions" -- a word more likely to carry weight with sponsors, with its desirable associations with lasting mental influence. Cybergold has launched a market research service (of dubious merit) whereby subjects are paid fifty cents or a dollar to click through and "read" ads. This concern for the meaningfulness of exposure to Web Advertising closely parallels the anxieties of television advertisers about the attention span of television viewers, and their proclivity for "zapping" commercials by switching channels, or "zipping" past commercials on videotapes of pre-recorded programs. From the advertiser's perspective, Web surfers can be just as fickle as television watchers, it seems.
In Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang carefully deconstructed the fantasies of control over television viewers and the necessity of such fantasies to the television industries daily functioning. In the trade publication Advertising Age, these fantasies, and the battle over competing claims for accurate measurement of Web surfers are now a major preoccupation. On the one hand, the Internet is projected as a much better vehicle than television, because the web user is presumably more attentive, more goal-directed--and wealthier. Yet anxieties about measuring and controlling Web users are escalating, and energies are focusing around the development of measurement devices adequate to convince sponsors.
For its target market of the professional upper middle class, the computer, is being installed as a domestic object in a process similar to the guidelines for installing the television set in the home in the 1950s studied by Lynn Spigel (1992). Computers are advertised on utopian claims to enrich family life, enhance communications, strengthen friendship and kin networks, and, perhaps most importantly, make children smarter and give them a competitive advantage in the educational sphere. In advertising, in news broadcasts, in education journals, the computer is often defined against , and pitched as an improvement on the television set: where television viewing is passive, computer use is interactive; where television programs are entertaining in a stale, commercialized, violent way; computer software and the Internet are educational, virtuous, new.
In research on television audiences, I have stressed the ways that negative feelings about television viewing (shame or defensiveness) affect what people are willing to say about television. Comparisons between television viewing and use of the World Wide Web are inevitable. Both television programming and computer software , web sites, etc. serve as topics of conversation and chat (the former being more legitimate among the educated middle classes). Among middle class professionals, the group best positioned to parlay computer use into improved earning power, discussing a new Web site holds more cachet than talking over last night's sit com. The negative associations of being a computer nerd, as in a hacker, have abated considerably in the last decade (Turkle, 1995), while computer magazines such as Wired have promoted fashionable "postmodern" associations with computer use. While some sanctions are associated with being a nerd, the computer stereotype has a higher gender, class and intellectual standing than the couch potato. On the other hand, those with less disposable income and less familiarity with computers may reject computers for the values they represent (such as dehumanization) their emphasis on written rather than oral culture, their associations with white male culture (hackers and hobbyists), and their solitary, anti-social nature. The operations of "distinction" will be especially important to bear in mind when doing empirical work on the social contexts of computer use.
II. Gendered Uses of Computers at Home
Television sets and computers introduce highly similar issues in terms of placement in domestic space, conflicts among family members over usage and control, value in the household budget, and we can expect these to be articulated with gender roles in the family. Some research on gendered conflicts over computers (Giacquinta; Murdock; Haddon) reproduces themes of family-based studies about control of the television set. Already researchers have noted a strong tendency for men and boys to have more access to computers in the home. Television studies such as Ann Gray's, David Morley's and my own work suggest that women in nuclear families have difficulty watching a favorite television show (because of competition for control of the set from other family members, and because of shouldering the majority of child care, housework and cooking). If male family members gravitate towards the computer as hobbyists, the load of chores relegated to female family members will only increase, and make it more difficult for female members to get time on the home computer. Computers require hours of trial and error experimentation, a kind of extended play demanding excess leisure time. Fully exploring the Internet needs time for lengthy downloading, and patience with connections that are busy, so much so that some have dubbed the World Wide Web the World Wide Wait.
In the family, computers can create anxiety, too: Young children must be kept away from the keyboard because of potential damage to the machine. Mothers, who have traditionally been charged with securing the academic success of their children, would have a strong incentive to relinquish computer time to older children, who are thought to benefit greatly from all contact with the technology. When anxieties increase and moral panics are publicized about children's encounters with pornography through the computer, or the unhealthy effects of prolonged computer use, the brunt of responsibility for enforcing restrictions on computer use will fall to mothers and teachers.
Some qualitative research has already explored these areas, and some of the most valuable work has been informed by British cultural studies work. Silverstone and Morley (1991) have offered a fascinating case study of a well-to-do London family whose home included a wide array of new technologies and whose explicit ideology was one of encouraging children to use them. Yet the mother remained at a weary distance from the computer. She responded with irritation to researcher's questions about her feelings towards the communication technologies, claiming not to have feelings about technologies at all. (1992; p. 35) Both parents desired that their children gain computer experience and preferred this to television watching, but expressed irritation with the boy's domination of their home computer. Measure were taken to try to secure computer time for the daughters in the home, but with mixed success. Mrs. Simon felt alienated from the developing "father and son" culture around the computer, and suffered arguments about the selection of computer games, but her frustration led her to take a course on computing. Tensions among highly motivated well- educated females over computer technology deserve much more investigation.
Similarly, Giacquinta, et al., in their qualitative study of white middle class New York families found that marked differences existed between males and females both adults and children, including less use by females, and "mothers were particularly estranged from the machines." (p. 80). The study, conducted in 1984-87, included 69 mothers, two thirds of whom were employed full time outside the home. Mothers tended to use computers for word processing and "did not engage in programming, tinkering, pirating, or game playing" (p. 81) Mothers found the violence in computer games objectionable. In general, they lacked "the interest, the need and the time" to develop computing skills (p. 89). Daughters were more likely than mothers to use the computer, and had more resources to support them such as classroom teaching, but they were not a focus of the girls' leisure time activities.
Friendships, kin networks and work relationships are crucial to the successful adoption of new technologies such as computers (Douglas, 1988) Computer use often involves borrowing software, troubleshooting problems, trying out new programs, boasting or discussing successes, cross-checking machines. Advice and encouragement are important components of this. The Giacquinta study found women rarely spoke with other women about their computers or assisted each other in learning. If women and girls tend not to talk about computers, they are at a sizable disadvantage over boys and men, especially those with considerable practice at hobby talk. In another study of home computing in the English Midlands, Murdock et al. found, in their sample of one thousand households, that males outnumbered females as the primary computer user by a ratio of seven to one. They also found that those who did not talk to others about computers or borrow programs from friends or relatives were most likely to have stopped using their computers. (p. 150)
Jane Wheelock found, in a British study of thirty nine families in "a peripheral region of the national economy" that there were three times as many sons interested in the home computer as interested daughters. Wheelock's study focuses on the ways that the household, operating as a complementary economy to the formal one, reproduces and produces labor power as related to computer use (p. 98-99). Daughters were more likely to be interested in computers if such interest was facilitated by parental and teacher encouragement, or if there were no sons in the family--or after the machine had been abandoned by the sons in the family. (p. 110)
Boys were much more likely than girls to use computers as a part of their social networks, something that, Wheelock notes, "increases boys' socializing, and shifts its locus towards the home; traditionally both are features of girls' experience."(p. 111) Lesley Haddon's observations based on time spent in a computer club similarly suggest that girls may not use computers as a topic for school conversation even when they do use computers at home, being more likely to discuss rented videos. ( p. 91) The girls in Haddon's study were also unlikely to play computers in public places, stores, arcades, or school clubs, but used them at home.
Most of these studies are somewhat dated, and do not provide any information about the use of electronic mail and the World Wide Web. These two uses of the computers, in their facilitation of personal communications, most closely resemble the telephone, a communications technology particularly valued by women (Livingstone, 1992,Rakow1988, Spender, 1995). Reliable information about Web Users is hard to come by and most research relies upon self-selection of its sample, i.e. people responding to various postings asking for Net users to fill out a survey form. Some of this recent survey information suggests that the Internet may be attracting women, especially younger, white, middle class women under thirty-five at surprising rates. In 1995, The Georgia Tech World Wide Web Users survey reports 29% of their respondents are female--a number that has increased significantly over the last three years. There has been a substantial increase in female Web users between the ages of sixteen and twenty years of age, and an increase in female users in who teach Kindergarten through twelfth grade -- there was a 10% increase in female users in this category observed in one year, 1994-95. The importance of access through public education institutions for women is significant: 39% of women responding gained Internet access that way compared to 28% of men. Yet there are clear signs that women are less likely to use computers intensively in their free time. On the weekends-- an indication of hobbyist users, the gap widens to 75 % male and only 25 % female: thus three times as many men are weekend users of computers compared to women. Women users were less likely than men to spend time doing "fun computing" or to use a computer for more than 31 hours a week. Although the Web is attracting men over 46 in increasing numbers--many of them as a retirement hobby, the relative numbers of women over 46 years of age who use the Internet are declining.
Much has been written about the ways that the Internet can be used to explore personality and identity (for example, Turkle 1995; Star, 1995). But women and the poor are going to be less advantageously positioned to engage in such activities for a complex set of reasons (Star 1995). As Roger Silverstone has explained:
the ability to use information and communication technology as a kind of extension of the personality in time and space....is also a matter of resources. The number of rooms in a household relative to the number of people, the amount of money that an individual can claim for his or her own personal use, the amount of control of his or her own time in the often intense atmosphere of family life, all these things are obviously of great relevance...." (Silverstone, 1991c, p. 12) .
III. Computerized Work Are women more likely to use the Internet if they use computers on the job? Working on a computer can mean very different things: if we are to understand the differential desire to use computers during leisure time, it is essential to make distinctions between kinds of computerized work. For example, huge numbers of female employees occupy clerical jobs that use computers for processing payroll, word-processing, conducting inventory, sales and airline reservations--over 16 million women held such positions in the US in 1993 (Kling, 1996). Less than half a million women work as computer programmers or systems analysts. Women overwhelmingly outnumber men in the kinds of jobs where telephones and computers are used simultaneously: airline reservations, catalog sales, telephone operators.
The type of employment using a computer that is likely to be familiar to the largest numbers of women, then, is a kind of work where keystrokes might be counted, where supervisors may listen in on phone calls uninterrupted, where productivity is scrutinized on a daily and hourly basis, where conversation with co-workers is forbidden (Clement,1996; Iacono and Kling, 1996). The stressful and unpleasant circumstances under which this kind of work is performed might explain women's alienation from computer technology and tendency to stay away from it during their leisure time.
Some parallels exist between clerical work and teaching-- one of the sole white collar professions dominated by women. As Steven Hodas points out in his discussion of what he calls "technology refusal" in schools, most teachers are women, most educational technologists are men who target their efforts at introducing computer technologies towards classroom teachers, not male administrators. The need for classroom computers is usually expressed in ways that derogate the work of teachers: in these discussions educational technologists "the terms used to describe the insufficiency of the classroom and to condescend to the folk- craft of teaching are the same terms used by an androgenized society to derogate women's values and women's work generally(p. 206)" When technologies fail in the classroom the reaction is to "blame the stubborn backwardness of teachers or the inflexibility and insularity of the school culture." Hodas usefully reminds us that present day arguments about the need for computers in schools mirror the same redemption through technology arguments that accompanied other media, most notably for our purposes, educational video. The violence that technologists have done to our only public children's space by reducing it to an "instructional delivery vehicle" is enormous, and teachers know that. To abstract a narrow and impoverished concept of human sentience from the industrial laboratory and then inflict it on children for the sake of "efficiency' is a gratuitous, stunning stupidity and teachers know that, too. Many simply prefer not to collaborate with a process they experience as fundamentally disrespectful to kids and teachers alike. (p. 213)
Telecommuting, working from the home through a modem or Internet access to the office, is a different category of computerized work which is supposed to hold special appeal to women. Telecommuting is now officially sanctioned by the US government, according to Rob Kling: A recent report developed under the auspices of the Clinton administration included a key section, "Promoting Telecommuting," that lists numerous advantages for telecommuting. These include major improvements in air quality from reduced travel; increased organizational productivity when people can be more alert during working hours faster commercial transit times when few cars are on the roads; and improvements in quality or worklife. The benefits identified in this report seem so overwhelming that it may appear remarkable that most organizations have not already allowed all of their workers the options to work at home.
While there are growing numbers of women doing pink collar jobs such as clerical and sales work at home, i.e. using their home computers, at jobs such as credit card verification and telephone solicitations, this form of telecommuting is also largely invisible in the mass media. Instead we see images of female professionals using computers to work from home, perhaps while their one and only child conveniently naps in the next room. Computer publications suggest "a hybrid site of home and work, where it is possible to make tele-deals while sitting in your kitchen." As Lynn Spigel has noted in her discussion of a Mac Home magazine cover: "The computer and Net offer women a way to do two jobs at once-- reproduce and produce, be a mother and hold down a high powered job. Even while the home work model of domestic space finds a place for women, it does not really break down the traditional distinctions between male and female." (Spigel, 1996) As more workers struggle to get their work done from home without benefit of an office, questions about the use of communication technologies become especially interesting and well-suited to ethnographic approaches. Another interesting issue for audience research is the entertainment uses of computers in offices, as office workers have access to more entertainment and play functions through their computers. Sherry Turkle's book, Life on the Screen(1995), examines a group comprised mainly of students or white collar computer programmers who work on computers throughout the day. Turkle is especially interested in participation in MUDS: on-line fantasy games that can have dozens of players. As Turkle describes this balance of play and work: I have noted that committed players often work with computers all day at their regular jobs. As the play on MUDs, they periodically put their characters to sleep, remaining logged on to the game, but pursuing other activities. The MUD keeps running in a buried window. From time to time, they return to the game space. In this way, they break up their day and come to experience their lives as cycling through the real world and a series of virtual ones.p. 189 While Turkle is primarily interested in the psychological dynamics of play with a variety of virtual selves, she rarely foregrounds the very specific class fraction who has the privilege to play on the job. In this world, white collar upper middle class, employers are finding that after a period of vigorous encouragement if not requirement of nearly constant computer and Internet use in many occupations, employees are spending large parts of the day playing computer games, writing personal e-mails, and cruising the Internet, and that it is increasingly difficult to confine white collar employees to work-related rather than entertainment uses of these technologies- -or in some cases to distinguish between the two. As one expert wryly put it in a discussion of the impact of digital video discs, "The big application for DVD later this year will be desktop video playback, which will eliminate any remaining worker productivity that hasn't already been destroyed by Web surfing." (Hood, 1997)
Turkle gives many examples of women immersed in the play with identity and the capacity for writing one's own dramatic narratives that MUDs offer, and she is especially interested in the phenomenon of players impersonating the opposite sex in their virtual personae. Turkle's study fails to interrogate the particular class background of the MIT students and computer programmers she interviewed for her study, or to ask how particular class positions may predispose women to be attracted to the kind of play with virtual selves that she describes as postmodern. The luxury of such computer play is unimaginable in the context of most clerical computer work and unlikely in the home work station when women race to get their work done before children come home from school or hurry to turn their attention from the computer to housecleaning, shopping or food preparation.
For writers such as Turkle, the Internet offers an arena for exploring--and deconstructing--traditional gender roles that can be quite liberating. Such an analysis contrasts sharply with the concerns of Cheris Kramarae, who in her analysis of the genres and kinds of information available on the World Wide Web, has noted the rapid proliferation of genres such as pornography, and modes of discourse, such as flaming, which may act as a deterrent to women going on-line. Similarly, Linguist Susan Herring has cast doubt on utopian claims for on-line communications in the workplace that have suggested these technologies may be advantageous for women getting ahead in professions. This work suggests that even among white collar professionals, computers may be more fun for men than for women. For example, in a study of academics using electronic discussion groups, Herring found that: .... male and female academic professionals do not participate equally in academic CMC. Rather, a small male minority dominates the discourse both in terms of amount of talk, and rhetorically, through self- promotional and adversarial strategies. Moreover, when women do attempt to participate on a more equal basis, they risk being actively censored by the reactions of men who either ignore them or attempt to delegitimize their contributions. Herring concluded that there was nothing inherently wrong with the technology of computer bulletin boards, rather the problem stemmed from the ways that old, familiar forms of gender discrimination-- from the academic workplace and from society--dictated the ways that participants would communicate. Laura Miller has dismissed this type of complaint about the Internet, warning that we need to be wary of the media's attempt to cast women as victims on the Internet, as in discussions of flaming or the prevalence of pornography: The idea that women merit special protections in a environment as incorporeal as the Net is intimately bound up with the idea that women's minds are weak, fragile, and unsuited to the rough and tumble of public discourse. It's an argument that women should recognize with profound mistrust and resist, especially when we are used as rhetorical pawns in a battle to regulate a rare (if elite) space of gender ambiguity (1995, 58) What is needed in this discussion between two different camps of feminists--those who see the Internet as rife with sexism (a group Miller unhelpfully calls the "schoolmarms") and those who see such behaviors as incidental problems, easily overcome by assertive behaviors--is research that links women's reaction and attraction to the Internet to other aspects of their lived experience, including education, class, sexual orientation, religion, and workplace culture, including how frequently they experience and how they deal with sexual harassment in their workplace. As Cynthia Cockburn reminds us "Gender is a social achievement. Technology too." (p. 39) The trick for media researchers will be to avoid a kind of static gender essentialism, where women, the elderly and the poor are eternally, innately deficientvis a vis new technologies, while all men benefit from inborn technical know-how, an affinity to toying with machines, and an enthusiastic embrace of time-intensive forms of hobbyism. Ethnographic studies can help to provide materialist explanations for women's reluctance to immerse themselves in computer use and on-line communications as well as explicating the circumstances under which women are attracted to and excel at computer skills.
The role of feminist researchers will include tempering enthusiasm for these new technologies, as Kramarae and Kramer argue The so-called popular media treat the new electronic systems as sexy, but the media fail to deal seriously with most of the gender- related issues. As those who are working closely with its developments know, the Internet will not, contrary to what the media tout, ride the world of hostility, ignorance, racism, sexism, greed and undemocratic governments. The internet has the potential for creating a cooperative collective international web; but, as with all technologies, the Internet system will be shaped by prevailing communication behaviors, economic policy, and legal decisions. (p. 15) One of the most important functions of ethnography then may be as an antidote to the hype about computers. Ethnography can describe, for example, the full context in which barriers to entrance on to the information highway exist--especially among people still worrying about keeping a car running on the real highway, much less having the extra time and money to maintain a computer at home.
Studying the use of computers may force communication scholars to examine the links between public and private; work and home more closely and encourage audience researchers to take stock of the role of television outside the home. While domestic studies of television audiences often report rather depressing views of traditional divisions of labor--and the early studies of computer use in the home seem to follow along similar lines, this picture may become more complicated and more nuanced if we examine the ways that women use computers in the workplace and how employment uses affect the likelihood that they will become computer enthusiasts (Haddon, p. 86). We need to engage both in domestic studies of computers and the study of public uses of television while examining the connections between office and home use. Both technologies--computers and televisions-- need to be studied in both contexts--the domestic and the workplace.
IV. Conclusion
We need to be explicit about the stakes involved in our representations of media audiences and computer users, and present our research in forms that are accessible to journalists and policy makers. The digital revolution is creating huge numbers of "information have-nots". With about 1/3 of US homes yet to receive cable television, the penetration of home computers is unlikely to reach anything like that of television sets. Researching only those who are already working with computers or have computers in the home will skew our understanding. As Dan Schiller usefully reminds us: It is only among the better-off -- households with $75,000 or more in annual income--that PCs had become routine, with a 60-65% penetration rate.....Even the experience of the most favorably endowed ones in the global political economy shows, therefore, that the level and character of access remained a function of entrenched income inequality. p. 5. McChesney cautions about the catastrophic impact of the Internet on the widening class divide:"In a class- stratified, commercially oriented society like the United States, cannot the information highway have the effect of simply making it possible for the well-to-do to bypass any contact with the balance of society altogether?" (1996,117)
The massive investment in a technology so heavily skewed towards benefiting the white middle class must be viewed with skepticism, and convincing arguments for the importance of sustaining funding for television and video production need to be mounted. John Caldwell has noted the logical leap made by many advocates of "telecomputers" and the information superhighway "to a vision of the world in which infinite individual needs are met through interactivity and technological responsiveness." As Caldwell reminds us: "Most audiences have yet to clamor for the headaches of menus, interactive branching, and nonlinearity. They want Schwarzenegger and production value, and they want it now. Many audiences do not want Nintendo and e-mail either, they want narrative and character." (p. 348). Television scholars must be prepared to protest the drastic cuts in funding for public television and for independent productions--television sets and VCRs are to be found in nearly every home (and many classrooms), television and video will continue to be vastly more accessible than computer communications for a very long time--and probably a better investment for a democratic society. It will be important to do field work close to home, especially with aggrieved communities whose second-rate access to media technologies and whose representational exclusion from the mass media have long and relatively unchanging histories, and for whom the push towards computerization threatens to exacerbate economic hardship and a widening class divide.
University administrators now pressure academics to form "partnerships" with business (Soley, 1995) All of us would do well to make sure that there are clear cut differences between our research questions and those of market researchers. One way to do this is to investigate those who are unworthy of market researchers' attention, because they have so little money, or because their ideologies and practices cannot be comfortable made to fit the categories of marketing. Bringing to bear on our analysis a full understanding of economic and historical determinants of the situations we study is another. Maintaining a high degree of consciousness about the markets currently targeted by business, as well as the spread of marketing techniques globally is a third, very important strategy. The challenges for future research on media audiences and computer users are to broaden our scope, through a stronger theoretical engagement with political economy, and a widening of focus beyond television to include new computer technologies. When turning to the Internet it will be especially important to treat computer communications as deeply cultural, as employing fiction and fantasy as well as information, and as open to variable interpretations based on gender, race and ethnicity. As the Internet is championed as the ultimate in "interactive" media use, it will be extremely important for media researchers to put forward appropriate skepticism about the laudatory uses of the term "active" in discussions of media use, and to problematize the complex factors involved in attracting both television watchers and computer users to particular contents and genres.
Ethnography can offer an appreciation of some of television's advantages over computers (such as its accessibility by more than one person at a time, and its visual and aural modes of communication) and guard against the unnecessary pathologization of television viewing, which almost always acts to stigmatize the already socially powerless. It will be important to look at the reasons why and the contexts in which television might be more appealing than the Internet. We know that television--for all of its failings--has been cheap, easy to watch at home, enjoyable to talk about with others, and reasonably successful as an educational tool. It will be important to understand the ways that such social features of broadcast technologies are missing or modified in new technologies. Finally, scholars should work to change the media and the structures of access to communication technologies, while politicizing the public discussion of media in ways that make explicit the gains and the losses at stake in promoting different representations of the audiences and computer users.
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