Media Use in the Home Environment

The topic statement was heavily wrong in many aspects in terms of ignoring the difference and speciality of media use and media consumption in home environment. Home environment is a place for private life and intimated communication that is wholly contradicted with the unconcealed and diverse information flow in the public area. Compared with the complex interrelationship between individuals in public, family provides a rather explicitly relations around children, husband and wife. However, there are certain factors, like gender difference, hidden behind which is necessary to testify and excavate through ethnography includes feminist studies. In the essay, I will apply for certain previous studies to prove and demonstrate the distinctions of use and consumption of media in home environment versus outside home area.

To begin with, the first part of the essay will focus on borrowing three famous feminist studies to critically argued and discussed about the distinctive characteristics of media use and consumption among husband and wife, also children in home environment which are Janice Radway’s Reading the Roman (1984), David Morley’s Family Television (1986) and Ann Gray’ video playtime (1992). As audiences have always been placed as the central subjects investigated in analysis the media uses and consumption, the gender difference of the audiences in home environment which I refer to husband and wife will be radically but rationally discussed; the reason for that is home is a place has been called by Sean Cubitt (1985) that ‘the politics of the living room’ (Morley, 1992: 140).The power inequality possessed by husband and wife will be further discoursed in later paragraphs.

First of all, Radway research...

... middle of paper ...

...Hermes, J. (1991) ‘Gender and /in Media Consumption in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society, 2cnd edition, London: Arnold

2. "Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naive." Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. New York: Routledge, 1989. 223-247. Print.

3. Seiter, Ellen. "Qualitative Audience Research." Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford Television Studies). New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1999. 9-31. Print.

4. Morley, Dave. "Gender, domestic leisure and viewing practices." Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. 1ed. New York: Routledge, 1992. 131-169. Print.

Work consulted:

1. Frazer, E (1992) ‘Teenage girls reading Jackie’ in Scannell, P. et al. (eds) Culture and Power, pp. 182-200

2. Rethinking the Media Audience: The New Agenda. 1 ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd, 1999. Print.