From Audiences to Consumers: The Household and the Consumption of Communication and Information Technologies

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Abstract
This article presents an account of the development of a research project into the household and the consumption of communication and information technologies. Previous research into the television audience has failed adequately to take into account the new communication environment of which television is but a part — an environment which is both technological and social. This paper offers a model for the analysis of the television audience which does take this new environment into account. Drawing on qualitative empirical work among family households, it offers a model of the media consumption process which takes the social, economic and technological aspects of the domestic sphere as central. In defining this domestic sphere as a moral economy, it suggests that the television audience has to be understood in terms of a set of practices, both routine and ritualized, which are firmly embedded in the various multiple dimensions of their domesticity.