SOME EFFECTS OF TELEVISION VIEWING ON FAMILY FUNCTIONING by SAM NEAL BRAUDT. B.A.

A THESIS IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND FAMILY STUDIES Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE IN HOME ECONOMICS

Approved

Accepted

May, 1988

Copyright 1988 Sam Neal Braudt

ACKBOVLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my wife, Ina Braudt, my daughters, Anne Braudt and Jennifer Braudt, and my mother, Faye Braudt, for much-needed support and encouragement during this most recent academic undertaking. Their patient understanding has been vital. My debt to the members of my committeeBrad Keeney, Neal Newfield, and Scott Pollardgoes beyond the customary gratitude for help and advice. For the past two years they have served as partners in the provocative conversation of ideas on which the present work is based. Their generous contributions of time and thought have been invaluable and will not be forgotten. Especial thanks go to Melissa Keeney. As an informal fourth member of my committee, her stimulating comments and frank enthusiasm have been a consistent source of renewal and inspiration.

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CONTEHTS ACOOVLEDGMENTS CHAPTER I. EVOLUTION OF MEDIA RESEARCH AND THEORY General Trends in Television Research Contributions of McLuhan and Innis SituationsSome Fundamental Concepts The Work of Joshua Meyrowitz II. SITUATIONS AS INFORMATION SYSTEMS New Media Create New Situations and New Behavior Middle and Deep Back Regions Media Effects on Group Identity Ways in Which Socialization is Affected by Electronic Media Influence of Media on Authority Effects of Media on Polite Behavior and Topics of Conversation III. MEDIA AND FAMILIES Implications for Role Theory Implications for Family Systems Concluding Remarks SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 16 18 18 20 22 23 15 15 1 2 3 5 9 11 12 13 14 ii

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CHAPTER I EVOLUTION OF MEDIA RESEARCH AND THEORY

Families are ubiquitous, and always have been. Television, while it has only been around for a few decades, is catching up fast: it spread from only 9% of American homes in 1950 to 96% in 1970 (Nielsen, 1977). Its familiar flickering glow is seen in family homes and bedrooms, in airport lobbies and prison cells. Ve quickly come to take for granted anything which is a consi^ant part of our living environment, adapting it to our needs in the process. One recent study of television viewing habits found that more than a third of the viewers of a typical hour-long television program do not watch the program to the end, that about 40% of viewers in cable households "always" or "often" search for another program during commercial breaks, and that 40-50% of television viewers are eating, washing the dishes, talking on the telephone, or reading while watching television (Television Audience Assessment, Inc., 1983). Television has become part of the fabric of our existence, as unremarked as the dining table or the family dog. Analysis of this remarkable growth and its effects, in terms of anything beyond simple summary statistics, began only fairly recently. It is the purpose of this thesis

to describe the thrust of television theory and research, with emphasis on the more recent media theorists and their concepts. Particular attention will be given to implications of their work for certain aspects of family theories.

General Trends in Television Research Mass media bypass traditional limitations on communication. Anyone with access to a printing press, a radio microphone, or a television camera can pass on a message to a very large number of individuals who are remote in place and possibly in time as well. Initial research on

media focused on the messages carried and on their potential for stirring a mass or mob reaction. Over the past two decades, however, such writers as Marshall McLuhan (1964) and Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), along with Theodore Roszak (1986), Gary Gumpert (1987), Gregor Goethals (1981), Neal Postman (1982, 1985), E. Ann Kaplan (1987), and Jerry Mander (1978), have dealt with qualities and effects intrinsic to the electronic media, especially television. They view media not merely as neutral channels that deliver information, but as forces that also impact behavior, perception, and social situations in specific ways that are largely independent of the particular content of the medium at any specific point in time. In this sense, McLuhan's catchy phrase, "The medium is the message," is literally true, Joshua Meyrowitz, in the communications department at the University of New Hampshire, has integrated such media theory with the concepts of Erving Goffman, producing a higher-order analysis with many implications for family life, political activity, and social order. The work of McLuhan, Meyrowitz, and Goffman will be treated at some length further on. The remainder of this thesis will discuss some recent developments in media theory and their possible contributions to an enrichment of family theory.

Contributions of McLuhan and Innis McLuhan (1964) was a student of medieval literature, an English teacher with a fascination for print media, and, later, for electronic media, especially television. In his initial work on the effects of

printing on culture he was influenced by the writing of political economist Harold Adams Innis (1964). Innis argued that different media

have different potentialities for control. A specialized medium that is difficult to decode is, according to Innis, more likely to be dominated by an elite with the capacity to limit access to it. On the other hand, a medium that is readily accessible to ordinary persons tends to democratize a culture. Printed editions of the Bible translated into the vulgate reduced the authority of the priestly caste, who until then had wielded power in part due to their monopoly of Latin literacy and in part owing to ownership of manuscript Bibles being restricted almost entirely to clergy and monastic orders. Innis (1964) also called attention to two important properties (or "biases," in his term) of media: a given medium tends to last a longer or shorter time, and it travels more or less easily across long distances. He held, for example, that such "time-biased" media as stone carvings lead to relatively small, stable societies, since such carvings are difficult to update and because their limited mobility makes them an awkward means for keeping in touch with remote outposts. In contrast,

the "space-biased" papyrus of the Romans allowed them to maintain a large empire with a centralized government that exercised authority over distant provinces, but at the cost of more social change and greater

instability (the latter due to the relative ephemerallty of ink marks on paper). McLuhan (1964) added the notion of "sensory balance" to Innis's (1964) concepts of information monopolies and media "biases." He looked at media as extensions of human senses, and surmised that technologies affect the organization of the senses in particular ways. Drawing on his

background as a literary historian, McLuhan demarcated three main periods of human culture: oral, writing/printing, and electronic. He characterized the oral world of the hunter-gatherer tribe as a closed society of high interdependence and low individuality. The addition of writing and, especially, of print tend to make the sense of sight dominant while minimizing the immediacy of sound and touch. Printoriented cultures become more introspective, rational, and individualistic, in McLuhan's view. With print comes abstract thought: the "invention" of written Greek around 1400 B.C. led quickly, in historical terms, to the Homeric epics and Socratic dialogues which have held sway over European culture and thought for the succeeding two millenia. The characteristics of print lead people to more linear, cause-andeffect ways of thinking. Allegiances shift from the immediate neighbors of an oral culture to an abstract "nation" or to a society of peers scattered over time and space but united in print by shared concepts and values ("The Community of Scholars," "The Dialogue of the Ages"). McLuhan (1964), many of the qualities of Western rationality and civilized behavior are derived from the influence of the printing press. Electronic media such as television, in McLuhan's (1964) opinion, extend our senses to embrace the planet; we regain the immediacy of To

neighbors in a small village, but on a planetary scale.

Electronic media

level times and places, make experiences i n s t a n t l y repeatable for the masses, and add complexity to the spectrum of communication forms. In addition, although each new medium transforms culture, and, arguably, modes of consciousness, i t does not destroy old forms of communication but r a t h e r supplements and complements them while a t the same time subtly and profoundly a l t e r i n g them. The important underlying when

principle i s firmly rooted in systems theory and ecological theory:

a new factor i s added t o an existing environment, the r e s u l t i s not the old environment plus the new element, but, rather, a d i s t i n c t l y new environment. This line of argument leads McLuhan (1964) to the view that the form of a communication has an impact beyond the overt content of the message sent. While not denying the significance of message content, he

i s primarily interested in a different dimension of a n a l y s i s . Although the work of such t h e o r i s t s as Innis (1964) and McLuhan (1964) draws heavily on i n s i g h t s and i n t u i t i o n s which seem to ring true, they provide more of a perspective for studying the effects of media on behavior than a detailed theory. What i s missing i s any real attempt to

link the systems c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s of media with the s t r u c t u r e and processes of everyday social (and hence family) i n t e r a c t i o n . to a body of work dealing with s i t u a t i o n s and behavior. ,^i;tu^tinn^Some Fundamental Concepts Sociologists have long recognized the importance of social situations. W. I. Thomas (1928) suggested t h a t if we define s i t u a t i o n s as We now turn

real, they become real in their consequences. Each culture or group constructs rules and roles for a variety of defined situations. A funeral demands different behavior than a wedding; a fraternity party's implicit rules differ from those of a classroom. Although constructed, rather

than innate, the rules and roles for situations do constitute social reality in a meaningful way; no one would attempt to behave in the first situation of each of the above pairs as they would normally behave in the second. People entering an interaction need to know how the situation is defined, need to know "What is going on here?" in order to behave correctly. To know the definition of a situation is to know much about

the nature of the encounter and the patterns that govern it, to know what is permitted ("mourners cry") as well as what is forbidden ("brides don't preach"). Closely related to the sociological concept of situations is the idea of behavior settings propounded by the social psychologist Roger Barker in his groundbreaking Ecological Psychology (1968). Barker and his

colleagues derived empirical decision rules for defining and delimiting real-life behavior settings and their degree of functional interdependence In human communities. These constructs, which in the opinion of the present author hold great potential for both systems and media theorists, have unfortunately been neglected even within the field of psychology and are essentially unknown to media theorists. As Goffman suggests in Frame Analysis (1974), situational definitions can become quite complicated. A situation can have a

"primary framework" (such as "fighting") and also have several overlays

of context ("playing at fighting," or even "actor portraying a play fight"). Amazingly enough, however, most ordinary adult members of a

group or culture can "read" the definition of even complicated situations quickly and accurately. Indeed, Goffman points out, it is often much more

difficult for researchers to identify, define, and study situations than it is for the average citizen to navigate them. This quick, intuitive identification of and response to situations is not innate. It is, rather, the product of a long learning process. To a

considerable extent, socialization in fact consists of learning to distinguish among situations and to narrow down one's behavior to the relatively limited range appropriate to a given situation. We frequently are only minimally aware of the process of making these distinctions, perhaps because we tend to focus on what is consistent in our behavior from situation to situation (our "identity") while minimizing the ways our behavior changes as we go from one situation to another. Goffman's (1959) work on situations provides some useful clues regarding the impact of new media on social roles. He describes social life using the metaphor of drama. To Goffman, we each play many roles on a variety of different social stages, offering a different, somewhat "edited" version of ourselves to each audience. The performance of a social role, to Goffman, is a teal performance: it displays selected behaviors for selected time periods, behaviors which must be, to some extent, planned and rehearsed. Just as in a Broadway play, the stage must be set, the performers must monitor their actions, and the roles enacted on one stage must be kept separate from those displayed elsewhere.

8 Embellishing his metaphor of the situation as drama, Goffman (1959) suggests that any person's behavior in a given setting can be divided into two major categories: "back region," or backstage behavior, and "front region," or onstage behavior. In front regions, where performers

are before their audience for a particular role, they play a relatively stylized conception of the demands of that role. For example, waiters in the dining room of a resturant are in a front region; they demonstrate such traits as courtesy, efficiency, and cleanliness. They do not chat intimately with the diners, nor do they comment on their patrons' eating habits or table manners. When waiters go from the dining room into the kitchen area, however, they cross from the onstage area to a backstage region, where they are hidden from the customers who constitute their audience. They share this backstage area with others who perform similar roles (busboys, cooks, other waiters) and who when backstage are likewise hidden from the customers who constitute their audience. Here they may comment on the uncouth habits of a customer, discuss the best way to appeal to a customer's vanity in hopes of getting a big tip, or openly sneeze and cough near food trays. In general, Goffman (1959) maintains, virtually

all role performers (which means all of us) tend to have back regions where they and their fellow players relax, rehearse, develop strategies for future performances, and joke about their behavior in front regions. Goffman emphasizes that even back region behavior constitutes a sort of role enactment, one in which teammates will not tolerate formal, front region style manners.

As we saw to be the case with the media theory of Innis (1964) and McLuhan (1964), situation theory, as developed by Goffman (1959, 1974) and others, has not produced a set of linked propositions describing the phenomena under study. There has been little work explaining the general process through which situations affect behavior, there have been few attempts to predict why and how social situations evolve, and there have been almost no analyses of how behavior may be expected to change when a situation changes. Elegant as his observations and analysis are, Goffman's (1959, 1974) work is no exception in this regard. Though presenting a rich source of data on human behavior, Goffman has basically provided us with countless detailed observations and with few integrating theories. His writings, which treat scholarly material in an almost novelistic fashion, do not readily yield up abstract principles. In addition, each of his works

stands alone, relatively self-sufficient, with few hints on how it relates to his other writings.

The Work of Joshua Meyrowitz Meyrowitz (1985) may exemplify a new generation of students of human behavior. Broadly read in several fields, including communications theory and sociology, he sets for himself the task of integrating the best insights of disciplines which hitherto have been perceived as distinct and as bearing little or no relation to one another. At the outset of his attempt to link media theory and situation theory, Meyrowitz notes that: On the surface, the two bodies of literature seem incompatible. They each suggest something about the social

10 order, but they do not overlap. The media theorists describe how media reshape large cultural environments and institutional structures, but they do not tell us much about the ways in which media reshape specific social situations or everyday social behaviors. For their part, most of the situationists are more concerned with describing situations and situational behaviors as they exist in a society than in analyzing or predicting social change. Further, the situationists focus almost entirely on face-to-face interaction and ignore interactions that take place through media. (1985, p. 33) But in Meyrowitz's estimation, both perspectives have some elements in common. Both groups reject limiting their studies only to lower-level

variations within a system (such as specific content of a medium or particular individual behaviors within a situation). Instead, they both

look at general effects interacting with the larger structure of the environment. More importantly, as Meyrowitz sees it, both groups deal with one similar theme: patterns of access to each other. "The situationists suggest how our particular actions and words are shaped by our knowledge of who has access to them, and the media theorists suggest that new media change such patterns of access" (1985, p.33). Meyrowitz (1985) finds Goffman's (1959) model of the situation as drama to provide some insights regarding the effects new media have on social behavior. Since enacting a certain role requires appropriate social situations and audiences, to the extent that a new medium restructures social stages and reorganizes audiences it will have a pronounced impact on social behavior. Some concepts of Keyrowitz's regarding the effects of media on social situations will be described next, followed by a discussion of implications of his views for certain aspects of family theory and research.

CHAPTER II SITUATIONS AS INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The usual definitions of situations describe behavior as taking place in a given physical location. Such physical barriers as walls, fences, and doors direct the flow of people and shape, to a considerable extent, the number, kind, and size of face-to-face interactions. The walls of a room allow interaction among certain individuals and simultaneously isolate them from others. Meyrowitz (1985) admits the importance of place, but he speculates that place is important mainly for providing barriers to perception. For him, it is the more inclusive notion of a perceptual field that matters. Rather than defining a situation in terms of who is in what location, he holds that the real issue is what types of behaviors are available, I 2 3 L whatever meaiis., for others' scrutiny. Harking back to Goffman's (1959) classic example of waiters in a restaurant, Meyrowitz asks us to imagine how the definition of the situation would change if by mistake an intercom is left turned on in the kitchen and some customers overhear the backstage gossip of their waiters. The situational definition will be affected even though no

change in the physical setting or in the physical locations of the players has occurred. In a similar way, he notes, print literacy permits

parents to create a backstage in the presence of their small children by spelling words to each other without being understood by the children. 11

12 Two teenagers who have been banished to their telephone-equipped bedrooms can overcome the confinement their parents intended by calling each other and creating a new, electronically mediated, backstage area. Meyrowitz (1985) suggests that if we think of a social situation as an information system in which certain social information is accessible only to specific people, we could extend the study of situations beyond just the "live" interactions that occur face-to-face in place-bound settings. Accepting an information systems viewpoint, he notes, allows

us to see both physical settings and "mediated" settings as part of a continuum, with both places and media producing characteristic patterns of interaction. Compared to "live" situations, media accentuate selected channels of information while completely omitting others.

New Media Create New Situations And New Behavior Situations utilize both performance stages and social "scripts." While scripts tend to change slowly, as a result of alterations in legal codes, social customs, and rituals, stages can change quickly when new media are introduced. It follows, then, that if the settings for

situations change (by merging, dividing, or disappearing), then it will be impossible to maintain the old definitions of the situations. Flicking a microphone switch or turning on a television set can change a situation as much as opening a door, building a wall, or changing the cast of performers. Social reality, Meyrowitz (1985) holds, exists not merely in the sum of people's behaviors but in the overall pattern of situational behaviors. When the boundary defining a situation is changed or removed, as by

13 electronic media, social reality tends to change as well. When a reporter meets with the President in front of television cameras. Is this encounter an intimate social meeting between two people or a public performance before millions? It is, of course, both, and therefore it is

neither, becoming rather something else, aill generis, different not merely in degree but in outright kind. The President cannot act as if he is alone with the reporter, not can he act as if he is addressing a crowd on the steps of the White House. The new, media-influenced setting calls for new actions and new social meanings. In this sense, Meyrowitz maintains,

we have a new situation and with it a new presidency.

Middle and Deep Back Regions Some of Meyrowitz's (1985) most provocative ideas come from his elaboration of Goffman's (1974) model of front and back region behaviors. He asserts that electronic media tend especially to invade what traditionally have been backstage areas, making them to some extent subject to audience scrutiny. In general, he says, whatever parts of the

rehearsal become visible to the audience must be integrated into the show itself; the more rehearsal space that is lost, the more the onstage performance comes to resemble a backstage rehearsal. The new behavior that arises out of two merging situations (say, the restaurant with front and back regions linked by the activated intercom mentioned earlier) he terms "middle region" behavior. In effect, the

audience members gain a "sidestage" view, seeing parts of the traditional backstage area along with parts of the traditional onstage area. A

14 middle region behavior p a t t e r n contains elements of both the former onstage and offstage behaviors but lacks t h e i r extremes. On the other hand, when the backstage area i s increased in scope, the onstage behavior can become even more contrived and formal, more r i t u a l i s t i c and ceremonial. The two new s e t s of behaviors t h a t r e s u l t

from the division of s i t u a t i o n s allow for both a coarser backstage s t y l e and a more highly perfected onstage performance. An example of increased

separation might be a telephone conversation carried on while others are in the same room. In general, the more distance there i s between two or

more regions, the more an individual's behavior can vary from one region to the next. Media Effects on Group Identity Group i d e n t i t y i s based in large measure on shared experience; to

the extent t h a t electronic media increase or shrink the number of groups whose experiences we can (albeit vicariously) share, our sense of who i s like us s h i f t s . A teenager's sense of group identification may move

toward young people portrayed on MTV videos and away from peers who live in adjacent houses. Since the influence of a primary group is inversely

related to the amount of access an individual has to other, competing, perspectives, t r a d i t i o n a l group influences may be d r a s t i c a l l y altered by information from mass media. A clear sense of "us" depends on sharing

one another's backstage behavior, while we tend to see as alien, as "them," those whose offstage behavior i s invisible to us. New media may

affect a s o c i e t y ' s group i d e n t i t i e s by allowing individuals to escape from place-defined groups and by permitting outsiders t o "invade" group

15 territories from which they have previously been excluded. The psychologist-turned-mystic Richard Alpert (1974) once commented that by the time a contemporary child is fourteen years old, she or he has vicariously experienced, through television, literally thousands of vividly portrayed role models and experiential situations, vastly more than any pre-television generation was ever exposed to.

Vavs in Which Sncializatlnn i^ Affected by Electronic Media Socialization involves the orderly and sequential acquisition of the special information of the reference group. A child is traditionally excluded from many of the secrets of adult life. This exclusion is not permanent or absolute. It is understood that in due time the individual

being socialized will be given access to the information of the group, in what is usually a gradual, carefully timed series of revelations, the rites of passage to which anthropologists refer. One way of viewing the impact of a new medium on socialization, according to Meyrowitz, is to examine its capacity to restrict individuals of different ages and backgrounds to different informational realms. The more a medium tends to allow for very private backstage areas, the more it will support slow, sequenced stages of socialization. On the other hand, media that reveal heretofore private areas where group identity is enacted will tend to erode slow, stage-determined socialization.

Influence of Media on Authority Privileged access to special knowledge tends to enhance authority. The status of superiors may be undermined when inferiors gain entry to

16 special areas of information. "The more a medium tends to separate what different people in a society know, the more the medium will allow for many ranks of authority; the more it tends to merge informational worlds, the more the medium will encourage egalitarian forms of interaction" (Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 64). Performance of a role high in authority requires careful concealment of backstage rehearsals, practice, and humor. The need for privacy for an authority figure suggests that hierarchies are usually supported by media that make a clear distinction between leaders' personal foibles and their public actions. Hierarchies will be weakened by new media that expose what were once the private acts of the powerful. It was not so

much the actions of the Watergate burglars as the revelations of "offthe-record" White House tapes that led to the demise of the Nixon administration.

Effects of Media on Polite Rehavior and Topics of Conversatinn Electronic media affect not only role performers but also audiences. As performances are seen by larger and more diverse audiences in our information environment, notions of what is proper and not proper for a given audience group become blurred. Men and women who regularly view the same television programs gradually stop distinguishing between "women's subjects" and "men's subjects," between "men's language" and "women's language." A traditional classroom may contain no electronic

devices, but its students all live in a media-saturated environment outside the classroom. Thus a school lesson about the idealized

functioning of the executive branch of the government may be interrupted

17 by a youngster who excitedly describes the presidential scandal reported on television the previous night. Or a young teenaged couple might shock their parents with rough language and sexual openness reflecting their repeated viewing of television portrayals of what had once been adult backstage regions. The apparent 'hypocrisy' that television exposes in many of the discrepancies between role performers' front and back region behaviors. . . may have a tendency to encourage viewers to develop a more consistent 'middle region' style for themselves that includes many words and actions from their QMIL backstage behaviornot necessarily from the idealized and sanitized backstage behaviors projected on television. (Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 175)

CHAPTER III MEDIA AND FAMILIES

While media theorists have not specifically concerned themselves with the application of their work to theories about the family, exploration of the implications of their perspective for related concepts in the literature of the family would appear to be a logical next step. The final portions of the present work will address some representative applications of media theory in a family theory context.

Implications for Role Theory Burr el al. (1979), in their exposition of role theory, discuss several concepts that would appear to be impacted by media theory. In general, media theory seems to suggest that electronic media, especially television, will substantially influence our thinking about roles and social norms (the Generalized Other which Burr e. ai. describe). Role enactment, or the behavior of an individual in a role, requires attention to the demands of a particular situation. To the extent that electronic media have altered the nature of frontstage and backstage zones and have added such complications as middle, deep back, and forefront regions, the enactment of roles by family members has become increasingly complex. The trend toward dilution of authority figures' status may have important implications for the effectiveness of parents as models for children and as leaders for their families. 18

19 Ve might a l s o hypothesize t h a t a s media i n f i l t r a t i o n continues, r o l e s t r a i n for a l l family members will tend to Increase. I t may be t h a t

individuals will feel compelled to adopt a middle region mode of behavior for a wider and wider range of s i t u a t i o n s , as the formerly sharp d i s t i n c t i o n s between frontstage and backstage grow fuzzier. The pioneers

of t h i s s t y l e may be the television talkshow h o s t s , individuals who excel a t appearing comfortable in a wide variety of s i t u a t i o n s , in large measure by portraying themselves as relaxed and informal, as if in the family den a t home, while casually acknowledging t h a t a t the same moment t h e i r image i s being relayed to millions of homes. Role enactments dominated by a middle region s t y l e could bid f a i r to become predominant in the future, a s individuals increasingly conclude: "I can't know who i s watching, so I will play safe by acting the same everywhere." I t i s intriguing to note t h a t precisely such a way of "being

in the world" i s the express goal of certain schools of Zen Buddhist p r a c t i c e (Reps, no date). Role making may be made a b i t easier, as the a v a i l a b i l i t y of nearly countless model r o l e s on television permits the individual to tailormake a performance from a large menu of off-the-shelf role elements. However,

c e r t a i n back region roles and behavior s t y l e s are conspicuous by t h e i r almost complete omission from television. The viewer i s v i r t u a l l y never

shown the long hours of diligent practice required for a r t i s t s t o prepare t h e i r virtuoso performances. As a r e s u l t , young people may feel

intimidated by the dazzling displays of s k i l l s whose laborious honing i s seldom hinted a t . Nor are people working at routine, complex, r e p e t i t i v e

jobs (i.e., most necessary jobs in the real world) much in evidence on the

20 small screen. Such humdrum, unglamorous a c t i v i t i e s would do l i t t l e t o

build network r a t i n g s , however valuable t h e i r example might be. Role t r a n s i t i o n s seem destined for change, too, especially for c h i l d r e n , a s s o c i a l i z a t i o n s t a g e s melt away in the face of widespread access t o information about the backstage world of a d u l t s . While t h i s

doubtless will make a d u l t s feel they are losing control of t h e i r children (as indeed they a r e ) , we may merely be returning to the e a r l i e r centuries h i s t o r i a n s remind us of, when children dressed and spoke very much like their parents. Adolescence, both as a concept and as a developmental

s t a g e , may be on the way out. Media effects on group identity, we might surmise, will include changes in the Generalized Other, We can c a l i b r a t e our behavior to the

s i t u a t i o n a t hand while keeping in mind how a wide range of possible reference groups we have seen on television might view our actions. Implications for Family Systems Family systems theory may have the most to gain by incorporating the new perspectives on electronic media. A variety of systems concepts

adopted by family t h e o r i s t s such as Broderick and Smith (1979) may be affected. As should be apparent from e a r l i e r sections of t h i s t h e s i s , e l e c t r o n i c media a r e d r a s t i c a l l y restructuring the boundaries of human i n t e r a c t i o n systems. A contemporary middle-class American home, with a

video recorder and a large color television located prominently in the l i v i n g room, smaller televisions in the kitchen and bedrooms, a component s t e r e o system, three telephone extensions, four radios, two personal

21 c a s s e t t e players ("Walkman" type), and a l i b r a r y of books, videotapes, and record albums, has boundary conditions t h a t are profoundly different from domestic h a b i t a t s a century ago. Traditional boundary maintenance in

such circumstances becomes an all-but-impossible Job. Input f i l t e r i n g , as a function of the family system, has also become a large and complicated t a s k . Some parents may simply give up and allow

almost any form of information input t o pass through unhindered, perhaps r e s t r i c t i n g t h e i r control efforts to a few token s i t u a t i o n s ("No R-rated movies when Grandma comes t o spend the evening"). Or they may give up

a l l censoring e f f o r t s , focusing instead on control of inputs of matter: "You can watch Twisted S i s t e r videos on M T V a l l you want, but keep drugs out of my house." Requisite variety, which systems t h e o r i s t s believe allows living systems t o respond flexibly to changing conditions, i s quite large and rapidly g e t t i n g even larger. On the other hand, t h i s variable may follow

some c u r v i l i n e a r r e l a t i o n s h i p to survival adaptiveness, in which case families may need to watch out for breakdown due to overload of variety. The memory subsystem discussed by Miller (1978) i s being s t r i k i n g l y transformed. Parents' roles as I n t e r p r e t e r s of the family's past will

increasingly be challenged by accurate electronic records of more and more f a c e t s of family life. Baby's f i r s t words (indeed, the b i r t h i t s e l f ) .

Grandpa's s a l t y language, and the disasterous vacation will be documented vividly on r e l a t i v e l y enduring memory media.

22 Concluding Remarks The effects of media are subtle but important, just the way a twodegree r i s e in the mean temperature of the e a r t h ' s atmosphere i s important. Much work remains to be done in terms of elaborating and

systematizing the t h e o r e t i c a l framework which will eventually incorporate the emerging perspectives. Moreover, l i t t l e work has been undertaken on

making baseline measurements of the media programming mix which c o n s t i t u t e s the very stuff of contemporary cognitive ecology. Without

such a database as a point of departure, future researchers will have no accurate way to determine d r i f t and evolution within the realm of mediated events. A new stage of theory and a n a l y s i s regarding media effects on family l i f e seems to l i e Just ahead. Perhaps the g r e a t e s t challenge will

l i e in operationalizing measurement of the new constructs, a necessary task if a media-augmented body of family theory i s ever to become anything other than Just another nice-sounding but untestable, unfalsifiable s e t of a b s t r a c t theoretical concepts.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alpert, R. unpublished speech delivered at University of Texas at Austin, March, 1974. Barker, R. Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods fon Studying the. Environment oi Himan. Behavior. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968. Broderick, C. & Smith, J. The General Systems Approach to the Family. In Burr, W. R., Hill, R,, Nye, F, I., & Reiss, I. L. (Eds.), Contemporary Theories AtQiil the. Eamil^L, Yol. Z- New York: Free Press, 1979, Burr, W. R., Leigh, G. K., Day, R. D., & Constantine, J. Symbolic Interaction and the Family. In Burr, W. R., Hill, R., Nye, F. I., & Reiss, I. L. (Eds.), Contemporary Theories Al^OUl the. amil^> )IsiL. Z> New York: Free Press, 1979. Executive Summary: Ihe Audience Eales. Television. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Television Audience Assessment, 1983. Goethals, G. T. Ihfi TL Eitual: KoTsMp. at. the. ndeo Altar. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1981. Goffman, E, The. Presentation of Sell in. Everyday Lile. New York: Anchor, 1959, Goffman, E, Erame. Analysis: An. Essay: OH t M Drganization Q 1 Fyperlence. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Gumpert, G. Talking. Tnmbstones &. Qtheji lalea of the. Media Age.. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, Innis, H. A, Ih Eias. oi GniTiTiiunlcatlon. Reprint of 1951 edition with new introduction by McLuhan, M, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1964, Kaplan, E, A. EoclOng. ArQund Iha Qloclt: Music Television, Pn^tF^^p^^^s^' i Gnnsumer Culture. New York: Methuen Press, 1987, Mander, J. Eflur A^E^^e^'t^s fot tlie Elimination ol Tplf>vlsion, New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978, 23

24

McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: Ihe Extensions oi Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, Meyrowitz, J. ]IQ Sensfi. o l ElaC. University Press, 1985. Miller, J. Lining. Systems. New York: Oxford

New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1978. Northbrook, New York:

Nielsen, A, C. filelsen. Eepoii on. Television. I l l i n o i s : A. C. Nielsen Company, 1977. Postman, N, I h e Disappearance o i Childhood. Delacorte Press, 1982,

Postman, N. Amusing Ourselves to Death: EuMiii Discourse in. t h a Aga o i ShoWL Business. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985. Reps, P. (Ed.). Zen. Elest, Zen. Eones.: A Collection Q1 Zen and Pre-Zen Writings. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, no date. Roszak, T. Ihe Cull ol Information: Ihe Folklore of Computers and thfi. InifiL Art of Thinking. New York: Pantheon Books/Random House, 1986. Thomas, W. I. & Thomas, D. S. I h e Child In America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928.

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