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chnology as quickly as they could afford to do so (Butsch 2000;
Spigel 1992). The latter image, reproduced by newspapers, parenting magazines,
and public policy pronouncements, represents the fear that motivated funding
for empirical research by social science designed to investigate television’s potentially
harmful effects (Rowland 1983; Wartella and Reeves 1985). So who was
right? Can we, after half a century or so of television in our homes and, furthermore,
half a century or so of research, identify what difference television made
to the family?
The moral panics associated with the arrival of each new medium, which
demand that research address the same questions over and again—about the
displacement of reading, exercise, and conversation; about social isolation and
addiction; about violent and consumerist content (Barker and Petley 2001)—have
a long history. Bettelheim (1999) traces them back via Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther, blamed for a wave of suicides in eighteenth-century Germany, toPlato’s ideal state that banned imaginative literature for corrupting the young.But what this makes plain is that society’s perennial anxieties about children,childhood, and the family are catalyzed by “the new,” the popular hope being thatby fixing the technology, society can fix the problems of childhood. However, a
critical rejection of both moral panics and technological determinism does notpermit us to conclude that television played no role in the unfolding history ofthe family in the twentieth century. Indeed, I am partly provoked to write thiarticle by the notable absence of answers to the “so what?” question from themany scholars who, over the decades, have zealously charted the facts and figureson the prominence of television within the family.1 Surely television must havemade some difference. Equally surely, family life would have been different withouttelevision or had television been itself different.To avert the charge of technological determinism hovering in the minds ofthis volume’s readers (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999), I stress that the startingpoint must be the recognition that television, both the domestic set and itsbroadcast forms and contents, was developed, designed, financed, regulated,and marketed by the very society that then worried about the consequences.
Crucially, society has itself undergone profound changes over the past half century,
so that television is just one of many factors that have influenced family life
in the second half of the twentieth century. These changes include the urbanization
and education of the population, the growing emancipation of women, the
growth of affluent individualism and the rise of consumer society together withan increasingly dispossessed poor, the gradual inclusion of the diversity of thepopulation in terms of ethnicity and sexuality, the decline in public participationand political commitment, and, specifically relevant here, the posttraditionalfamily and research on adolescence. Together, these factors have refashionedthe family during the twentieth century in the direction of individualization
and democratization, ever further away from the Victorian family (Beck andDownloaded from https://ann.sagepub.com by Barbara Sadler on October 22, 2009HALF A CENTURY OF TELEVISION IN THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN 153
Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Coontz 1997; Gadlin 1978); they have therefore also
shaped the context within which te