This essay plan will attempt to uncover the ways in which people consume television within their own homes and will be comparatively based on David Morley's research on the subject.
Essay Plan With Bibliography
This essay plan will attempt to uncover the ways in which people consume television within their own homes and will be comparatively based on David Morley’s research on the subject.
David Morley’s article ‘The framework of family viewing in Great Britain’ attempts to interpret the way in which families consume media, in this case through television. The main principles of the text appear to outline the differences between Male and Female media consumption and indeed, why such a difference occurs. Morley puts this difference down to “...particular social roles that these men and women occupy within the home,” or in other words gender rôles. What this means is that according to Morley, women and men watch television in specific ways relating to social responsibility and gender. For example, Morley states that women multi-task whilst watching television which is due to “…their continuing sense of domestic responsibility,” whilst men apparently find it hard to consume television in this way and instead require absolute silence and focus on the program in question. In terms of who decides what to watch and when, it would appear that men are in charge and in most instances the dominant male will have control of the viewing procedures. This would appear to relate very strongly to orthodox interpretations of gender role which suggest the male as head of the household and hence everything in it, including television viewing. Indeed, it would appear that according to Morley the only time women watch television without multi-tasking is when the household is empty and time can be spent watching alone. If this is the case it would certainly indicate that women have a stronger ‘domestic responsibility’ and feel ‘guilty’ when watching television as a sole purpose due to apparently insufficient use of time. Morley concludes that women have accepted a “...masculine hegemony that defines their preferences as having low status” and as a result cannot argue for their own preferences as the things their husbands watch are more ‘prestigious.’ This could be interpreted as suggesting that women subconsciously bow down to their male equivalent’s preference and underlines orthodox interpretations of social gender role further.
