How TV Mediates the Husband-Wife Relationship

In his groundbreaking essay, “Media, Technology and Daily Life” (1984), Hermann Bausinger raises the question of the relatively unexamined relationship between the media and the everyday. Central to his argument is that television is a constitutive part of the way everyday life is conducted. Television is a mediated family member—yet inconspicuous and naturalized in its domestication. Although Bausinger pays little sociological heed to everyday life implicated in the relations of gender, age or class, he initiated a phenomenological approach to explore how television enters everyday life. How does it manifest itself and what does it mean? This article develops into an empirically grounded account of television and everyday life. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this study explores specific ways in which television is integrated into the everyday lives of women of different generation and class positions. What are the distinctive features of Korean women’s experience of television in the intimacy of domestic life, in particular, in relation to their husbands? The focus of the study is on how television mediates the husband-wife relationship in different social locations. My aim is to offer a nuanced, thick texture of television mediation that occurs in, contests and transforms particular spaces of contemporary Korean homes. For the framework of this study, I mainly refer to western theoretical and empirical work on women as audiences. This is because, in examining relationships between women and media culture, Korean television studies have been predominantly concerned with the issues of women as “representations” and women as “creators” but rarely, women as “audiences.” A dominant model of television media research is a political economy approach. Although there exists a productive body of knowledge on the socio-economic position of women and gender relations, Korean women’s studies have not yet empirically examined how women’s lives intersect with the everyday experience of the most popular media, television, from sociological and cultural perspectives. Any exploratory study of what womendowith television in everyday life is largely absent. The relative absence of ethnographic audience studies in Korea leads me to review existing western literature, mainly Anglo-American, to discover differences and similarities between the western scholarship and the Korean fieldwork. Ethnographic studies of television in everyday life are still relatively rare, and mostly conducted in a western context. Some of the classic studies in the West offer insights into how television mediates the husband-wife relationship, in particular, the gendered aspects