Media and Family

I came home from a day in N.J. to find my boyfriend sitting at the kitchen table, shopping online. As I watched a dvr'd episode of Grey's Anatomy, I marvelled in how much of our family conversations revolved around the commercials that played in between segments of the show. Our interactions, overall, contained some element of media and technology in them. Traditionally, families and households have been defined as social systems. However, modern households possess an additional technological dimension brought about by several media technologies--television sets, dvd players, dvr's, cellular phones, answering machines, voicemail boxes, radios,computers, i-pods, etc. The use of online media in my household continues to expand. Our home is a technologically complex environment with multiple television sets, radios, telephones, fax machines, computers, cellular phones, gaming systems and so on. The use of these technologies as a form of communication amongst my family members has become significant. Whether it is the use of a cell phone to call and tell me they got home safely from school or work, or a conversation at the dinner table about the new Droid commercial dissing the i-phone, media and media technologies have become commonplace in our lives.

Directly and indirectly, television provides bases for family interaction. More specifically, the viewing of television programs as a staple family time activity, I find those moments excellent in their ability to provide teaching moments between Wayne, Christian, Cereta, and I. The adult responses that Wayne and I give to questions Christian and Cereta may have, aid in the children's understanding of program content, foster critical viewing skills, and increase their recall of information when referred to in later conversations and experiences.

Watching and commenting on t.v. shows within the context of our home, helps to reinforce conventional ways of comprehending both the medium and social reality in general. This, in essence, is what Winston is referring to when he focuses his attention on the process whereby society and individuals incorporate media technologies into the fabric of daily life asa response to changes, not the origin of those changes.