Guilty (P)leisures: Notes on Television Use in the Single-Person Household

Figure 1.

“Perhaps the most radical method of distancing oneself from feelings of discomfort over watching TV is not to use television.”

One evening over dinner, we were discussing the various ways that television functions in our lives. We realized that we, like many of our friends who live alone, have viewing practices and attitudes towards TV that differ in significant ways from the kinds of collective viewing practices in multiperson households thus far examined and theorized in academic work on television spectatorship. In other words, we felt left out of most television studies and recognized the need to broaden the definition of TV users and the contexts of TV use.

Our starting point for this project, then, is the recognition that one culturally significant group thus far excluded from TV audience studies is that comprised by lone users—that is, by people who live alone and who most often use TV alone. The term “lone user” distinguishes our individual television consumer from the individual spectator/subject posited by film theorists such as Christian Metz (1982). As Robert Deming (1985) and David Morley (1986) have argued, theories of the cinematic spectator/subject have only limited applications for theorizing the television user. Whereas the cinema spectator is an engaged viewer whose subjectivity is produced by a single clearly delineated text, the television user faces (and turns away from) an ongoing, shifting, ruptured, multilayered text and a constant choice of what to look at or not to look at, what to hear or not to hear—a fragmented experience made even more so through use of the remote control. The subject for television is not just a watcher but an (inter)active consumer or user of TV and the supertext always already in progress, manipulating it by switching channels, adjusting the picture and sound, turning the set on and off. Our informal study suggests that, unlike the cinematic subject, who is at most times (but not always, as Lawrence Grossberg [1987] has noted) an attentive viewer, rapt, engaged in and by the text, the TV user is most often inattentive, distracted, not really “watching” (in the traditional sense) at all.

The term “lone user” also differentiates the subject of our study from that of previous television viewing analyses, which assume a multiperson audience in a domestic context. Earlier studies of housewives and families (e.g., Gray 1986; Modleski 1979; Morley 1980, 1986), together with more recent work on distinct user populations based on forms of identity such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or fandom (e.g., Bodroghkozy 1992; Gross 1989; Jenkins 1992) focus on behavior patterns of collective audiences viewing in the context of multiroomed homes. These studies often map viewing practices along gender lines and draw conclusions based largely on pre-established and unproblematized gender roles and power relationships within traditional single-family households. Although various subject positions have been theorized for the television viewer—positions that depend on factors such as cultural capital, interpellation by the text, viewing context, daily schedule, forms of identity, and specific socio-historical moment—the lone user and her/his TV use has been overlooked by media theorists.

Presumably because no one is there to “monitor” them, people who live alone can watch television as often or as seldom as they wish to, in any way they choose. Although viewing practices and attitudes toward viewing certainly stem, at least to an extent, from behavior learned and disciplines internalized while growing up, we were curious about whether TV allows for the position(s) of the lone user and, if so, how that experience might be different from TV use in a multiuser context. In addition, we wondered whether behavior stemming from traditional gender roles would still predominate amongst people who live alone and don’t have to answer to, or be responsible for, any other people living in the same space.

To collect our data, we circulated two rounds of questionnaires to our friends, family members, and colleagues via selected Internet discussion...