Collection 5: "Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century" by Jeanne E. Arnold

Television is now so intricately woven into the fabric of the American family experience that few children born during the last two decades will be able to imagine a social world that has not been partly shaped by the imagery, discourse, and ideas originating from television programming.

In fact, many twenty-first century children are born in the physical presence of a TV: most labor, delivery, and recovery rooms in the U.S. now feature large, wall-mounted flat-panel sets. That TVs are witness to such intimate and emotionally bonding experiences speaks volumes about televisions and the American way of being.

The set used by the collective is a compelling example of an object that is not merely a tangible product of otherwise invisible cultural forces but rather an agentive participant in the daily production of social lives.

The introduction of a new TV to a living room, for example, shapes the decisions underlying where we locate our furniture, where we direct our gaze, and how we orient our bodies.

At some deeper cognitive level, our relationship to the TV—which includes a relationship to the object itself but also our personal experiences centering on TV media—even shapes the ways that we relate to our built spaces.

Our photographs of living room assemblages repeatedly reveal spaces organized around televisions rather than spaces with other primary affordances, such as face-to-face conversation.

Indeed, families often locate the TV immediately adjacent to a wood-burning stove or fireplace, and new homes feature recessed fireplace-like nooks designed for television sets.

Some researchers associate TV viewing with reduced social interaction, while others report the opposite and even see evidence for families’ use of TV time as a platform for togetherness. Research based on our unique observational data sets is new to the discussion and actually lends support to both generalizations, reflecting the complex relationship Americans have with television.

Attentive, focused TV viewing accounts for only 11 percent of all primary person-centered scan sampling observations...

Kids view solo in about 17 percent of the cases where we record TV viewing as the primary activity, mothers and fathers watch alone in only 6 percent and 13 percent of the cases, respectively.

The proliferation of video media technology since the debut of network television in 1946 has had a profound influence on American lifestyles.

Television is so entrenched in popular culture that we are surprised when we meet people who do not have at least one set.

Of course, sales figures do not reflect the number of sets already found in what archaeologists regard as systemic context (here, the home): the behavioral system in which artifacts participate in everyday life.

The rate at which TV technology evolves and the sheer volume of television sets people discard both suggest that this artifact will be particularly useful for teasing out discrete generations of household refuse from the materially complex and jumbled strata that constitute our municipal landfills.

The rate at which TV technology evolves and the sheer volume of television sets people discard both suggest that this artifact will be particularly useful for teasing out discrete generations of household refuse from the materially complex and jumbled strata that constitute our municipal landfills.

The rate at which TV technology evolves and the sheer volume of television sets people discard both suggest that this artifact will be particularly useful for teasing out discrete generations of household refuse from the materially complex and jumbled strata that constitute our municipal landfills.

Archaeologists rely on seriation—the sequencing of functionally similar artifacts based on stylistic differences—as a method for ascertaining relative chronology at archaeological sites.

The maximum widths and rates of tapering (in both directions) summarize the popularity, rapidity of change in preference or supply, and persistence through time.

When significantly better TV technology emerged in the form of flat-panel models, color CRT models declined precipitously, producing the narrow profiles at the tops of the CRT battleships.

The adoption rate of flat-panel sets has been steep and unprecedented in the domain of television technology, expanding as CRT use plummeted.