Amy Holdsworth, On Living with Television

Abstract

What does it mean, and feel like, to ‘live with’ television? To grow up with television, to grow alongside television, to return to television, to form parts of oneself in dialogue with the small screen? How does ‘television time’ intertwine and loop into ‘life time’, and what kinds of temporal effects does this intertwining have on the ways that we experience the everyday? How does television, as a particular kind of media, generate a sense of continuity, regularity and interruption for us as viewers? How does it operate as a technology of fantasy, aspiration and desire – holding the past and anticipating the future? How does television shape and orchestrate the ways that we make and re-make, imagine and anticipate our personal, domestic space, and the very concept of ‘home’? These are some of the intriguing questions that are posed by Amy Holdsworth throughout her remarkable book On Living With Television. The slimness of this volume belies the ambition of its scope and the breadth of the concepts that are introduced to interrogate its key questions. I devoured this book, chapter by chapter, in a series of sittings, and was left energized and reflective by the end of each one; this is, in fact, a book best savoured piece by piece. It invites an intimate contemplation with television as domestic object, text and experience. In her introduction, Holdsworth sketches out her intention to produce a part-autobiographical and part-autoethnographical account of the televisual, and it is this combination of approaches that has created such a special and moving meditation on this most familiar of media. The book shows how media and popular culture work to pattern and hold our everyday lives in ways that are both idiosyncratic and collective. Throughout I recognized many shared experiences, where I have ‘lived with’ television in ways that resonated with the analysis and insights of the writer. At the same time, Holdsworth articulates the distinctiveness of her television trajectory – ‘a life lived alongside television’ – in all its temporal messiness, its repetitions, banality, comforts, durational routines and incomplete loops. Ultimately this book presents a powerful case for attending to the form of television – its temporal, spatial and material specificities as a type of media – as a strategy that can help us better grasp how television operates to both fragment and connect spaces, bodies and worlds.