INTRODUCTION

The Virtual Family is a qualitative case study of a group of adolescent New York City girls that examines what they watch on television, what they get from watching, and, more specifically, their perceptions of the characters as the virtual family. By exploring the ways in which the girls perceive of, think about, relate to, identify and interpret the characters, the girls' perceptions of the virtual family are shown to be manifested into their personal horizons of experience 1 and
lifeworlds. 2 Through conversational interviews with the girls and visits to their homes and other areas of personal space, I obtain information on how the girls live, whom they interact with, what is important to them, what their activities and responsibilities are and when, how, where, with who and why they watch television. By witnessing the details of their natural environments, I am able to accurately ascertain a sampling of the substance of the girls' everyday lives, including their involvement with television and its characters.

I choose to speak with the girls and examine their relationships with television characters for several reasons. I wanted to conduct a media research endeavor with women, and young women especially, which focused upon their culture, experience, relations, roles and perception of self in everyday life and also upon their use and involvement with media, specifically television. From a feminist perspective concerned with young womens' informed mediations with the world, I find that negotiating meaning on television can be extremely problematic for young women especially when they attempt to live up to an identity that television dictates as 'correct'. A large portion of the discourse of television is aimed directly at women with the express purpose of 'suggesting' to them the 'proper' female social roles and functions.
I believe adolescent women especially to be potentially vulnerable and susceptible to this discourse.

I also concentrated on this group of girls because I find it quite interesting that they relate so much with television programs and characters which express a dominant 'white American' ideology that is quite different from the girls own ethnic and cultural makeup. The girls' lifeworlds and daily practice are quite different from that portrayed on the majority of television series programming. Many, if not most of the television series' settings are white, upper middle-class, glossy suburban; highly fictional and radically different from the realities of the girls and many other adolescent female viewers like them. Programs that feature almost exclusive African American and 'multi-cultural' casts also follow this upper middle-class formula and setting. The girls I concentrate upon, with their very different life constructs are clearly not the general, intended or mass audience assumed by the programs' producers. They are not accurately addressed or represented through the predominant television programs. My interest with the girls' ethnic and cultural makeup is in exploring how these girls perceive and interpret the prevailing television stories and characters and how they may regard and appropriate them into their own lives which consist of very different background and detail.

The girls watch, enjoy and even relate to programs and characters that represent realities far different from their own. Regardless of the vast differences of lifestyles that the programs and characters represent, certain characters have a high influence upon the girls. The girls claim many reasons for their attention to the characters and reveal that certain of them do have an actual relevance in their lives.
A prevalent reason is that the girls share situational experiences with the characters.

Various adolescent life issues such as relationships, peer pressure, drugs, sex, pregnancy, sexism, education, employment and family issues are represented and played out by the characters on television. The girls are often able to learn things from the characters by the ways in which the characters take action on the various issues. The characters present the girls with options about how to handle particular situations and provide emotional substance with which the girls can identify, regardless of the differences in the lifeworlds of the characters and the girls. The girls watch, learn, retain and refer to the information they get from the characters. This information includes not only the action a character took but also the characters' personality traits and the environmental context in which the character is represented.

The girls store the information they receive from the characters and refer to it in a casual manner such as simply remembering the details of a particular episode and more specifically such as when addressing or questioning their own real-life situations which they have seen represented through the television programs. The girls often discuss the characters' actions and interactions with their friends between episodes, expressing a desire to understand and integrate the characters into the context of their own lives. 3 This type of "Discourse about television is itself a social force. It is a major site of the mediation of television meanings, a site where television meanings fuse with other meanings into a new text to form a major interface with the world of action and belief" (Hodge and Tripp 143). The characters are very often significant and meaningful enough to the girls to the point that they remain in their minds as personas; actual points of reference that the women can refer to and relate to as they do real companions and family members. It is this significance that the characters embody in the minds of the girls that leads me to call the characters the virtual family.

This designation of television characters perceived as the virtual family is my main focus. The girls' gender and youth issues become related concerns as associated with the sociological and psychological processes (and consequences), of viewing and perceiving television's versions of the world. The girls' ethnic and class designations also become related issues that give support to the proposition that the virtual family can occur for anyone, despite extreme representational difference between the characters' and the viewer's material and cultural constructs.

My analytic approach to the girls' relationships with the televisual characters is informed by a vast amount of research done on television use in general, womens' television use in particular, the nature and intricacies of televisual discourse and philosophical ponderings of the real and the virtual. I refer particularly to the research areas of audience and reception, text, genre, content and meaning, representation and identification studies. Particularly in the area of womens' relationships with television, there have been many informed studies done on the subject of women's use of, responses to and representation on television. 4 While much work done in the areas of media study has proposed certain truths, generalizations and questions, the combined outcomes fall short of describing the virtual family. I have tried to recombine some of the already proposed descriptions and conclusions about the intersections of the media text and the media audience in attempt to describe the virtual family as perceived and utilized by the girls.

My underlying theoretical alignment is with the philosophical methods of phenomenology and hermeneutics. I consider these methods to be of practical and everyday use, apart from formal instruments of theory. Through them I am able to understand and describe the dynamics of the process by which the virtual family occurs within the girls' interpretations. As I listen to the girls and collect their responses, I employ a phenomenology of experience and perception which calls for an understanding of objects and events according to their own contexts, without an over-predetermination on the part of the perceiver. This approach provides "frames through which we can view our experience and being-in-the-world in order to begin to comprehend it in all its ambiguity, profundity and essential interconnectedness." 5 The girls are open to the text of the television characters, accepting them on their own merits. I simultaneously rely upon a hermeneutics which stresses that prejudgments do exist in the mind during the moments of perception and interpretation. 6 The girls have experiences and associations that they apply to the text of the television characters as they interpret them. It is through a combination of pre-set ideas and acceptance of nonjudgmental information that the virtual family comes into existence. In understanding how the girls interpret and interact with television characters as the virtual family, these phenomenological and hermeneutical methods are most valuable as modes of thinking and perceiving of the elements of life which organizes itself (often unpredictably), in front of us.

From these theoretical underpinnings and influences, I examine several factors associated with the girls and their construction of the virtual family. I explore what goes on during the viewing process itself, the content of the programs, the perception and meaning-making processes and the result -- the interpretation(s). The processes of perception and interpretation, with an emphasis upon how they occur during routine activities and associations with the media in everyday postmodern life, are the central elements of this investigation. I assume our current time of living to be within a postmodern world that is fractured and complex in its makeup; naturally composed of endlessly interconnected events and layers of meaning and reference that gain existence by way of perception and interpretation. 7 A crucial premise to my thesis is the manner in which the initial reception of information occurs, as it is from this point that one begins to assign meaning and significance based upon experience, associations and pre-suppositions about themselves, the details of life, the world and their relations with it all. The perceptions the girls construct of certain television characters and the ways in which they assign meaning illustrate a phenomenological mode of thinking and a poststructuralist assertion of free-form semiotic play in which "meaning is always situated, specific to a given context" (Seiter 61).

I have tried to establish and follow a method of inquiry with the girls based on a cultural studies approach. 8 I attempt to ascertain and understand the meanings of the girls' interactions with television characters by obtaining information directly from the girls and within their natural environments and also by initiating questions and topics but avoiding directing them towards any particular ideology. I include the girls' responses drawn from interview sessions to provide the actual language, thought and sentiment of the girls. The girls provide information on their routines and activities, the people and characters they interact with and what television situations and characters they find most meaningful to their lives. My main objective is to understand the girls' activities and the meanings the television characters have for them. The thoughts they engage in and live out on a daily basis are given freely and enthusiastically by the girls upon which I subsequently compare with theory to explore the substance. 9

The girls' backgrounds and environmental factors are considered as contextual information that may relate to their particular viewing and perceptual practice. While differences in demographic distinctions among the participants are noted and considered as possible reasons for certain beliefs and practices by the women, most emphasis is placed upon the sort of construct in which they live out their daily lives, what their belief systems about society, family and relations are and how their perceptions and utilizations of television and its characters coincide with their daily lives and activities. I have tried to get an ethnographically accurate sample of the girls' daily physical lives and their daily televisual lives. 10 I concentrate on what they do within each realm, what they make of each realm and how the two realms interact, inform and influence the other. My theory is that it is through this interaction of realms that the television character becomes the virtual family member.

Much of my analysis is informed and guided by a phenomenological hermeneutics of television and audience in which understanding television is "not merely reproductive, but also productive.....in a certain sense, recreation" (Gadamer 107). I adopt an active audience theory and try to build upon it by insisting that the girls do more than actively interact, re-read and re-appropriate the texts. By their adoption of the attributes of the characters into memory and recall, the girls actively integrate the texts into physical existence in a very commonsensical and practical way.

The degree of influence or relationship with the television characters is determined by the viewer, of course. Her perspectives determine her understanding of the character and all that the character represents. Subsequently, it is her own understanding of the personality and actions of the character that determines the type of interpretation she applies. Whether the girls obtain any influential information from the character, whether they learn or adopt any method of behavior or reasoning from the character, and also whether the girls come to know the character to the point that they can predict the character's personality and responses are all contingent upon the girls' individual realms of experience and associative processes. In some cases the girls associate more closely with the character based on their own experience and their history of 'knowing' the character to the point that the character's actions, words and personality remain in the memory of the girls as a reference point from which they can draw upon to figure out a situation or just consult to decide what the certain character might do.

This type of association involves the crucial component of imagination and there is persistent criticism which says that this type of imaginary referral is less credible because the 'person' in question is a fictitious television character (Mander). I have to argue the opposite; that the process is not incredible, that it is quite substantial, natural and even beneficial. Imagination is a powerful and important function of the human mind. Imagination occurs in conjunction with perception and understanding. Through imagination we can transcend our limited realities and empower our minds and lives. Literature has long given acclaim and legitimization to the process of imagination. 11 When applied to television, imagination does not have to infer only negative notions of escapism. To immerse oneself into a televisual story and worldview of its particular environment and characters does not have to be a detrimental process. I contend that the process is highly beneficial, enriching and educational. The virtual family provide additional personas with which to identify and engage with. They widen the realm of mental activity and can have direct positive consequences on the viewer's physical as well as the mental life.

I consider the concepts of familiarity and identification according to the manner in which they are utilized both in the production of the televisual text and by the viewers in the process of interpreting television. An assumption underlying television's practice of conveying the familiar to attract and communicate is that viewers share many of the same experiences and overall perception of lifeworld. It is through the sum of experiences and interpretations that each person's lifeworld is characterized and through identification with the televisual text, the viewer becomes involved with the lifeworld of the text. The mechanisms of familiarity and identification are employed by television as psychological devices which attract and hold the audience. An understanding of these as such is crucial in assessing the influences upon the viewer as she interprets television's texts. "Identification can, then, be conceptualized as the viewer's appropriation of a social role elaborated in the text. That role may often be experienced as familiar, producing as easy conformity to its rules and horizons of experience" (Wilson 60).

Historically, sociologists and psychologists have studied women's practices and responses concerning cultural norms as expressed through the media. Feminist criticism has provided multiple accounts of the detrimental effects of media upon women's consciousness (de Lauretis, Kaplan, Mayne, Steeves, Spigel, Weedon). Studies in psychoanalysis have delved into the portrayal of women in the cinema and on television and into women's reception and manifestation of these portrayals (Doane, Mulvey, Flitterman-Lewis, Shoos). Textual analysis has examined the 'text' of cinema and television concerning the depiction of women (Modeleski, Kuhn, Warth). I find that much of the early work done on the female audience in particular has concluded with limiting and negative tones.

A common thread throughout each of these areas of structuralist bent was the assertion that the audience "uncritically adopted the text's apparently coherent view of the world and forgot it's own limited and fragmented experience" (Wilson 2). This type of limiting theory "denied the specificity of the individual's experience and the function of that experience in providing the individual with an emerging awareness of contradictory versions of reality" (Wilson 3). Much attention has been given to the notion that the media can exert a detrimental sexist effect upon the female audience. Under this type of speculation, women were depicted as in danger of readily accepting and emulating the stereotypical models depicted of them in the media; that they can appropriate these depictions and manifest them socially in their own behavior.

Later work involving media and audience adopted an audience-centered and reader-response stance and began to assert that there is a multiplicity of meaning assigned by viewers to media images. Reader-oriented criticism developed within literary studies starts from the belief that "the meaning of a literary text does not reside in any absolute sense within the text itself. Rather, texts are made to have meaning by readers as they read" (Allen 102). Post-structuralist audience studies emphasized a shift from an analysis of the meanings the text of television imposes upon a viewer to an analysis of the process the viewer employs while 'reading' the text. Cultural and media theorists who investigated the use of television in the home, by the family and by women 12 began to find that "the text has a meaning in accord with codes of perception that it does not control" (De Certeau 170). Audience-centered theorizing is concerned with the 'real' audience, complete with perceptions and experiences which are often contradictory to those presented through the dominant ideology of the text.

It is from the practical consideration of an active audience theory that I continue. Relying upon a post-structuralist emphasis on the variety and contingency of meanings which can be drawn from televisual texts, I observe the ways in which the girls may appropriate and find meaning and significance in the characters through the substance of the text of the particular programs they identify and elaborate upon. While I do not describe or criticize television's overall effects, intentions or purpose, I do consider the structural elements of the programs as the framework through which certain meanings are offered to and obtained by the girls. The concepts of familiarity and identification are substantially illustrated by the girls' responses to actual programs and the situations and characters represented.

To substantiate my use of the term 'family', I attempt to flesh out the various definitions, notions and functions of the term. Although families are traditionally defined as biologically and genetically immediate blood relations, family has many forms and is perceived of in various ways according to belief systems, customs and practices. The concept of family carries connotations and emotions based upon how one perceives family. The many approaches to exploring the concept range from social/anthropological to psychological and philosophical. Every mode of analysis multiplys the number of possible ways to think of and experience family. The role of a family member extends to an almost infinite number of associations, all based on a quality of relationship. A family member can be determined by how intimately one regards another, to what extent one feels trust and affection. It is this quality of relationship which differentiates the role of a family member from that of a casual acquaintance or other non-familial associate, whether they be immediate physical relations or television personas.

By a definition based upon a distinction of relationship, television characters can be just as significant to viewers as physical people can be. Though they are not living in a currently defined physical, biological sense, the characters are present in reality and in this way, they are real. The virtual family is significant both in terms of the functions it serves as close and reliable connections to the girls and as representations of human persons.

This proposition and description of the virtual family leads to an inevitable contemplation of the real and the unreal, the artificial and the virtual. Thus, I include a discussion of the real, it's (supposed) attributes and qualifications. Objective definitions usually constitute something as real while subjective interpretations can qualify a representation of the real as real itself. This manner of understanding and interpreting the real results in a push for the status of the virtual as real in its own right and asserts a blurring of any distinction.

The virtual family is a mental construction based upon the material provided by television and its modes of production created by viewers through their life experiences, expectations and non-expectations.
My conclusions serve to support my theory of the virtual family's existence as evidenced through this case study with the girls.


Notes

1 I assume 'horizons of experience' to be the collective set of experiences, expectations and assumptions held and witnessed by an individual. Each horizon differs according to what encounters and influences a person experiences and negotiates. Television provides material to partake and participate with and thus adds to a person's horizon of experience. Tony Wilson, Watching Television (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993) : 14-16, draws upon the foundationalist phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (London: Harper and Row, 1965), to explain that: "Horizons (of experience) are those remembered cognitive frameworks, implicit (even if not immediately available to consciousness), within the individual's perceptual processes. They allow the experience of things in the world.....they are the frameworks of cognitive knowledge underlying perceptual experience, allowing aspects of that experience to be recognized and identified as instances of types already encountered.....Horizons structure and guide subjective perception, functioning as a central aspect of the individual's engaging with the world.....Horizons of experience are culturally inflected, informed by an intersubjective awareness of the world." BACK TO TEXT

2 I refer to the 'lifeworld' as the physical and mental environment(s) and social organization(s) that one is born into and lives within. A 'lifeworld' is formed by one's horizons of experience woven together. Wilson 17-19, drawing again upon Husserl, provides an appropriate definition: "A life-world is pregiven, an everyday pre-reflective and unanalysed world of familiar assumptions and perceptions.....A life-world is embodied subjectivity, a structure of behavior and common-sense assumptions whose unproblematic character is sustained by their familiarity....." Wilson also presents the concept of lifeworld as developed by the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Institute of Technology, 1987) : 295, as: "".....a communicative concept. Communication producing factual or evaluative agreement presupposing a common starting point in the pregiven or unchallenged, in a life-world of shared assumptions. In resting on these assumptions, a horizon of common understanding is sustained: communicatively structured lifeworlds......reproduce themselves via the palpable medium of action oriented to mutual agreement"". BACK TO TEXT

3 The process by which viewers talk about the programs they share in common has been explored in detail by Dorothy Hobson, "Soap Operas at Work," Remote Control, eds. Ellen Seiter, et al., (London: Routledge, 1991). Hobson analyzes women who view soap operas and discuss them afterward in detail amongst their friends and co-workers. She finds that the process of talking about the soaps to be just as important as watching them. As they discussed the soaps, the women analyzed the characters' actions and behaviors, argued the meanings entailed in the plots, tried to guess what would occur during the next episode and associated the details of their own lives to the fiction of the soap opera characters. BACK TO TEXT

4 Among those who have recently published works that concentrate on the subjects of womens' use of and representation on television are Eric E. Peterson, "Media Consumption and Girls Who Want to Have Fun," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987) : 37-50; Lana F. Rakow, "Gendered Technology, Gendered Practice," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1988) : 57-70; Martha Nochimson, No End to Her (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992); Elayne Rapping, Gender on Television (Boston: South End Press, 1994) and Margaret Heide, Television Culture and Womens' Lives (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia Press, 1995). BACK TO TEXT

5 Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) : 5. Spurling is referring to the phenomenology of the lifeworld and one's way of existing within it as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty who draws and expands upon Husserl's emphasis upon 'intentionality', 'bracketing' and 'reduction', Heidegger's Dasein and other existentialist variations of the structure of the lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty considers the perceiving subject to encounter prereflected objects and events as new phenomena, subject to any type of interpretation based upon the context, presentation and organization of the perceived itself. Spurling describes philosophy for Merleau-Ponty as "an attitude of wonder in the face of the world, a constant questioning and desire for understanding, not in the hope of attaining some merely intellectual solution, nor of dissolving the paradoxes and ambiguities of life, but rather in the hope of perhaps attaining some kind of directedness or orientation. The goal of philosophy is to enable each of us to rediscover his situation in the world, not in full clarity, since we are never transparent, to ourselves, but in a way that makes the world and ourselves a bit more accessible to our understanding." BACK TO TEXT

6 David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology (Ohio U Press, 1974) : 162, say that "A hermeneutical approach - whether to a text or a culture - shows its phenomenological roots by the refusal to bring to the task of interpretation a set of assumptions about the text itself. The text addresses us from a different time, sometimes in a different language or from a different culture, but we read it with the expectation that we can bridge these gaps. Yet the task of interpretation is not one of trying to reconstruct the world of the text but to let the text speak to the interests of the reader......The task of interpretation involves a dialectical process that includes the interests of the reader as well as the autonomy of the text."
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7 "The world is there before any possible analysis of mine, and it would be artificial to make it the outcome of a series of syntheses which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the object corresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but products of analysis, with no sort of prior reality." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) : x. BACK TO TEXT

8 An objective of cultural studies which I find particularly relevant is articulated by James Carey, Communication as Culture (London: Routledge, 1989) : 56. "Cultural studies does not seek to explain human behavior in terms of the laws that govern it or to dissolve it into the structures that underlie it; rather, it seeks to understand it. Cultural studies does not attempt to predict human behavior; rather, it attempts to diagnose human meanings." BACK TO TEXT

9 Carey, 59, draws upon Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) : 10, to describe the "consistent challenge within communications studies ""to untangle a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit and which (the student) must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render."" Carey explicates Geertz's words as the challenge "to grasp the meaning people build into their words and behavior and to make these meanings, these claims about life and experience, explicit and articulate so that we might fairly judge them." BACK TO TEXT

10 "Ethnography (is) at its most basic.....concerned with the social meanings of human action as that action occurs in its 'natural' context.....how people understand and organize the world around them and what meanings they attach to their own behavior and that of others. Ethnographically inspired television audience research strives for 'thick' descriptions of the complex ways in which people interact with television, of the relationships between television and other aspects of domestic life..... Ethnographic television studies are those which respond to the critical problem of television's ubiquity and intimacy. By the seemingly simple acts of observing how people interact with television and listening to what they tell us about the meanings those interactions have for them, we begin to glimpse something of the complexities and subtleties of television's roles in our lives." Allen 129. BACK TO TEXT

11 Allen 104-105. Allen uses a phenomenology theory of reading activity developed by Roman Ingarden, and elaborated by Wolfgang Iser, to describe the process by which 'the act of reading is not merely a mechanical process of sense making, but rather a curious and paradoxical process by which.....marks on a page are brought to life in the reader's imagination." The literary work is "like a piece of sheet music, still only a set of possibilities - a 'schemata' - a skeletal structure of meaning possibilities awaiting realization by the reader." The process of reading is "a complex process in which the reader brings to bear upon the words of the text previous experiences with literary texts, knowledge of other texts.....and an array of mostly unconscious assumptions drawn from their own experiential world." Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: John's Hopkins U Press, 1978) : 2-3, asserts that the reader assumes "a 'wandering viewpoint', a constantly changing position within the text itself.....a process of alteration between protension (expectation or anticipation) and retention (our knowledge of the text to that point).....Although the text can stimulate and attempt to channel protension and retention, it cannot control those processes, because both occur in the places where the text is silent - in the inevitable gaps between sentences, paragraphs and chapters (shots, scenes and episodes within the televisual text)."
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12 Among those who remain influential in this area are Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads (London: Methuen, 1982); Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985); David Morley, Family Television (London: Comedia, 1986) and Ann Gray, Video Playtime (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

CHAPTER ONE


TABLE OF CONTENTS