Scannell, P. “Dailiness” in Radio, Television and Modern Life. Blackwell, London, 1996, 144-178.
- Key Aims: The aims of this reading are to communicate the ways in which broadcast media is routinised into our everyday life in order to cement its position as something to which we as humans have a right to expect. It is generated by a past-becoming future, opening it up to generational gaps and “times … rhythms and ways of being” (Scannell, p 178). It is participating partly in discussions from the previous readings, including the idea that media transforms space and time to open up the world to its inhabitants, and the theory that media create its broadcasts for the audience.
- Key Concepts and Ideas:
– Care is a large concept throughout the reading, meaning that the work, effort, observation and concern pumped into the making and shaping of broadcast media is presented as the natural, everyday, ordinary entitlement of television and radio.
– Dailiness is presented in this context as the way in which an everyday service is routinely carried out in a never-ending flow, shaping our sense of time. This sense is what picks out one day from another and differentiates between existential time that is to come and time that has already been.
– My-Time is used to explain the phenomenon of the time that is used to measure my-self – the concerns of how near or far my own “here and now” exists in relation to my situated being in the world (Scannell, p 152). It is also the time that broadcast media aims their efforts towards.
· Television and radio are the constants in modern life – they play up the projection of certain selfs to the world we know, the personalities (all somehow interesting and human) displayed in the programs are those of our own time and generation: at once now, then and not yet become. The language of these is understood by all listeners and is what links us together and what we share. It spans our two worlds: the world consisting of My-time, with my everyday concerns and immediate existence, with the world on a broader scale, made up of the events and happenings reachable and knowable, only through broadcast media.
The linear structure of time is made up of endless cycles: the “arrow of time” (Scannell, p 153) is actually bent into thousands of new days of new things happening and to be done, with these cycles predicted and continued by broadcast media in order to give meaningfulness to the everyday, presented always as a new day.
This structure and language affords us the ability to recognise the future as a continuation of past, both in immediate terms and for those of the next generation: dailiness will continue its cycle with every new day, projecting itself in the future whilst existing firmly in the now.
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