Based on the premise that public time, sustained through broadcasting, is central to the social organisation of the home, this article focuses on two components of domestic consumption. This is the author's manuscript of an article that was published by Sage. It operates in a destabilized environment, in which families have more or less disappeared, romantic dyads cannot be sustained, and women's quest for enduring ties takes the form of seeking primordial, biological, `genuine', blood ties. The dyadic form appears to be taking over in the 1990s, harping on the modern and postmodern despair of too much freedom and too little trust.
While the kinship structure in both the dynastic (or patriarchal) and the community soaps constitutes a hegemonic, taken for granted framework for the programmes, the community soaps tend to be produced in the spirit of public service broadcasting and so are more likely to problematize gender issues in their conscious attempt to transmit social messages. For each of these subtypes, the article analyses the gender and class context for narrative events as portrayed within the soaps. The study of British, Scandinavian and European soaps, based on an `ethnographic' approach to the social networks in the world of the soaps, shows that these countries have developed three distinctive subtypes of the genre: the community soap, the dynastic soap and the dyadic soap. These results are discussed in relation to past research but the authors also argue that, as the findings suggest some participants gained a therapeutic effect from watching EastEnders, there is a fruitful and little-explored link between such comfort viewing and research on psychotherapy.Īnalysis of the most popular locally made soap operas in each of five European countries reveals that the soap opera is not simply an imported American genre. These themes were made up of seven categories, each of which helped explain why participants watched EastEnders: reduced troubles, gender, relaxation, social activity, community, realism and Britishness. Two major themes constituting social objects were identified - female desire and community. Material was generated via an open-ended email questionnaire and analyzed qualitatively using grounded theory. The second aim was to identify the kinds of social object dominating their accounts as a way of revealing the forms of cultural debate catalyzed by the show.
The first aim was to understand why people watch this program.
This article describes a study investigating narratives obtained from 45 participants about their watching of the television program, EastEnders.
0 kommentar(er)
