Abstract
This article examines how an analysis of a broader media ecology of a particular generation can offer a more complex account of past audience habits than the ones we gain from quantitative audience ratings based on one medium alone. It also shows how past surveys can be put to use anew within new theoretical frameworks. The main argument is based on a cultural studies–inspired interpretation of a home electronics survey, conducted by the Swedish public service radio’s research unit in 1985. The main focus is on members of the cohort born during the 1960s, who grew up with television and quickly became avid television users. The longitudinal analysis of television preferences within the broader media ecology of this generation sheds new light on the relationships between different media, but also on the long-term impact that a particular media ecology may have on one’s engagement with the media at later stages of life.
Introduction
Television arrived late in Sweden, but its initial establishment and development were rapid. By 1965, only 9 years after the official start of television in Sweden, 70% of all Swedish households had their own television set (Törnqvist, 1967: 171). This meant that, for children born in Sweden during the 1960s, having a television set in the living room was already a given of daily life. However, to understand what this meant for them, it is important to set it in the wider cultural and media context. Members of this generational cohort were children during the radical movements of the late 1960s and the early 1970s and became teenagers during the ‘culture wars’ between the politically radical social realistic aesthetic, the disco and pop cultures, as well as the coming of punk music during the late 1970s and the introduction of television soap operas in the early 1980s. Therefore, I will argue that when commercial television around 1987 started competing with public service television, the 1960s generation was already familiar with contestations surrounding high and low culture and the new cultural forms and tastes. Most importantly, the specific spaces and technologies of media consumption that emerged at this moment, including those tied to television, must have had meanings for them different from those among older and younger generations. Extrapolating from this particular case, I argue that it is possible and useful to make some generalizations concerning the relationship between when a person is born, the context of this individual’s lifestyle and how it may affect his or her future engagement with the media world. To put it differently, I shall argue that the particular media ecology a generational cohort grows up with plays an important role in shaping average media consumption habits and patterns throughout its life cycle.
Probably no other generational cohort before the one born in the 1960s has been so closely monitored by media researchers using a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research methods. This was also a time when studies of both popular culture and youth cultures came into vogue, and the 1960s cohort was the most obvious subject for these new fields of study. Its media consumption and use habits have been quantified and theorized extensively and used as the basis for developing general models of identity formation.
The general conclusions of these historical studies can be contested, partly because the chosen methods of data collection are often inadequate to provide full insights into the complex processes of identity formation. Nonetheless, these data can be of considerable value to media researchers today, particularly once we start to examine them longitudinally and take into account a wider range of data regarding different media and cultural habits, and use them to reconstruct the broader media ecology of a particular generation and its trajectory over time. Thus, we can offer a more nuanced and sociologically complex account of past audience habits than the ones we gain from quantitative audience ratings based on one medium alone and/or at one single moment in time. Thanks to the plenitude of empirical data, an analysis of what I would like to call television natives, based on the comparison of data from different media and overall consumption and lifestyle patterns across a greater time span, offers an excellent subject for historical audience research.
This article starts with a brief discussion of the materials and methods to be used in the study and their pros and cons. It then proceeds by providing some general background needed to interpret the chosen case study, namely, a discussion of the notion of generation and its relationship to television. The last section examines the 1960s generation and its media ecology. The main argument is based on an interpretation of the 1985 home electronics survey, in combination with other historical audience studies on the backdrop of the contextual changes in the Swedish television and media system, Swedish policies and economy. I discuss the results of these studies, taking into account cultural research on uses of different media in order to raise questions concerning how this particular age group may have responded to the changing media ecologies from the 1980s onwards.
Material and methods: The pros and cons of reusing past historical audience research
The empirical basis for this article consists of data and historical analyses of television viewing patterns, together with demographic and lifestyle and consumption data from the 1970s and the 1980s in Sweden. Swedish audience research dates back to 1928 when Swedish public service radio started an audience research unit called Sveriges Radios publik- och programforskningsavdelning (Swedish Radio’s Audience and Programme Research Unit, often shortened as SR Pub). From the late 1960s and until 1992, when it was replaced by the company MMS, the unit not only produced audience ratings but also conducted a large number of studies of media use and consumption as well as broader everyday life patterns (Bjur, 2009: 18). Sveriges Radio’s own research thus became the main provider of data and knowledge about domestic radio and television audiences. With the new Swedish cultural policy implemented in 1974, radio and television became recognized as key cultural players, which made SR Pub’s research even more important not only for internal purposes of Swedish broadcasters but also for Swedish media policies. SR Pub’s reports made many references to contemporary media theory, both post-McLuhanesque media-as-liberating theories as well as debates on media-as-dangerous, frequently echoing Herbert Schiller’s books. In doing so, they inscribed themselves within the development of mass communications research internationally. At the same time, many of these studies offered ‘executive summaries’ that were designed to provide the basis for political and administrative decisions. Over the years, SR Pub’s surveys have been used for many scholarly investigations of audience preferences and behaviours (Bjur, 2009: 18). Obviously, the broad range of research questions and the long time span of SR Pub’s studies from the end of the 1960s into the 1990s have made its surveys instrumental to both Swedish media and communication research and Swedish policy makers from the early 1970s on into the new millennium.
The 1985 home electronics survey, which provides the main basis for my own analysis later in this article, can be considered a typical example of SR Pub’s research. It started with the method of investigation (SR Pub, 1985b: 4–5) and continues with ‘comments’ about the broader context of the kind of media use or consumption the study covered (p. 6). The introduction ended with a half-page summary of results of the different age groups and including a short paragraph, echoed in the subheading, which stated that the dominant technology for each age group was the technology that ‘entered the market’ when the particular age group were teenagers (p. 7). Apart from research reports of this kind, SR Pub also published studies focusing on the data and the methods of investigation more generally (e.g. Höijer, 1998).
Retrospectively, it is easy to raise methodological questions concerning SR Pub’s studies. For instance, the study of young children’s television viewing conducted in the summer of 1986 was based on interviews with the parents of small children, aged 3–8 years, while older children were themselves interviewed about their viewing habits (SR Pub, 1987). In both cases, there may be problems of recollection and, maybe more importantly, of definitions. It is quite likely that parents’ attitudes towards children’s television viewing may have affected their answers and hence do not offer an adequate reflection of the children’s own preferences and habits. Another example of the problems of reliability can be found in a 1982 report following the introduction of changes to established methods of assessing audience ratings. SR Pub’s established method of analysing audiences was based on data from about 120 annual ‘programme days’, that is, the days they had chosen for study. On each such day, 175 people were interviewed and asked which TV programmes they had watched the previous 3 days. In 1981, SR Pub tried to find ways to gather enough data and still interview fewer people. Instead of asking each person about the previous 3 days, they wanted to change to asking about the previous 4 days, The result of the study was a loss of precision, due to difficulties of recollection from 4 rather than 3 days. On the other hand, they concluded that problems of recollection already began after the first day (SR Pub, 1982). The fact that SR Pub continued to ask about viewing patterns more than 24 hours back in time is revealing of the acceptance of the (perhaps unavoidable) inaccuracies of this kind of method, but also of a reluctance to question more profoundly the reliability of an interview-based rating system.
Nonetheless, these methodological shortcomings should not lead us to reject such studies as potential sources for a history of audiences. As Jérôme Bourdon suggests in his contribution to this thematic issue, we should resist the temptation to reduce all historical representations of audiences to ‘mere representations’ that do not point to any external reality outside of themselves. To start with, what makes these surveys useful is that the research methods do not seem to change much throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s. Even if there are many reasons to question individual results, the trends they reveal over time may still be valid. Also, as Deacon and Keightley (2011) point out, quantitative studies can contribute to long-term studies, sometimes revealing marginal phenomena so far ignored by researchers. Second, given that SR Pub’s research, as suggested earlier, played an important role in Swedish cultural and media policies at the time, their overall research priorities, their approach to the media and their interpretations of results can offer important insights into the changing ideas about audiences (as examined by Sabina Mihelj in her contribution to this themed issue), the broader trends in Swedish media and cultural history, as well as the dynamic interdependence of media production and media policy. As indicated earlier, the aim of this article is to explore the first possibility, namely, to offer a reading of such historical data as a means of reconstructing a particular, generationally specific media ecology and its trajectory over time.
The already-mentioned home electronics survey, which forms the main basis of my analysis in this article, was part of SR Pub’s rather ambitious audience research activities at the time. In the survey, it was obvious that television was, and had been for a long time, a well-established medium. A total of 96% of all people in Sweden lived in a household with a television set (SR Pub, 1985b). The home electronics survey was conducted in February 1985, when 2500 people (aged 9–79 years) were interviewed, by telephone, according to a strict set of questions concerning access to and consumption of home electronics and some questions on the size of the household. The study included an assessment of the representativeness of the sample with margins of error for the different age groups. This study seems to be methodologically more transparent than many of the regular audience rating reports produced at the time. To further minimize the impact of any methodological shortcomings of this study, I will be using multiple historical sources on media consumption and home media electronics and their use patterns to reconstruct the media ecology of the 1960s cohort and its longitudinal trajectory. On the other hand, through home electronics I will be able to put some emphasis on the importance of also considering the materialities of media ecologies (Fuller, 2005: 2).
The television generation
Karl Mannheim’s 1920s distinction between generation as location (time and place) and actuality (experiences) is frequently used in sociology and media studies (Bolin and Skogerbø, 2013). Another observation made by Mannheim (1952/1928), which is of relevance to my further discussion, is the idea that experiences encountered in late youth or early adulthood tend to be most formative and have greatest impact on one’s subsequent life trajectory. Categorizing people as cohorts born at a certain time, or living at a certain place at a certain time, is of course an established practice in national statistics. However, how exactly to link separate birth cohorts to formative experiences is a question of interpretation. In both research and popular discourse, distinctions between different generations often follow major political changes such as World War I, World War II or the fall of the Berlin Wall. As many of the most widely quoted studies were conducted in the United States, the selection of these events is often US-centred or at least West-centred. One example is the classification by Zukin et al. that divides generations in the latter half of the 20th century into ‘the dutifuls’ (born before 1945), ‘the baby boomers’ (1946–1964), ‘generation X’ (1965–1976) and ‘the dotnets’ (born after 1977) (Zukin et al., 2006 in Westlund and Weibull, 2013). An alternative way of categorizing generations, used among media scholars, is based on the medium that a particular generation grew up with and took for granted (e.g. Bourdon, 2011). This is also the type of categorization I draw upon in this article.
Such categorizations of generational cohorts have been criticized considerably for being too generalizing and for obscuring important internal differences (Westlund and Weibull, 2013). While these critiques are valid, especially when considering the widespread casual references to ‘generation X’, ‘the baby boomers’ and so on, they do not in themselves invalidate the usefulness of the notion of generation as such. I would instead argue that it is still useful to use this notion – and, more precisely, generational cohort – as a combination of both location and actuality, while also acknowledging the internal variations in each generational cohort. Here, we need a cultural studies perspective to acknowledge heterogeneities based on class, gender, ethnicity and so on. While the SR Pub’s data do not allow us to gain insight into all the aspects of internal variation, we may be interested in – for instance, the categorization according to education and income is too broad in both scope and conceptualization – it still provides enough raw material to work with.
One reason why generations have recently seen a renewed interest among media scholars may be because of the success of the notion of ‘digital natives’ (Bolin and Skogerbø, 2013). This idea refers to the cohort born from the early or mid-1990s onwards that has experienced neither a world without the web, nor a daily life without mobile phones or computers. If the presence of the web is enough for the definition of digital natives, it seems relevant to argue that ‘television natives’ are almost equivalent to the ‘baby boomers’ (the early ones in the United States, later ones in Europe and Japan). What I seek to do in the case study that follows is therefore to reconstruct the changing media ecologies of Sweden’s ‘television natives’ and the experiences that went with them. In relation to those, I am particularly interested in any formative experiences linked to the media ecology encountered in late teenage/early adulthood and the way it may have impacted subsequent media preferences and uses. This may also help shed new light on the complex processes that underpin the gradual introduction and diffusion of new media technologies and their integration into everyday life and their impact on previously existing technologies.
Analysing the changing media ecologies of the Swedish television natives
Arguably, the rapid diffusion of television in Sweden was to an important extent enabled by the post-war economic and social development of the country. During the decades following the end of World War II, Sweden had a more equal distribution of income than most other (Western) countries (Roine and Waldenström, 2008; Steinmo, 2010). The result was that more people had more money than before, money that was used for better housing and increased consumption. In the 1950s, the development of the welfare state had been a consequence of a political strategy where resources were redistributed by encouraging consumption. In the 1960s and the 1970s, these policies were complemented by a redistribution of wealth based on high taxes (for both individuals and companies). This was the economic and social environment Swedish television natives were born into.
Before turning to the analysis of the 1985 home electronics report, it is useful to examine a report published in 1983 which included the results of a longitudinal examination of studies of children’s television habits between 1972 and 1982 and hence sheds some light on television natives’ childhood years. According to this report, between 1972 and 1982 children in Sweden reduced the time of daily television watching from 94 minutes to 61 minutes. This radical decline is presented in a couple of studies during the following years. The only explanation given is a potential late-afternoon competition between children’s television programming and school and day-care centres. There are no indications that the method of investigation (telephone interviews with parents) changed during this time. Given the critical debates against television during the 1970s (Hadenius, 1998) and changes in programming (SR Pub, 1985a), it was perhaps not that surprising for the researchers at the time. Children from low-income families on average watched television for 22 minutes longer than children from high-income families, but the overall trend in all income categories pointed downwards. From 1982, children’s television consumption started to (slowly) increase again but never reached the figures of the early 1970s. As might be expected, the average time spent in front of television over weekends was particularly high. One out of five 7- and 8-year-olds in 1984 watched television more than 4 hours per day during weekends (SR Pub, 1985a). Even without examining these figures in detail, it is feasible to argue that the change over time is an indication of both everyday habits and parents’ attitudes towards television. In the early 1970s, television was still a rather new medium, but the fascination with it was waning as the decade progressed, resulting in more limited amounts of time spent in front of television.
By just looking at audience statistics, it may seem that those who were between 5- and 8-year-old at the time and whose parents were less educated (i.e. did not have tertiary education) were the true television natives during the first years of the 1970s, as they watched on average more television than children with better-educated parents.
An explanation for the upward trend in television viewing among children after 1982 is the changes in the nature of Swedish television at the time as well as changes in the broader media ecology – namely, the deregulation of broadcasting and the introduction of a wide range of new information and communication technologies, including satellite and cable television. Before that, the history of Swedish television was relatively static and characterized by the monopoly of the public broadcasting service. Between 1956 and the 1980s, the only major shift in the Swedish television system was the introduction of a second public service channel, TV2, in 1969. The second channel did not change the range of television broadcasting; neither did it significantly change the amount of time the audience spent on watching television. It did, however, broaden the content of television including news and political and social coverage, drama and children’s programming, as well as popular formats such as talk shows and quiz shows.
The more profound changes started in the early 1980s. A small proportion of households in the country already started gaining access to cable and satellite television before 1985. In 1987, the first commercial Swedish television channel, TV3, started broadcasting from the United Kingdom. After Five years, television advertising became legal even for television channels broadcasting from Sweden (Engblom and Wormbs, 2007; Ewertsson, 2005). Although the policy of high taxes was combined with a financial policy that resulted in high inflation during the 1970s and the 1980s, the inflation and the simultaneous availability of subsidized housing loans meant that more people could live better and gradually afford to buy several new electronic gadgets such as new television sets, music equipment, as well as video game consoles and home computers. The presence of all these different technologies, the well-developed telephone system, as well as cheap and reliable electricity, together with a greater diversity of television content, made for radically different conditions for consuming media during the 1980s compared to the 1960s and the early 1970s.
Let us now return to the analysis of historical audience research, this time looking more closely at the 1985 home electronics survey (see Table 1). The closest we get to the television natives in the 1985 survey is the category 18–24 years, without children (‘Without children’ means in this survey that they do not live with children, not that they are not parents). To put it differently, the television natives who were children in the 1970s became young adults by the 1980s. As we shall see from the results presented below, this was the generation that was technologically best equipped and – arguably – eager to explore the full potential of the new, increasingly diverse media ecology.
Ownership of and access to home electronics in Sweden in 1985.
Source: SR Pub (1985b: 35–36, 42).
Life cycles: 1 = 18–24, without children; 2 = 25–44, without children; 3 = 45–64, without children; 4 = 25–44, children 0–6 years; 5 = 25–44, children 7–17 years; 6 = 45–64, children 0–17 years.
Those included in the group aged 18–24 years are underrepresented with regard to ownership of colour TV sets, which is not surprising because many of them were students or unemployed, and colour TV sets were still rather expensive. On the other hand, compared to the next age cohort in the survey, aged 25–44 years, without children, a larger share of them owned a stereo TV set. This may be explained by a higher interest in the medium. A perhaps more convincing explanation arises when we compare them with 25- to 44-year-olds with younger (0–6 years) or older (7–17 years) children. Young families with children were more likely to have a stereo TV set. Again, broader social explanations are needed. Those who were able to buy homes during the 1970s and the 1980s had by 1985 a pretty strong household economy. They also had a long experience of television. The oldest of them, born around 1950, had most likely experienced television since around the age of 10 years and had had parents who benefited the most from the development of the welfare state during the 1950s and the 1960s, which meant that people without higher education could still afford a stable middle-class life. The groups less likely to own a stereo TV set, those aged between 25 and 44 years without children, were either still students or generally more highly educated, or with low education and grown-up children. These will become important groups for further comparisons later in this article.
To further understand the television natives during the crucial years of the deregulation of the Swedish television market, we need to have a closer look at three technologies that were particularly common among them in the 1980s: video games, home computers and cassette music. Even if the total numbers of those using these technologies are smaller than for television, I will argue that they are relevant to study because they were new home technologies at the time and were linked to new forms of practices (see, for example, Montfort and Bogost, 2009). As I shall argue, their use alongside television offers an important angle on interpreting the media habits of Swedish television natives.
Home computers are most common among people with middle and high education, and among students and 9- to 14-year-olds. For all age groups, men are in the majority (60% on average). Home computers are most common in households with four or more people.
On average, 4% of all the households, or 7% of the population, had access to video games in 1985. The households where it was most likely to find a video game console were those aged 25–44 years with older children and 45–64 years with children (they did not separate younger and older children for this cohort), but also the 18–24 group without children. This is possibly a good measure of who played video games in Sweden during the mid-1980s, namely, teenagers and young adults. Video games are most widespread among people with middle education and again among 9- to 14-year-olds and students. Again, men are in majority (67%). Video games are most common within households with three or more people.
Cassette players are most frequent among people with low to middle education, but also among part-time workers (which may include students). Again, the 9- to 14-year-olds was the group with most frequent access to cassette players, but the difference from older cohorts is not as big as for home computers and video games. However, there are considerably fewer cassette-player owners among those above the age of 65 years. Unlike video games and home computers, cassette players were evenly distributed between men and women. Households where cassette players are most common include three or more people.
An obvious observation concerns the difference in education. A superficial analysis would argue that home-computer use, video game play and cassette-music listening are linked to traditional class divisions. This may be reasonable, but the Swedish working classes during the 1970s were relatively wealthy, considering how many owned their own homes as a result of the welfare state. The survey also indicated that home-computer and video game owners generally had access to many other technologies, including television and different music technologies. I would therefore suggest that class divisions have a limited value for interpreting these results. Instead, it is worth taking into account the cultural practices associated with these new technologies, starting with the creation of mix-tapes enabled by inexpensive cassette players.
Listening to recorded music has a long history. From the late 1950s through the 1960s and increasingly during the 1970s, listening to recorded, but not broadcast, music turned from being something for well-educated middle-class men into something that also included, and was perhaps even dominated by, young working-class and middle-class men and women. When in the 1970s and the early 1980s easy-to-use and inexpensive cassette players made it possible for young people to record music using their own cassette players in their own rooms, this opened up opportunities for new patterns of behaviour, such as making mix-tapes. This activity was no longer limited to DJs, music-radio workers and artists but became a standard activity among older children and teenagers. The compilations of mix-tapes were, on the one hand, a way to collect music but also formed part of a creative engagement with music’s capacity to express and create identity and group identification (DeNora, 2000; Frith, 1997; Jansen, 2009).
Mix-tapes became particularly important for new forms of music, or new modes of music listening, where the individual track was more important than the artist (Drew, 2005), including early punk and new wave as well as disco music. In either case, radio became an important and often the sole source of new and identity-producing music. The relationship between cassette players (with recording functions) and the spread and ‘use’ of punk, new wave and disco music is not that far-fetched, as they obviously coincided in time, from the mid- to late 1970s until the early to mid-1980s. It is also important to note that they coincided with other important developments in the Swedish media landscape at the time, namely, the transition from regulated to deregulated broadcasting as well as the beginning of the shift from (analogue) broadcasting and print to (digital) interactive technologies.
The ‘heavy’ cassette users from the late 1970s and the early 1980s were young adults when the CD technology replaced the cassette. The CD opened up opportunities for a wider distribution and greater diversity, including new music and re-mastering of 33 and 45 r/min discs. On the other hand, before mp3, the CD represented a radical shift from the recording possibilities of the cassette to only listening to a CD. For the cassette users, only the home computer could bring back the participatory production aspects of the cassette. Given the relatively high costs of computers during the 1990s, before iTunes (2003), it is possible that those who used cassettes to make their own collections, but did not have the financial resources to purchase their own computers, had limited opportunities to continue their participatory modes of production. It would be interesting to compare these patterns with uses of videocassettes, which remained an inexpensive means of making one’s own collections for a longer time. The popularity of music videos and its growth following the deregulated television broadcasting market during the late 1980s and the early 1990s make this assumption reasonable.
Those cassette users who bought PCs during the late 1980s and the early 1990s could easily continue and expand their participatory production activities. A decade later, this group, now in their 30s, probably became an important support group for peer-to-peer file-sharing from Napster to The Pirate Bay. Following this line of argument, the hard-core file-sharers, born during the 1990s, were most likely the children of this early television ‘literate’ generation.
What unites home computers and cassette technologies is the combination of using and producing. Early home computer technology like Apple II (1977), Atari 400 (1979), ABC 80 (1980), BBC Micro (1981), Commodore 64 (1982), or ZX Spectrum (1982) required some basic programming skills. Even if only a few percent of the Swedish households owned home computers, the percentage of people with programming skills among them was most likely quite high. Even if computers could in principle be used to support practical household tasks, the main use was for entertainment, namely, playing and making games and making images or sounds. Regardless of whether punk and new wave fans were working class or middle class, and regardless of whether computer owners were middle class or upper class, these phenomena coincided in time. It also seems that punk and electronic music have been popular among successive generations of hackers, crackers or demo-makers, and, hence, there may be connections, at least from the perspective of computer owners, between punk, new wave and electronic music and the ownership of home computers and acquiring of programming skills.
Video games are important in order to understand what television may have meant for (young) people during the late 1970s and the early 1980s because video game consoles at the time required a television set in order to be used. In addition, the systems of the type that the 1985 survey included – for example, Atari Video Computer System (VCS; 1977), Sega SG-1000 (1983) or Nintendo Entertainment System (1983) – did not require many technical skills and were not in a direct way connected to participatory production. This information of video games is relevant when following the generation of the television natives into the 1990s when the world wide web (during the early 1990s) came hand in hand with home computers well equipped for gaming at the same time as a new generation of video game consoles (for television) opened up opportunities for more advanced audio-visual experiences (e.g. Sony’s Play Station in 1993 and Nintendo 64 in 1996).
Conclusion: From television natives to the do-it-yourself generation?
To sum up, the first (Swedish) television generation, those born during the 1960s, watched more television as young children than any former generation. They did that at a time when television programming for children prospered and when public service television had created a mix between commercial formats and more traditional public service programmes following the introduction of the second public service channel in 1969. They went to school during a time of major educational change, which emphasized creativity and participation as well as fostering social equality and providing strong support for children with learning difficulties and attention problems. Outside school they were the first generation to really make use of a cultural policy where involvement and training in artistic practice, particularly music practice, as well as involvement in sports, were free of charge and easy to access. Finally, they grew up at a time when parents, even those with low education and low incomes, had more material resources at their disposal than those of most other Western countries – thanks to the welfare-transfer system, publically supported housing and tax reductions for house loans – and hence could afford to equip their households with new electronic gadgets.
When these television natives became teenagers, during the second part of the 1970s and the early 1980s, television sets were ubiquitous; some, more often boys than girls, were the first to employ easy-to-use music technologies, home computers and video game consoles. Some, both boys and girls, began to form their own identities by way of punk, new wave, electronic or disco music, thus focusing as much on activity (music creation or dancing) as on listening. They became adults during the 1980s, which in Sweden was a period of political liberalization, a booming economy (followed by a severe real-estate stock-market crash towards the end of the decade), and the beginning of the deregulation of television and radio.
To put it differently, watching television in Sweden during the 1950s and the 1960s was a completely different activity compared to watching television during the 1970s and the 1980s. Television meant other things, even with similar machines in the living room. Even if the shift from the former to the latter was anything but revolutionary, I argue that it was important. But, as I have argued here, the change is difficult to discern by looking at television ratings alone.
What has thus become characteristic for this generation is an increasing focus on participation, do-it-yourself (DIY) culture and a cognitive juxtaposition of welfare state/public service values on the one hand, and popular (US-oriented) media formats and new media technologies on the other. It is consequently not surprising that, when television natives entered into their 30s and 40s and gained influence on the media ecology as both consumers and media workers/executives, their particular experiences from the 1970s and the 1980s can be used to help explain how Sweden has become successful in media platform and content innovation. Phenomena, such as The Pirate Bay, Spotify and maybe also Minecraft and The Swedish House Mafia, rely on both an awareness of participatory cultures and a broad range of media consumption.
I have argued that it is possible to analyse the audience history by focusing on a particular generation and its changing media ecology. By creating an imagined life-course out of contextual conditions, focusing on the experience of different forms of television programming in the context of Swedish public television, as well as changes in educational and cultural policy and the technological environment, it has been possible to distinguish a group of people born between the early 1960s and the early 1970s and who grew up in Sweden during the 1970s and the 1980s. Another selection of material may have of course given other results. A reason for choosing this particular group is that it was, demographically speaking, a relatively large group. More importantly, the television natives also lived through some of the major shifts in the Swedish post-war society.
By combining demographic particularities (identifying a longer period with a high birth-rate) with demographic data, consumption data, and educational, economical and technological changes that may have had a significant effect on a chosen group, it is possible to create a framework for further empirical studies in order to identify the consequences of having a large group of people in a society sharing certain experiences, identities and values. This approach to audience history could also offer the basis for addressing questions concerning present and future television consumption, including the influence one ‘technological generation’ may have had on another: in what way, for instance, are the practices of Swedish television natives linked to the practices of the so-called ‘digital natives’ of the 1990s (who are in most cases their children)?
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Sabina Mihelj and Jérôme Bourdon for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.