Silverstone, Roger (1945–2006)

Roger Silverstone was a British researcher of mass and new media, and communication studies more generally. He was influential in the development of these fields in the United Kingdom and contributed several ideas and approaches that are likely to be of lasting importance.

Having grown up in Birkenhead, Silverstone studied geography at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked briefly in publishing, and then as researcher and director for London Weekend Television and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—at the latter he was involved in programming concerned with the Apollo moon landing. These experiences gave him deeper inside knowledge of the broadcasting industry than many media academics. His PhD research used sociological, anthropological, and literary approaches to examine television narratives. In 1985, Framing Science: The Making of a Television Documentary explored TV's representation of science through an ethnographic account of the shaping of a BBC documentary. In 1994, Television and Everyday Life discussed how TV links private and home life to wider communities and public spaces.

While Reader in Sociology at Brunel University, he became active in the study of consumption of new information technologies. He became the first Professor of Media Studies at Sussex University in 1991, whose Silverstone Building is named in his honor. He became the London School of Economics' first Professor of Media and Communications in 1998, and in 2003 the LSE set up its Department of Media and Communications under his leadership. His widely read (and widely translated) Why Study[Page 1286]the Media? published in 1999, strongly defends media studies against popular prejudice. In the same year, he was founding editor of the journal New Media and Society.

He made important contributions to analysis of consumer issues in studies of the incorporation of TV and new information technologies in everyday life. He sees the appropriation of such media (and by extension many other innovations) into everyday life as a process of domestication in which innovations and social practices coevolve. This is a more dynamic and subtle account than that represented by the standard model of diffusion of innovations. The adoption of innovations (often emerging from industries such as consumer electronics, telecommunications, and broadcasting) involves integrating them into everyday practices. The TV set is fitted into a corner of the room, for example. Consumers, learning about what activities the innovations can and cannot readily support, reshape their own behavior and their environments accordingly. Thus, the living room is redesigned, meals and meal times are reorganized to mesh with TV viewing patterns. Information about these adaptations, in turn, influences industrial innovators and their designs for subsequent generations of innovative goods and services—TV sets that can fit into kitchens, special TV dinners, for example.

Silverstone stressed that this is not just a matter of physical properties of consumption goods; nor is it just as the consumers' search for more functionality and convenience. Symbolic dimensions of consumption are also important: consumers give meaning to the objects and practices of consumption, actively configuring new products into their everyday lives and identities (or rejecting them).

All media were once innovations, and their domestication (and our shaping of lifestyles and worldviews around this domestication) has been a complex and contested matter. Domestication is far from automatic, and consumers are far from passive. There are many levels of negotiation (e.g., between consumers and suppliers, and between the members of a household). The rules of behavior within which consumption takes place are negotiated; these rules shape the goods and services that are available to be purchased and how these are actually consumed. Rather than take media, and media consumption, for granted, Silverstone problematized these processes as topics for inquiry and intervention.

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