`Tactical' living: a situated study of teenagers' negotiations around and interactions with living room media

Tutt, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9216-8617 (2008) `Tactical' living: a situated study of teenagers' negotiations around and interactions with living room media. Environment and Planning A, 40 (10). 2330 -2345. ISSN 1472-3409 doi: 10.1068/a39385

Abstract/Summary

This paper examines everyday living room interactions in which teenage household members conduct `tactical' play in order to temporarily gain access to, and disrupt, the dominant, domestic codes of living room media. The practices of individuals are interpreted, through Michel de Certeau's language of `tactics', as struggles or a series of opportunistic actions which can often reforge these codes of living, precisely because the house `rules' are not fixed or deterministic in practice. In these tactical performances of self, the use of media is enmeshed in a host of situated and symbolic action, reaffirming how media and face-to-face interactions are multiply and closely entwined in everyday living room life. This video ethnographic work examines such instances of teenagers appealing to `house' rules and demonstrating domestic helpfulness in order to gain access to media, and the tethering of media to objects through the routine practice of `markers' and `stalls'.