How do we watch TV? Introduced into mass distribution after World War Two, in its first decade, economies of scale resulted in two concurrent sites of consumption for television: neighbourhood taverns, and the homes of the very wealthy (McCarthy 2001; Rose 1986). As prices for television sets fell, by the end of the 1950s television penetrated the homes of the middle class. The first wave of television scholarship consequently focused on the overwhelmingly domestic content of commercial broadcast network television (usually understood to be a family medium), the introduction of the public sphere into the home and thus the domestic sphere, and the experience of home viewing; much of it from a feminist perspective (Friedan 1964; Meehan 1983; Marc 1984, 1989; Lipsitz 1988; Hammamoto 1989; Haralovitch 1989; Boddy 1990; Leibman 1995; Mellencamp 1986). Largely absent is a systematic understanding of how the relationship between television's context (the home) and television's content (the programming) is contingent on a set of historical, institutional and economic conditions; conditions that have since changed, along with the way that television's audience watches TV. What results is a set of assumptions about television's audience that continues to inform discussions of both television and its audience, even as television systematically occupies and subsequently alters new contexts.

Here is a more accurate way of asking the same question: how is the way we watch TV organized by where we are? Earlier scholarship and public commentary on television described certain contradictory experiences. First, television is watched. Second, watching television takes place inside the home in a dedicated, stable space, such as a family room, or the living room, or the bedroom. Third, as a consequence of this domestic stability, watching television is something that a viewer can leave and return to repeatedly. Thus, ‘watching’ television becomes a different experience than going out to the movies, or a live theatrical event, or a dance performance, or the opera, where the audience is restricted from entering the building before the show's start, and prevented from staying after its end. Out of this emerges television programming that is structured on imperfect concentration— or flow and its interruptions—and the insight that domestic labour performed in a state of distraction, such as childcare and housekeeping, is facilitated by the structure of commercial network broadcast television (Williams [1974] 1992; Modleski 1984; Spigel 1992).