‘Tactical’ Living: A Situated Study of Teenagers' Negotiations around and Interactions with Living Room Media

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’.