Business, Media, and Family History

This talk raises issues of interdisciplinary research into the relations between business, media, and family history. While the panel is aimed to consider intersections between communication and business history, I want to additionally emphasize the need to understand the links of both to the history of family and home life. The history of business is also a history of communicating (largely via home-based media) to publics in their homes. In this discussion I especially consider how research on television and new media households benefits by developing methods that can interweave all three areas of research in order to better understand how people have experienced their everyday lives through the mediated spheres of industrial culture that have increasingly become part of the modern home since the turn of the 19th century.