While attending to other tasks, it is common for persons working at home to keep the set on and listen in. Many children are kept occupied with the television set in the role of baby-sitter. The elderly and persons with limited mobility spend much of their time in front of the set. None of these statistics reveal anything new but are interesting in recapitulating the insidious fact of television's constant presence. Generations that have grown up with television and all that it presents, represents and entails are literate with the medium as a matter of course.
Technology is one of the crucial constituents of life, self and identity.
The girls have grown up with the various discourses of television and have quite naturally learned to regard them as a normal and integral part of life. Along with the telephone, the radio, tape and CD player, and, to fluctuating degrees, the computer, television is both a device and a medium of communication that the girls have been exposed to and encouraged to use and interact with since birth. The girls illustrate a media literacy that is image-based. They are accustomed to the languages of several media at once. It is a literacy that is both similar to and distinct from reading, writing and other basic communicative modes and practices.