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170 Communication Theory & Research
TABLE 13.1 OWNERSHIP OF COMMUNICATION RESOURCES AMONG HOUSEHOLDS AT
SELECTED INCOME LEVELS (UK, 1992)
% of households with:
Weekly Household Income (£) TV Cable TV Telephone Video Home computer
80–100 98.4 6.5 74.5 40.7 6.5
160–200 98.6 6.8 87.1 62.9 12.5
280–320 98.6 9.8 92.0 80.3 16.3
640–800 99.5 17.1 99.5 91.8 36.9
All households 98.3 9.3 88.4 69.3 19.1
Source: Central Statistical Office (1993).

which wired households can draw on a cornucopia of technical advances? To
press a button is to know. It’s a tempting vision. But there is a price to be paid to
enter this playground. As information becomes increasingly a commodity, to be
bought and sold, then having the admission price becomes ever more crucial for
citizens in a society claiming to be informed.
The information society is a myth. We live in a media society, in which infor-
mation is available at a price, or not at all. We assume that all have the means
to partake of this new rich information diet, but even a cursory glance at the
evidence shows how far this is from the truth.
The figures in Table 13.1 show the ownership of different communications
goods among high-, low- and medium-income groups. As you might expect, TV
is more or less universally available, though this disguises the difference
between the well-heeled media academic with his slimline fastext Nicam stereo
sound master set, and portables in every room in the house, and the dodgy four-
channel secondhand small screen in the parlour of his less affluent neighbour.
But if we look at other goods, a gap begins to appear. For example, video own-
ership, though relatively widespread in Britain (much stimulated by the royal
wedding in the early 1980s), is much more common among higher income
groups. Ownership of a video recorder doubled from 30 percent to 60 percent of
the population between 1985 and 1990, but it remains well below half among
poorer households, who have the least opportunity for alternative entertain-
ment outside the home. Home computers, though increasingly available, are
very inequitably distributed through the population. Even telephones, widely
assumed to be universally available, are in fact not found in nearly one in eight
households, overwhelmingly those in lower income groups. Indeed, if those
figures are broken down further, we find that phone ownership is even lower
among single pensioner households and lone parents – just those groups we
might assume are most in need of such facilities. Among single parent house-
holds containing two or more children, the figure for telephone ownership drops
to 64 percent.
It is sometimes argued that this gap will diminish over time, just as it did for
new ‘white goods’ in the 1950s. But this is unlikely to be so for two reasons. First,
it is intrinsic to the nature of these goods that their ownership imparts cumulative