Care providers consider media use in the nursing home a poor alternative to other communicative interaction and accept it only with reluctance. Yet research shows that television has a special appeal for the aged, appeal that is enhanced in the nursing home environment where few activities offer the variety and the pleasures of media consumption. While theories of media use and aging portray media use as solitary, unidimensional, and problematic, this study looks at media use as multidimensional, embedded in the social life of nursing home residents.

Because previous research links communication and successful adjustment to the nursing home environment, this study focuses on the communication patterns of nursing home residents who have survived the adjustment process, often complicated by trauma, and made the nursing facility a home. The purpose of this study is to establish the importance of mass media consumption routines in the social lives of the institutionalized aged through an examination of the relation between media use and other communicative interaction. Adopting a Social Action Perspective for examining mediated communication, methods employed are anthropological, and observation and interviews provide primary data. Findings are organized in a three-stage chronological model and results are supported with descriptions of media routines indicating the premises of action that guide the performance of consumption activities.

Interviews yield regularities of medium and genre preference, and indicate the importance of roommate relations in determining the amount of consumption and pleasure experienced. Three styles of roommate relations are described: a cooriented style: a parallel style and a non-coordinated style. Premises derived from depth interviews suggest that media consumption is guided by a variety of strategic goals: appearing active, maintaining control, remaining socially inegrated, defining intimate space, and creating opportunities to interact with others. Media routines are strategic responses, countering obstacles in the nursing home through maximizing available resources.

Theoretical development for media audience research resides in the media consumption stance that distinguishes modes of media use by the strategic goals and outcomes of participants, each considering a different relationship between medium and audience member, an identifiable pattern of coordinated activity. Stances described include monitoring, witnessing, and hitchhiking.