“Relax and enjoy these disasters”: news media consumption and family life in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

This essay constitutes an analytical exploration of the contemporary media-saturated environment and, concomitantly, the television’s palpable effects upon everyday (and family) life—issues manifest throughout Don DeLillo’s fiction and, more specifically, in what has been deemed his “breakout book”: White Noise. Significant theories vis-à-vis the consequences of media and the data gathered and interpreted by media reception ethnographers (e.g., David Morley, Jean Baudrillard) are brought to bear. Ultimate conclusions point to the fact that media sources do, in fact, provide impetus for the sharing of human concerns and fears, and thus embody a cohesive and pragmatic “apparatus” of family life.