Page 10 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

1 Introduction

There are many books that address the nature of everyday life and even more
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that examine cultural change and the media. This book is about all three
topics. It seeks to offer a new approach to the understanding of these inter-
related themes. In this introduction, I offer some background that points up
the need for the sort of book that this is. This offers an initial consideration of
the main themes that I will subsequently explore. The second part of the
introduction details the content of the chapters that follow.
A key theme of this book is that the increased importance of media of
communication has had a significant effect on the nature of ordinary life in a
contemporary consumerist capitalist society such as that in the UK. This
statement of theme immediately introduces three significant questions. First,
what is meant by increased importance? Second, what are media of communi-
cation? And, third, what is meant by ordinary life? I offer now some initial
clarification of my understanding of these issues, before turning to some other
points of introductory significance.
In my view, the idea that media are becoming of increased importance
has often been misunderstood. To be clear, I will not seek to argue (along the
lines of some representations of the work of Jean Baudrillard) that society has
become equivalent to media life. While the ‘hype’ surrounding such ‘post-
modern’ ideas often has a role in pointing up how ubiquitous the media have
become, it rapidly becomes subject to diminishing returns. Social life and
cultural life are not the same as media life. If such a strong argument for the
significance of the media is to be rejected, as missing the point that many
events happen outwith the media, then it also seems important to recognize
that society and culture have been changed quite fundamentally by the avail-
ability of a range of media as resources for the conduct of everyday life. Data
and theories that support this contention will be considered as this book
progresses.
At the moment consider the following differences over 50 years. I write
as a member of the first British TV generation (I was born in 1956 – the year
after commercial TV started) in that I can’t remember life before TV. In my
early life, I went to the cinema when it still showed newsreels, when two
feature films were on the bill and when the national anthem was played at the