Page 12 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Introduction 3

media and other parts of our lives. As might be suggested by the content of
those two paragraphs, it is possible that while my media life has become more
resourced, my locality of residence is far less diverse and my face-to-face con-
tact will primarily be with other white middle-class people, in great contrast to
my experiences of south London of the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing
up. This suggests that there are some complex interactions between living
spaces and media lives.
In addition, I have mentioned family and work. I am firmly of the view
that as well as considering residence and media, patterns of interaction among
family (and friends) and relationships to work also have to be considered
alongside media interactions and this book will have this as a focus. My
point is that media resources have expanded greatly and that to understand
our culture we need to see researching and understanding this as a key aim.
Common ways of thinking of this have involved ideas that society is media
saturated or media drenched. I prefer to work with the latter term, as the
former perhaps suggests that no more can be added and I do not think that we
have reached the end point of media development. Such media drenching has
a range of implications for our lives. I have considered some aspects of the
implications of this process in earlier work (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998)
and will use this as a base in some of the subsequent discussion.
Part of how I define the media has also been communicated by the
earlier brief characterization of media availability. I will adopt a broad defin-
ition of what is meant by media. One of the problems with the history of the
study of the media is that it has tended to be skewed by most attention to film
and television. While understandable on a number of levels – including the
popularity of both of these forms as mass entertainment – this has tended to
lead to other media becoming the ‘poor’ relations. However, this is now chan-
ging at a rapid pace, as the literatures on other media, including radio as well as
‘new’ media, develop. The book will therefore seek to take into account these
developments and not to become a study of television. Another reason for this
is that admirable theoretical and empirical studies of TV and everyday life
already exist (for example, Lembo 2000; Silverstone 1994). While I will not be
able to cover all media in anything like great depth, I do think that it is
important to recognize the range of media that are potentially significant in
ordinary life. These include mobile phones, mp3 players, and so on. One con-
sequence of this attention to a range of media will be that I want to include
and therefore value the way in which sound is significant in ordinary life.
There still tends to be a prime focus on the visual media in media studies.
Again, while this is understandable, it is limiting, especially as media ‘converge’
technologically.
The third question introduced earlier was the nature of ordinary life. I will
examine in more detail the reasons for my terminology here in Chapter 2.
There I will consider the main parameters of extant theories of everyday life
and distinguish my approach from them. I will do this in accord with some of
the arguments outlined in previous work on audiences, but will introduce
some further aspects. In short, I will suggest that the idea of ordinary life is
sociologically significant in illuminating how life is lived out. One of the great
interventions of cultural studies in its earliest formulations was to point the