Page 126 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Enthusing 117

that I began this chapter by repeating are important, as indeed is the further
position of the petty producer, because as Couldry suggests:
Indeed, if the ‘ordinary life’ of audiences continues to generate revenues
for media corporations as it did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even
the boundary between the study of audiences and the study of media
production cannot be assumed. For, as we have seen, the worlds of the
audience and media production are not sealed off hermetically from
each other (see Toynbee 2006), but intersect in what particular audience
members do. Each of these ‘worlds’, after all, is just one aspect of the
larger picture of media’s role in the social world.
(Couldry 2005: 220)
Thus, the boundaries between a producer and a consumer are subject to
some erosion but the particular aspects of these differences still need to be
theorized. While Couldry’s idea of extension suggests important dimensions
that need to be connected to that of diffusion and is therefore important in
those terms and for deepening the scope of audience studies in itself, it does
not necessarily represent an advance on the idea of diffusion. However, it is
significant that this important discussion of the audience in more social terms
ends up with a concept of extension in the way that the work examined earlier
in the chapter does with respect to the idea of the self.

Enthusing: diffusion and the self
The ideas of the extended audience and the extended self are of significant
importance, as they allow consideration of how ideas of the audience and the
self need reconsideration in the context of the developed media frame and the
impact of commitment to media and cultural forms on the sense of the self.
However, as with the idea of the extended audience and previous ideas of the
audience, media relations and power, the idea of the extended self seems to
remain rather too much on the territory of previous studies of the nature of
the self and media. Paradoxically, perhaps, they carry too much baggage from
previous understandings of the media and culture. Thus the extended audi-
ence idea focuses rather too narrowly on the audience relationship with new
and old media and the idea of the extended self and the role of the secondary
transitional object likewise keeps too tight a connection between the self and
particular and singular objects. Extension seems to convey the idea that what
previously existed has simply been extended or built on, rather than trans-
formed through addition into something else. Therefore to capture this, I
argue it is important to recognize that the audience is diffused as is the self.
This takes into account the advances of these arguments, but seeks to
apply them across a range of different experiences and activities. Importantly,
these ideas are concerned with the way in which these experiences are con-
nected to identifications with a range of activities that can become more or
less salient to the individual at certain moments. It has been much remarked
that in contemporary times, the self has become more pluralistic, and that
conceptualizing this as diffused allows examination of the different aspects of
identity and how they are salient in different ways and at different times.