Page 13 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

4 Cultural change and ordinary life

way in which academic attention should be paid to how culture is ‘lived’.
Some of the ways in which this lead to the prioritization of the idea of
‘experience’ became somewhat problematic as this literature developed. 2
However, I will maintain that attention to the lived means that sociology,
cultural and media studies can detail and explain key aspects of social and
cultural life. For this to happen it is necessary to draw on the resource of
key aspects of contemporary social and cultural theory; in particular, I will
argue those that address ideas of performance and audiences are of greatest
significance. Using these resources will lead me to be critical of many of those
accounts of everyday life that either work on the premise that everyday life is
in principle compromised or inauthentic or that everyday life involves resist-
ance to a dominant power structure. Following and expanding on Silverstone
(1994), especially via some of the literature on music and sound, I will offer an
alternative account.
There is another sub-theme that influences my attention to ordinary life.
I seek to explore the value of the living out of ordinary life, not as resistant to
centralized or fragmented power but as providing the meanings and routines
that enable people to experience the everyday joys and pleasures (to be sure
there are many drawbacks as well) of simply going about their lives. I think
that despite some of its many difficulties, some of which will be considered
in this book, the seminal work of Putnam (e.g. 2000) on social capital (see
Chapter 3) captures something of what I feel in this respect. Moreover, soci-
ology and cultural studies have not paid sufficient attention to these concrete
pleasures of ordinary life. The use of ordinary therefore has some measure of
polemic behind it. I write not as a critic of everyday life or a celebrant of its
resistive qualities, but as an analyst of the sometimes extraordinary qualities of
the ordinary lives of people living in a society such as ours.
I have other views that influence the way that this book has been put
together. Doubtless these will seem idiosyncratic in many respects, but part of
my desire here is to shift some literatures that seem rather too stuck in modes
of ‘normal science’ at present. First, I want to suggest that reconciliations
between aspects of what might be seen as more ‘orthodox’ sociology and polit-
ical science and media and cultural studies would be beneficial. Aspects of
sociology’s findings on how people use their time and political science’s analy-
sis of participation in civic activities and trust can be brought to bear on media
and cultural studies’ research on audiences and fans. This I will maintain can
be of mutual benefit. Second, and partly because of these disciplinary boundar-
ies, some of the work on culture in North American sociology has been rela-
tively poorly integrated with cultural and media studies. While only aspects of
this work will be drawn on in this book, I will address at several points issues of
how work on cultural taste needs to be considered alongside cutting-edge
audience studies. The idea of social capital is but one arena where these differ-
ent strands can be brought together profitably. Third, I seek to emphasize and
try to understand further the living out of social and cultural change. There
have been many accounts that offer grand narratives of such change: for
example, arguments about late modernity and postmodernity (which have
become unfashionable rather too quickly in my view; see Matthewman
and Hoey 2006); globalization/hybridization; and hypermodernity. Such