Page 130 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Conclusions 121

Fifth, the activities involved interconnected processes of distinguishing
and distinction, belonging, individual identity and enthusing. I seek perhaps
to distinguish myself from others by things like my appreciation of particular
types of art, music and food and write about them here. However, the activities
I have described also condense some patterns of elective belonging. I was not
born where I live, but part of my feeling of belonging there involves my con-
nections with my family, who live there with me and who attend local schools
and have local friends, as well as my interactions with local friends and neigh-
bours. Elective belonging also condenses other aspects of forms of belonging
that are important to us in individual ways, such as connections to people (for
example, family and friends) and places (in my case, the north of Scotland),
which are parts of our senses of self. This also involves things like enthusiasms.
My liking for popular music runs through a lot of the activities that I have
described and this is an important part of my diffused identity, which often
connects it to other aspects of who I am (as a husband, father, son, in-law
family member, close friend, acquaintance, neighbour, academic, and so on).
The diffused identity is thus network or web-like.
Finally, my actions and activities may involve different degrees of inten-
tion and rational action and, indeed, they involve a number of decisions, some
much more significant than others. However, they also involve reciprocity,
friendship and love in varying degrees. There is a danger that characterizations
and theorizations of everyday life of the type that I considered earlier in the
book downgrade these aspects of life. This is not always the case and I am
definitely not suggesting that we simply celebrate ordinary life. However, I am
opposed to both the critical and celebratory positions as a priori. Moreover, I
hold the view that a fully social media and cultural studies needs to recognize
the complexity of the interaction of the ordinary and extraordinary and
deploy the now many tools that we have to understand its changing nature
better. My main hope is that this continues to develop in ways that draws on a
range of sources. Thus, in many respects the intervention of this book is to
argue for a further shift in the study of the nature of ordinary culture that
represents an argument for the merger of two main streams of thought.
My view, therefore, is that, broadly, media and cultural studies’
approaches to audiences have become more social as they have progressed and
that this is to be welcomed. However, despite the arguments of writers such as
Bull (2000), Lembo (2000) and Silverstone (1994) and others who have ‘social-
ized’ media and cultural studies, they are still not social enough, in that some
important interventions are not deployed in the analysis. By the same token,
many aspects of sociological study have been insufficiently cultural, in that
(and this is a very crude characterization) they have tended to suggest that
modes of social inequality can be considered outside the parameters of the
living out of ordinary life. A significant part of my project therefore has been to
bring the points where these traditions are proximate ever more closer. This
has meant that I have summarized and drawn on for my analysis those forms
of the study of media and culture from within the media and cultural studies
traditions that have moved closer to the socio-cultural analysis of ordinary life,
while retaining a consideration of media and interaction themselves. Con-
trariwise, there have been moves from within those parts of sociology that