Page 133 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

124 Cultural change and ordinary life

sought to address that debate in its usual terms in this book. Rather, I have
sought to explore ideas of identity and individualization through a number of
studies, but would emphasize the importance of the consideration of what
I have termed enthusing in this book, again built on earlier analyses. A key
strength of recent discussions of fandom, enthusing and audiences such as in
the work of Hills (2002), Sandvoss (2005) and Couldry (2005) is precisely this
attention to social, cultural and individual processes. Other work on class also
has such dimensions (especially Sayer 2005; Skeggs 2004). A key theme in
these literatures is the idea that the self is extended via accumulative and
media processes. I have on a number of levels sought to follow this idea, but
I have taken it in a direction that suggests that this is not just a process of
extension but also one that involves processes of diffusion and interconnec-
tion. In this sense, the self is produced and reproduced not just through pros-
thetic processes that involve taking on and taking off aspects of identity and
selfhood or the addition of elements, but the constitution and reconstitution
of a diffuse and shifting self that is able to perform electively in a wide range of
increasingly audienced situations. The term diffusion connects this to the idea
of the diffused audience.
In the first chapter of this book, I exemplified the changing nature of
media contexts by considering very briefly some of the changes that have
occurred over my lifetime and in this conclusion have explored some aspects
of my more recent ordinary life. This was done in a spirit of illumination but
also to begin the consideration of what I have subsequently termed ordinary
life. While this has some dimensions of the kind of autoethnography favoured
by Hills (2002), which has become a part of ethnographic and anthropological
debate, I mainly seek to try to demonstrate the interconnections between
dimensions of a performative and audienced ordinary (with extraordinary
features) life and wider social and cultural processes.
I have no doubt that readers of this book could perform the same exer-
cise in ways that illuminate the specific aspects of ordinary life, which are part
of wider social and cultural changes. It is very likely that this exercise will
reveal the critical significance of a range of different media. I have no doubt
that this aspect of ordinary life will continue to grow in significance.