Page 14 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Introduction 5

accounts offer a range of suggestive tools, especially I will argue around ideas
of how belonging is constituted in a society like that in the contemporary UK.
On the basis of a range of resources, the book will offer a new way of
understanding the processes of ordinary life. My argument, which develops as
the book progresses, so therefore to summarize, consists of the following
claims:
• Ordinary life is important, is often theorized inadequately in the context
of theories that are of little contemporary use in understanding complex
social changes and is itself changing.
• Ordinary life is media drenched and is increasingly constituted around
mediatized processes, but is not the same as media life.
• Ordinary life needs to be understood in the context of key contexual-
izing processes of social and cultural change: globalizing/hybridizing;
fragmenting; spectacularization and performing; and enthusing.
• Ordinary life should be conceptualized as involving the interaction
between audience and performance processes.
• Through these processes of audiencing and performing, three other
rather general processes are played and lived out: belonging, distinguish-
ing and individualizing.
• That important light has been shed on these processes by research on
social class and culture and that given that class has often been thought
to be an outdated concept, this is worthy of sustained attention.
• In summary, my argument is that while social and cultural life is, as a
consequence of media drenching becoming increasingly audienced and
performed, these processes of audiencing and performing involve people
in forging new ways of belonging that seek, as well as making them feel
like some people (to belong), to also distinguish them from others and to
make them feel that are individuals and not just like everyone else.
At the moment this is only a statement of the argument, which I will
build up over the course of the pages that follow. The book is structured as
follows. The next chapter will review the history and current state of theor-
izing of the idea of everyday life. I will offer a pretty brisk overview of these
theories and, in accord with the approach already articulated, offer some
reasons as to why I think this literature, despite its many insights that are
mobilized at points, does not offer a way forward for the enterprise of this
book. Second, again building on some extant work on the idea of ordinariness,
I develop the argument for the use of this idea to theorize the way in which
life is lived. A third significant component of this chapter is to argue for the
significance of sound and music in everyday life.
Chapter 3 reviews some of the key changes that have affected ordinary
life. This will provide a base for some of the more detailed discussion in sub-
sequent chapters. Four key areas of social and cultural change are considered
and specific instances of the processes as they are affecting life in the UK will be
examined. This is significant as it deepens the argument about why a new
understanding of ordinary life is necessary. First, I will consider the impact of
processes of globalization and hybridization, where forms of mobility are of
increased significance. Second, I will discuss theories that suggest that culture