Page 28 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Concepts and theories of everyday and ordinary life 19

know every step of the daily journey with its predictable monotony,
every station and how long it will take them to cover their daily journey.
They feel oppressed by it. They have long ceased to take any notice
of their surroundings. The use of a personal stereo is the only thing
that makes the time pass bearably for these users. At least whilst they
listen to it they do not have to think about their daily routine or the
office that awaits them. Personal stereos permit users to reclaim or
repossess time.
(Bull 2000: 190)
In addition to therefore showing the ordinary and the repetitive, Bull
also demonstrates how users move out of this routine (as well as the ordinary
dangers and anxieties of the city) into the imagined and personally con-
structed pleasures of alternative realities. Bull uses these insights to argue that
music and sound should be seen as a more important part of everyday life than
has often been the case in the past, where there has been a significant visual
emphasis to the detriment of the other senses. Despite its many insights and
its significance to the sort of argument being deployed here, there are some
deficiencies in this work. While the personal stereo users that Bull studied
are described as commuting, sleeping and working and some of them have
friends to share their stereos with, they often seem to be separated from wider
networks of family and friends and other experiences. In some ways, these
personal stereo users are rather like the separated (massified) individuals of
mass culture and mass society theory. To develop this account further it is
necessary to combine the sort of sophistication deployed by Bull with a similar
degree of attention to the way in which family and friendship networks are
culturally significant.
In addition, Bull downplays ideas of distinction. He does not discuss the
work of Bourdieu and the sort of work produced on consumption by those
influenced by Bourdieu. In one respect this may mean attention to the role of
technological objects in status displays. In the area that Bull explores the func-
tion of the iPod in this respect is interesting, as it is most often seen simply as a
fairly nondescript set of white earphones, even though this may be seen as an
indicator of the status of the wearer as technologically advanced and a music
lover with an extensive library of music as a resource. The possession of the
iPod says something about the owner, but further allows a far greater range
of sources for the materials that can be carried around to facilitate the modes
of narcissism, narrative construction and aestheticization of everyday life
described by Bull with respect to the personal stereo users. Thus while the
routines described by Bull may have stayed much the same as travel to work
has not changed much in recent years – except perhaps to be subject to even
more pressures and greater dullness – the technologically facilitated means to
manage it imaginatively have. Access to such goods and imaginative resources
is, of course, dependent on other things such as money and a computer.
However, in general as Nick Abercrombie and I argued in 1998, the media
resources available in general are and continue to increase in ways that will
change aspects of ordinary life.