Page 31 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

3 Changing ordinary life

In Chapter 1, the introduction to this book, I exemplified how media are
impacting on ordinary life by discussing the change in the range and amount
of media technologies available in a contemporary home as compared with
one 40 years ago. This should not be taken as suggesting that the primary way
in which change is occurring is technological. While technological develop-
ment is highly significant, I follow those critiques of technological determin-
ism that argue that all such changes need to be seen as social through and
through. In this sense such technological changes are socially contextualized
by a range of other changes. An important part of my argument in this book is
that the ordinary life in the way that I have characterized it in Chapter 2 is
subject to change from a variety of forces and processes. Indeed, my conten-
tion is that the theories and accounts of everyday life that I reviewed in
that chapter are unable to accommodate the significance of these changes.
In this chapter, therefore, I consider four processes that have been identified in
recent social and cultural research as having such overarching significance.
There is a tendency in the literature to focus on one or more of these to the
relative exclusion of the others. These themes will then figure and be
examined in more detail in the chapters that follow. The four processes are:
globalizing/hybridizing, fragmenting, spectacularizing and performing, and
enthusing. In this chapter, I introduce key themes and processes in each of
these areas to set the ground for my subsequent discussion.

Globalizing and hybridizing

As with everyday life, there is a voluminous literature on globalization and I
only desire to be succinct at this point. Following the definition of globaliza-
tion as ‘the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnec-
tions and interdependences that characterize modern social life’ (Tomlinson
1999: 2) and seeing hybridization as the processes by which new interconnec-
tions between social and cultural forms are being produced in such a context,
in broad terms it is possible to examine globalizing and hybridizing pro-
cesses in four areas of practice and struggle: economic, political, social and
cultural.