Page 34 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Changing ordinary life 25

way. As Tomlinson (1999: 29) argues: ‘[W]e need to see “roots and routes” as
always coexistent in culture, and both as subject to transformation in global
modernity.’ This is now a dominant position in the dynamic of globalization
and hybridization, one that maintains that the are ‘glocal’ cultures and that
‘globalization promotes much more physical mobility than ever before, but
the key to its cultural impact is the transformation of localities themselves’
(Tomlinson 1999: 29). This position has been argued most fully and in most
detail with respect to the media by Morley (2000). Thus, it is possible to see the
issue of the form and meaning of modes of local belonging as a critical issue in
contemporary sociology. I will seek to examine this with respect to two
themes. First, there is the role of media in the constitution and reconstitution
of modes of belonging to localities and social networks. Second, and in a
related way, there is the consideration of what is actually meant by belonging.
This means examining the extent to which modes of local belonging relate to
other modes of belonging and ‘rootedness’.

Modernity, fragmentation and personal choice
Discussions of globalization are often tied up with those about modernity.
Sociology has always been concerned about the nature of modernity and from
the 1980s onwards social science and the humanities conducted a contentious
and often confused debate about whether society and culture had become
postmodern. This debate has now almost vanished (Matthewman and Hoey
2006). On one level, this is welcome, as the terms in which it was conducted
were becoming less and less likely to aid further insight. On another level, this
is problematic. This is because a number of the themes that were explored in
the postmodern debate continue to be of significance. Some of these are cap-
tured by terms such as hybridization, as the postmodern debate was concerned
to explore the ways in which forms of culture and texts influenced each other
in complex ways and how new forms that combined previously separate
forms of culture were coming into being. However, another important concern
of discussion was the extent to and ways in which cultures and forms of cul-
ture were fragmenting. An aspect of this discussion was the decline of the
so-called grand, master or metanarratives that no longer governed cultures.
While this theme from Lyotard (1984) was itself subject to some dispute, it
did draw attention to ideas of local, relative and fragmented forms of life.
Moreover, the discussion itself drew significant attention to the ways in which
culture can be seen as changing – often in rapid ways. In some respects the
debate on postmodernism became entwined with that on consumerism.
Another reason to mourn the premature death of the postmodern debate
is that much of the sociological form of it was conducted with little reference
to empirical evidence. While for some this was logical in that some forms of
postmodern reasoning would resist any such straightforward call to notions
of evidence, for a sociological analytical account of the contemporary condi-
tion it was ultimately disabling. It is also paradoxical as since the death of
the debate evidence has come forward that can facilitate some refinement
of the terms of understanding. The postmodern debate therefore foregrounded
some issues that I suggest remain of some significance to the understanding