Page 42 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Changing ordinary life 33

of the decline in social capital for trust and civic consciousness. This is all well
and good, but this is then relatively divorced from understandings of culture
and cultural capital as involving a way of life or habitus (although not from
the idea of cultural capital as manifested in institutionalized educational
qualifications). This means that theorists and analysts like Putnam then neg-
lect the way in which ways of life are changing with respect to a range of media
and culture-based experiences. In short, TV becomes a ‘bad thing’ because it
takes up the time that we could/should be devoting to those forms of associ-
ational activity that build trust and social capital. However, as has been
pointed out (Norris 2000), this is a much generalized and indeed uninformed
understanding of how people relate to TV and how it fits into ordinary life. It
has been argued that it matters what people watch on TV. So that watching the
news and documentary programmes might be thought to have a different
relation to a person’s views than watching game shows. However, even this is a
very limited progression beyond the Putnam position, as it does not take
account of the ways in which TV audiencing processes have been researched
for over a half a century. Moreover, it even more clearly does not relate the
complexity of our media and cultural lives to the complexity of our social
ones – precisely a key point of my argument. A danger of Putnam’s argument is
that it nostalgically wants a return to a society that did not have the range of
mass media resources that characterize contemporary advanced western
democracies.
Switching tack somewhat, there is another literature that does consider
in some detail the nature of investments that people make culturally and
socially with the media. This is the now extensive material on media fandom.
As was argued in Audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) and as will be
reviewed and extended later, this literature is relatively divorced from more
sociological approaches to the patterns of social life. This has now begun to
shift appreciably, so for example both the works of Crawford (2004) and
Laughey (2006) (see further Chapter 4) show the interconnections between
culture and media (theorized with contemporary resources) and social life.
This is also the case with the work of Sandvoss (2005), who adopts an
understanding of fandom that crosses a range of experiences:
Whether we find our object of fandom in Britney Spears, Buffy the
Vampire Slayer or the Boston Red Sox, these are all read and negotiated as
(mediated) texts by their fans. The way in which fans relate to such texts
and the performances that follow from this relationship vary between
different fan cultures, and indeed from fan to fan. Yet, they are all forms
of consumption in which we build and maintain an affective relation-
ship with mediated texts and thus share fundamental psychological,
social and cultural premises and consequences.
(Sandvoss 2005: 8–9)
This idea of ‘fandom as a form of sustained, affective consumption’
(Sandvoss 2005: 9) captures significant aspects of contemporary social and
cultural experience. Thus, it can be argued that these understandings of
fandom need to be brought into closer conversation with new forms of
understanding of the networked nature of social life. As I will suggest in