Page 46 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Understanding and theorizing cultural change 37

transmission. Through these processes, the relatively direct communication
between ‘live’ performers and audience is broken. The texts of the television,
music and film industries (which are subject to processes of technological
convergence) are globally available (see the discussion of globalization in
Chapter 3) and therefore are not discreet performances located in a time, place
or space. Ritual and ceremony decline as texts and media become part of
ordinary life. Thus, while some television viewing is highly ceremonial and
‘meaningful’, for example a group or a family may view a particular pro-
gramme at a certain time, a number of studies have shown much TV viewing
is distracted or done while other things are going on. The mass audience is
private rather than public in the main. Even films are now commonly watched
on video or DVD in the home. Television viewing, once the medium is
established in a society, predominantly takes place in the home. Significant
performative occasions such as watching a sports event in a bar are exceptions
that prove the rule of the domesticity of the medium and the audience. The
attention of the audience can vary from highly engaged, focused viewing to
complete distraction. Finally, the distance in spatial and time dimensions of
the audience from the performance is high.
The diffused audience is characterized as follows:
The essential feature of this audience-experience is that, in contempor-
ary society; everyone becomes an audience all the time. Being a member
of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor even an everyday
event. Rather it is constitutive of everyday life. This is not a claim that
simple audiences or mass audiences no longer exist, quite the contrary.
These experiences are as common as ever, but they take place against the
background of the diffused audience.
(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 68–9)
Several social processes, which have been considered so far in this book,
contextualize the development of the diffused audience. First, people are
devoting increasing amounts of time to media consumption. Second, such
consumption is increasingly woven into the fabric of ordinary life. Third,
western capitalist societies have become more performative in a number of
ways. Thus, many aspects of ordinary life have been subject to increased con-
sumption activities that involve display and the performance of a spectacle.
One example of this is the extension of performance and consumption around
contemporary weddings (Boden 2003), which can now cost significant sums
and which are fuelled by representation of celebrity weddings and magazines
that offer advice on how the wedding is to be performed. ‘Special’ days during
the year are also becoming increasingly consumer oriented in ways that
prompt expenditure, as well as explicit performance and display. In Britain,
this sort of spectacle–performance–consumption cycle, would include the fol-
lowing: Christmas, New Year, St Valentine’s Day, Mothers’ Day, Father’s Day,
Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night. This cycle is punctuated by other regular
events like birthdays and weddings, as discussed by Boden (2003), as well as
occasions such as child-naming ceremonies. While this mode of performance
is specific to contemporary and highly mediated societies, it is based on that
from everyday life in earlier periods.