Page 50 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Understanding and theorizing cultural change 41

communication adds further levels of mediation and distance between the
audience and performer. However, this is not a move from the unmediated to
the mediated, but rather needs to be understood as adding additional levels of
mediation between the audience and performer’ (Crawford 2004: 25). While
this point is germane and it can be accepted without destabilizing the overall
model, there is an important point to be made here. Crawford’s argument
reinforces that about the role of mass media of communication in leading
to new types of audience experience. Thus, the points about the increased
significance of media in varied audience experiences stand, showing the
differences of this argument from those that use transhistorical ideas of
theatricality and performance.
The development of the diffused audience of ordinary life is specifically
a result of two interconnected social processes. First, there is the increasing
spectacularization of the social world. Second, there is the way that individuals
are constituted as narcissistic. The diffused audience is different from simple
or mass audiences. Thus, significantly, the social (and indeed sometimes phys-
ical distance) between performers and audience is increasingly eroded. Con-
sequently, communication between performer (or producer) and the audience
is ‘fused’ and the role of mediating institutions becomes much less important.
Social distance tends to be eroded. Such diffused audiences are both local and
global as the performances of ordinary life are enacted in ordinary settings
and use a range of resources to fuel the imagination. Hence, as introduced in
Chapter 3, global processes and resources can be lived out in local and specific
environments. The extent of ceremony in diffused audience processes tends to
be relatively low. This is because they are enacted in the context of the flow of
ordinary life.
However, certain aspects of that everyday life become highly ceremonial
and invested with great meaning to become ‘extraordinary’. Thus, for example,
there is the rapid development in Britain in recent years of roadside shrines at
accident points and a tendency to promote certain key birthdays by banners
on the outside of houses. Attention is also subject to a degree of variability, as
aspects of ordinary life and audience members switch from intense involve-
ment to relative indifference, or what Goffman (1963) theorized as ‘civil
1
inattention’. Performance in the diffused audience is both public and private
and the boundaries between historically separated spheres of social life have
been blurred, as in the processes theorized by Lash (1990) as de-differentiation.
Some writers have criticized the idea of power that this entails. Key works
in this respect are by Crawford (2004) and Couldry (2005). Crawford argues
that this sort of ‘consideration of power relations is largely restricted to a crit-
ique of its centrality to the incorporation/resistance paradigm. However,
beyond a few passing remarks to the increasing fragmentation of social power,
this is subsequently ignored in their theorization’ (2004: 26). Couldry makes a
similar point in developing an argument concerning the way in which this
argument tends to deflate the power of media institutions, which is real and
apparent in a number of ways. Crawford uses the work of Mathiesen (see
Chapter 3) and others to consider the place of power and Couldry seeks to
show how media institutions are culturally significant in Durkheimian ways. It
should, therefore, be apparent that there are some significant issues here,