Page 55 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

46 Cultural change and ordinary life

first, the degree of involvement with music, which he divides into casual and
intensive; and, second, whether the tastes and practices are inclusive or exclu-
sive. Combining these dimensions produces four positions: drifters (inclusive
and casual consumers), surfers (exclusive and casual consumers), exchangers
(inclusive and intensive users) and clubbers (exclusive and intensive users).
The drifters:
had little awareness of their music consumer and producer practices
even though their everyday life contexts regularly featured music within
earshot. Music often played a minor role in these young people’s every-
day lives. Although music would be infrequently purchased or experi-
enced in public contexts where high amounts of financial capital were
necessary, its pervasive presence through casual media such as radio
perhaps explains drifters’ populist tastes and mainstream sensibilities.
(Laughey 2006: 175)
The surfers, despite also being casual in consumption were exclusive in
public practices – ‘if specific types of music texts were immaterial to the
pleasures of surfers, specific practices associated with exclusive music contexts
were of paramount importance’ (p. 177). Exchangers ‘tended to invest more
significance in mediated than co-present practices. Music texts and tech-
nologies would be more important to the everyday lives of exchangers than
exclusive music contexts. Whilst exchangers’ tastes would often be alterna-
tive and specific to particular music genres, their sensibilities leaned towards
mainstream public practices of inclusion’ (p. 177). Finally, ‘clubbers engaged
in intensive media use and exclusive public practices. Being a clubber refers
more to a sense of membership in a specific music taste group than to
the particular context of clubbing. However, the term is also apt because
clubs were mainly perceived as sites for exclusive music consumption and
production’ (p. 178).
This typology is important for the attention to a range of different
aspects of public and private, meaningful or casual interaction with music and
other media. It is significant for the overall thrust of my argument as recogniz-
ing the significance of these different aspects, in the context of family, friends
and individual meaning.
This sort of approach is also well represented in Lembo’s (2000) book
Thinking Through Television, where he convincingly argues that most previous
theories and accounts of audiences and television are deficient. In terms of the
arguments that I have set out in this book and chapter so far, there are two
particularly important aspects to his argument. First, while having much
admiration for the work done in cultural studies on audiences for television,
he argues that it is limited by a continuing focus on issues of the power of
television and the degree of audience resistance to it. In his account, this
means that analysis has become overly focused on dimensions of audience
response to the texts of television in these terms. This means that such analy-
ses neglect what he sees as the more fully social aspects of how television is a
part of what I have termed ordinary life. Therefore, second, a critical important
part of his book is the call for an examination of the sociality of television
viewing. As he says: