Page 65 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

56 Cultural change and ordinary life

some degree become producers. Second, and more significantly for this part of
the argument, technological innovation is enabling the transfer of practices
that once were the province of professionals and had high equipment costs to
ordinary life. Thus, while the history of the development of photography as a
‘vernacular practice’ is well known, this process has reached a new stage when
it is possible to take photographs on a mobile phone and transmit them easily
to friends and family. Likewise, the development of relatively inexpensive
digital cameras and camcorders has facilitated the recording of ordinary life. It
is very common for an event or, say, a school concert to be recorded by the
majority of the audience. These recordings might then be transmitted to
others so that those, for example friends and family, who are living elsewhere,
can view these activities via their computers.
Media are therefore becoming interactive in ways that move film and TV
production closer to the everydayness of TV. These sorts of process are also
being facilitated by the availability of hardware and software for media pro-
duction in schools and colleges. While these processes are uneven, the growth
of subjects such as media studies and forms of digital production can lead to
modes of amateur production that can be seen as essentially similar to that
of music. This is reinforced by the way in which the boundaries between
these forms are being blurred; with, for example, mobile phones and mp3
players facilitating everyday production and consumption around a range of
increasingly integrated media.
There is a danger of being overenthusiastic about these shifts, of being
technologically determinist and of overestimating the extent of their occur-
rence. However, despite this I argue that these shifts undermine the case for
confining the term scene to music-based ideas of place.

Place
I suggest that the extension of the idea of scene to cover modes of more wide-
spread interaction has been done on the basis of misconceived response to
the processes of globalization. Indeed, even the earlier theorizations of the
concept sought to address this issue. Thus, Straw (2003) characterizes his
earlier (1991) conceptualization in the following way:
Straw’s rethinking of the notion of ‘scene’ was devised to intervene
against a perceived over-valorization of the sorts of musical localism
common within alternative rock scenes in North America in the late
1980s. While the small-scale, artisanal character of musical activity in a
multitude of local scenes made this activity seem more firmly grounded
than many others in local identities, Straw argues that the culture of
alternative rock was a highly cosmopolitan one. From one locale to
another, a relatively similar range of styles and practices had been repli-
cated, suggesting that an analysis of this activity might be full of lessons
about musical cosmopolitanism and globalization as it was about the
persistence or resurgence of specifically local identities and values.
(Straw 2003: 350)
In a similar way, Cohen argues that ‘efforts have been made to reconceptualize