Page 90 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Capitals and the use of time 81

Finally, they offer some comments on the idea of fragmentation. As
Gauntlett and Hill suggest: ‘The idea of the “fragmented audience” has been a
popular way of considering changes in the reception of television, following
from the changing face of broadcasting for some time now. But we found little
evidence of it’ (p. 288). In addition:

It is worth noting from this study not only the particular point that
British audiences refused to fragment much in the first half of the 1990s,
but the more general and important finding that people’s social impulses
will most likely mean that they will not become fragmented, isolated
viewers to the extent that some have predicted.
(Gauntlett and Hill 2005: 288–9)
This is important as going against some of the excessive claims for
fragmentation of more extreme postmodernist writers. However, it does show
both the significance of TV and its patterned consumption (see also Savage
et al. 2005). Moreover, this very important study has shown how television
is related to a number of other important features of social and cultural life.
In addition, it points to how difficult it is to study the subtleties of identity
even through such long-term research. The way of thinking about such issues
involves the development, I argue, of the sort of approach represented by
this book. It also captures the detail of how people use time with particular
attention to TV.
This fairly brief consideration of time use in general and with specific
attention to TV has drawn attention to three related processes of time use that
are of significance for the argument here. First, there is the everyday micro-
time use that can be studied usually on the basis of some kind of diary or
through interviews, that looks at the rhythms of the day, week and year
(rhythms that are reflected and constructed by media schedulers, although
what is broadcast at what time and on what day of the week; as well as through
the significance of fixed sporting events like World Cups and so on). Second,
there are the changes that take place across the life course and the fact that
people pass through different life stages. Third, there is the way in which
these processes come together to produce the long-run trends, which this
section began by considering. These processes need to be more directly com-
bined with other forms of evidence about what is happening to the processes
of ordinary life.

Social capital in Britain

In Chapter 3, I introduced some of the work on social capital, especially that
associated with Putnam (2000). There I also stated that his work had led to
much debate about the theorization of social capital and its effects. As this
debate progressed, Putnam and Goss (2002: 9–10) argued that four impor-
tant distinctions had emerged with respect to social capital: ‘formal versus
informal’, ‘thick versus thin’, ‘inward-looking versus outward-looking’ and
‘bridging versus bonding’. These are useful and in the main fairly straight-
forward distinctions. Formal versus informal captures the distinction between
an organized group and a loose grouping that may have some social rules, but