Page 99 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

8 Distinguishing and connecting 2:
the omnivore thesis

Earlier in this book, I suggested that a key process to be examined in the
consideration of cultural change is fragmentation. My suggestion was that this
idea had, in many respects, in an earlier stage of debate on cultural change,
been wrapped up in the idea of postmodernism. While I certainly do not advo-
cate a return to this idea, there is a danger that the ideas that it sought to
examine and social and cultural processes considered under its head gain
less attention that they should, given its demise (Matthewman and Hoey
2006). I have therefore examined some of the claims around hypermodernity
in this ‘conceptual space’ and have tried to follow through on some of the
processes that I think are important in this space in the earlier parts of this
book.
As I also argued earlier, one of the big problems with the debate on post-
modernism, especially in sociology and in the more social and cultural forms
of cultural and media studies, was that it was based on rather little substantive
empirical evidence. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. On one level, the
theory was meant to be a prompt to research and it might not have been
expected that there would be detailed empirical work to back it up. It might
have been expected that such research would follow along subsequently. This
after all is the nature of ‘normal science’. However, more importantly, the
philosophical and theoretical stance adopted by many advocates of the post-
modernist approach would have argued against many forms of more con-
ventional empirical research as resting on outdated assumptions about the
nature of the world and how it could be studied.
This stance meant that much of the writing on postmodernism was
rather speculative and based on characterization of cultural and social changes
(some of which was intensely thought-provoking) rather than detailed
research into them. In my view this was not necessarily problematic provided
that the theory was looked at in ways that recognized that such direct empiri-
cal research was not what it was seeking to achieve. However, it is possible
to argue that the lack of detailed evidence for some of the key claims of the
theory was problematic in the context of the generality of the claims made.
Thus, if one of the important claims of the postmodern thesis was that new
forms of culture were emerging that were often made up of fragments of old