- everyday questions about clothing, appearance and leisure
- high-impact decisions about relationships, beliefs and occupations
- earlier societies with a social order based firmly in tradition
- post-traditional societies we have to work out our roles for ourselves
- 'What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity - and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour.'
- connections between the most 'micro' aspects of society - individuals' internal sense of self and identity - and the big 'macro' picture of the state, multinational capitalist corporations, and globalisation
- Social change such as in relationships bought about my decline in religion and rise of rationality - changes in how individuals view life
- Institutions typically thought to want people to have stable monogamous family life
- mix of macro elements like law change and micro elements of how people live lives - change stemming from mesh of both
- media also influencing views of things like relationships
- need for 'good stories' would always support an emphasis on change in relationships
- inevitably receive a message that monogamous heterosexual stability is, at best, a rare 'ideal', which few can expect to achieve
- encouraged to reflect on our relationships in magazines and self-help books (explicitly), and in movies, comedy and drama (implicitly)
- Information and research is then 'reappropriated' by ordinary people, often lending support to non-traditional models of living
- Information and ideas from the media do not merely reflect the social world, then, but contribute to its shape, and are central to modern reflexivity
Read more:
http://www.theory.org.uk/giddens4.htm
Gauntlett, David (2002), Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York
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