Abstract
The key purpose of this edited collection is to produce a broad array of observation and analysis dealing with the intersections of popular culture and lived experience in our everyday personal and social worlds. Popular culture is everywhere around us in the social milieux we inhabit from day to day. Examples range from the fashionable clothes we wear, the music we listen to on our iPods, the coffee we buy from a downtown vending machine, to the adverts for commodities and services that surround us in street and shopping mall. We put the materials of popular culture to use all the time, and what we make of them, what we do with them, what applications we assign them to are often of greater interest than the materials themselves. The book brings this out well, delving into the intimate minutiae of everyday life and popular culture in the early 21st century, with most of the contributions taking a broadly defined interactionist perspective to our shared collective lives. The many short essays here look in detail at such mundane experiences as getting dressed, staying in hotels, shopping, exercising, putting on make-up, playing music and seeing live music, sharing selfies, reading, using mobile phones and watching TV. The editors’ useful introduction identifies six main thematic features of popular culture and everyday life: embodiment, ritualisation, performance, creativity, biography and bonding. These run through many of the mundane experiences focused upon and will resonate with readers as they reflect on their own quotidian existence, comparing how this relates to the discussion of these varied lived features of everyday life.