Lifestyle Media And The Formation Of The Self

Be the best you can be' urge self-help books and makeover TV shows, but what kind of self is imagined as needing a makeover and what kind of self is imagined as the happy result? Drawing on recent sociology and psychology, this book explores the function of slummy mummies, headless zombies and living autopsies to creating an idea of self.

Ranging from travel to wellbeing and fashion to food, Lifestyle Journalism explores a wide variety of subjects within a growing field. This edited collection examines the complex dynamics of the ever-evolving media environment of lifestyle journalism, encompassing aspects of consumerism, entertainment and cosmopolitanism, as well as traditional journalistic practices. Through detailed case studies and research, the book discusses themes of consumer culture, identity, representation, the sharing economy and branding while bringing in important new aspects such as social media and new cultural intermediaries. International and cross-disciplinary, the book is divided into four parts: emerging roles; experience and identity in lifestyle media; new players and lifestyle actors; and lifestyle consumerism and brands. Featuring case studies from a variety of countries including Turkey, the US, Chile and the UK, this is an important resource for journalism students and academics.

We often hear that selves are no longer formed through producing material things at work, but by consuming them in leisure, leading to 'meaningless' modern lives. This important book reveals the cultural shift to be more complex, demonstrating how people in postindustrial societies strive to form meaningful and moral selves through both the consumption and production of material culture in leisure. Focusing on the material culture of food, the book explores these theoretical questions through an ethnography of those individuals for whom food is central to their self: 'foodies'. It examines what foodies do, and why they do it, through an in-depth study of their lived experiences. The book uncovers how food offers a means of shaping the self not as a consumer but as an amateur who engages in both the production and consumption of material culture and adopts a professional approach which reveals the new moralities of productive leisure in self-formation. The chapters examine a variety of practices, from fine dining and shopping to cooking and blogging, and include rare data on how people use media such as cookbooks, food television, and digital food media in their everyday life. This book is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the meaning of food in modern life.

This book analyses representations of sustainable everyday life across advertising, eco-reality television, newspapers, magazines and social media. It foregrounds the discursive and networked basis of sustainability and demonstrates how such media representations connect the home and local community to broader political, social and economic contexts. The book shows how green lifestyle media negotiate issues of sustainability in varying ways, reproducing the logic of existing consumer society while also sometimes providing projections of a more environmentally friendly existence. In this way, the book argues that everyday lifestyles are not an irredeemable problem for environmentalism but an important site of environmental politics.

This book explores the emergence of "lifestyle" in the US, first as a term that has become an organizing principle for the self and for the structure of everyday life, and later as a pervasive form of media that encompasses a variety of domestic and self-improvement genres, from newspaper columns to design blogs. Drawing on the methodologies of cultural studies and feminist media studies, and built upon a series of case studies from newspapers, books, television programs, and blogs, it tracks the emergence of lifestyle’s discursive formation and shows its relevance in contemporary media culture. It is, in the broadest sense, about the role played by the explosion of lifestyle media texts in changing conceptualizations of selfhood and domestic life.

Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a multi-billion pound diet industry. Yet, when we question if our bathroom scales can really tell us about our health, we start to ask just why and how fat holds such fascination. In this book, Jayne Raisborough explores interpretations of fat bodies from Palaeolithic Europe to Poverty Porn TV to argue that fat’s materiality makes it ripe for stigmatising associations. However, especially in a social context that presents health as a matter of choice, fat also emerges as an ideal redemptive substance to be pummelled and starved into submission. This book presents a ‘fat sensibility’ to demonstrate how fat is helping us all become responsibilised healthy-citizens. It asks just what self are we being asked to diet ourselves into?

The first systematic, comprehensive and critical English-language study of radio in China, this book documents a historical understanding of Chinese radio from the early twentieth century to the present. Covering both public matters and private lives, Radio and Social Transformation in China analyses a range of themes from healthcare, migration and education, to intimacy, family and friendship. Through a concentrated and thorough scrutiny of a variety of new genres and radio practices in post-Mao China, it also investigates the interaction between radio and social change, particularly in the era of economic reform. Building on the core theoretical concept of ‘compressed modernity’, each of the radio genres explored is shown to embody China’s efforts to achieve modernity, while simultaneously exemplifying radio’s capacity to manage the challenges that have arisen from the country’s distinctive and perhaps unique process of modernization. Written in an engaging style, this book makes an important contribution to radio history internationally. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of broadcast media, radio and Communication Studies, as well as Chinese culture and society.

Addressing a multitude of questions and issues surrounding how we use the media, Media Effects and Beyond represents the results of an international research programme into the use and effects of television, video and music. Seeing the viewer not simply as passive object but as a very active subject, the contributors engage with every aspect of children's, adolescents' and families' use of the media - its character, causes and consequences. Topics explored include media and social mobility; family commumication, and consumer lifestyles. Confronting the two traditions of lifestyle research and effects research, Media Effects and Beyond offers a much-needed reconceptualization of both. Written at a time when traditional European public service media systems struggle against a tidal wave of commercial electronic media, this book will be important reading for students of contemporary culture and communications, as well as media policy for decision makers.