Lifestyle Media in American Culture by Maureen E. Ryan

Author:Maureen E. Ryan [Ryan, Maureen E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781315464954
Google: pClKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-01T03:34:06+00:00

From Instruction to Inspiration

The second element in the turn to lifestyle on television is the waning of instructional logic. On British how-to programs of the 1970s, Brunsdon and colleagues find a “didactic insistence on objects and operations, and camera, editing and commentary are governed by the logic of exposition: ‘this is how it is’, ‘this is what it looks like’, ‘this is what you do’”.75 These programs attempted to construct a sense of the events unfolding in real time, with few modifications in post-production. On HGTV and the Food Network, lifestyle shows retained some of the didactic focus of the instructional programming from which they emerged, but it was no longer the primary logic, serving more as a pretext for other logics to flourish, such as ordinariness or, as Brunsdon et al. suggest, transformation.76 Instead, editing and framing construct a spectacle through the increased use of close-ups (to capture reactions after a makeover is revealed), the collapse of labor time through elliptical editing, and the drama of the “after” moment.77 Bonner notes that with this attenuated instructional logic, instruction often migrated onto “extra-televisual sites,” such as the program’s related website, blog, or book.78 Indeed, this gradual relegation of instruction to ancillary sites (such as the DIY Network and the Cooking Channel, running old HGTV and Food Network programs) indicates that lifestyle media are institutionally useful as a way to launch new media ventures. Even further, this process ensures that lifestyle culture spreads as more venues for lifestyle media develop.

While Brunsdon’s and Bonner’s identification of these formal changes is quite right, I want to highlight another dimension of the waning of how-to logic: its collapse into a much broader, more tenuous, and more affective category of inspiration. Where instruction is concerned with the proper measurements and tools, and generally providing all the information one might need to replicate the project modeled on screen, inspiration is an affect of possibility, offering a set of spatialized fantasies laid out for the viewer, and the pleasure of merely considering undertaking the advice on offer. Inspiration opens up a realm of daydreaming and reflection on the viewer’s everyday life that is made possible more by its ordinary aesthetic than by concrete tools for its achievement. Where an instructional program might make one specific home improvement project achievable through step-by-step information, lifestyle television fosters generalized dissatisfaction with one’s home life, usually experienced as “inspiration,” which we might define as feelings of possibility and transcendence afforded by a combination of creativity and consumer plenitude. This more diffuse and overarching feeling of inspiration arguably sustains consumer desire over a longer term than does instruction.

Again, a comparison with how-to programming illustrates this shift. This Old House was a home renovation show that began airing on WGBH Boston in 1979. Each season tracked the restoration of a New England home and provided instruction for DIY-ers in tackling the whole remodeling process, from plumbing and heating to flooring and cabinetry. True to the pedagogical intent of PBS, the instructional component of This Old House was extensive.

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