Page 93 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

DAVID C. CHANEY

Inevitably in ascribing more technical meanings to words used in everyday life
one is to some extent arbitrarily juggling with or constraining the looseness of
ordinary usage. I want to argue, though, that, first, one can make a meaningful
distinction between ways of life and lifestyles; second, it is only in eras of mass
entertainment and communication that lifestyles have developed; and, third,
lifestyles exhibit some of the characteristics of social forms appropriate to the
changing meanings of culture I have described.
I think it is typical to think of lifestyles as a form of social status. They are
ways in which members of a group can display their privileges, or, more
actively, use their mastery of symbolic capital to control access to desirable
status. Following Max Weber’s early formulation, it is conventional to think of
lifestyles as a form of status that derives from a mastery of expenditure on con-
sumption or leisure time, rather than a structure of stratification based on the
ownership and/or organization of means of production. Such displays of con-
spicuous consumption have in the past been associated with wealth, either
inherited or newly acquired. The novelty of mass leisure and consumerism
developed in the twentieth century is that the play of status associated with
consumption practices is no longer confined to the very rich, but becomes a
more widespread focus of social interest.
The development of consumerism in mass society makes it necessary to
make a distinction between way of life and lifestyle. I do not want to play with
words here but the distinction is useful because it underlies a distinctive type of
sociality characteristic of lifestyles. A way of life is typically associated with a
more or less stable community. It is therefore displayed in features such as
shared norms, rituals, patterns of social order, and probably a distinctive dialect
or speech community. A way of life is based in the production and reproduc-
tion of stable institutions, and ways of life are therefore grounded in distinctive
and specifiable localities. Although in the looseness of ordinary speech we
might refer to this way of life as a ‘style of life’ I think this is misleading. Thus,
for example, while Kephart’s study (1982) of cultural minorities in the United
States uses lifestyles as a central concept, the religious communities he describes
are clearly instances of distinctive ways or forms of life.
In contrast, lifestyles are based in consumer choices and leisure patterns. This
is significant because, when lifestyles structure social identification, economic
practices have to be grasped as representations. As I said above, in the virtual
cultural supermarket, choice is not random but coalesces into patterns or styles.
In sharing attitudes, values, and tastes which will be characteristic of particular
groups, the sensibilities expressed in taste are increasingly imbued with moral
and aesthetic seriousness. It becomes accepted that one’s tastes are respons-
ibilities by which the person will be judged by others. They are therefore
integral to a sense of identity but not as a stable or uni-dimensional character-
ization. As Bensman and Vidich say in relation to the lifestyles of the new
middle classes: ‘The existence of artificial life-styles, self-consciously created as
if they were works of art, suggests a lack of inevitability in the living patterns

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