Page 94 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

that classes adopt’ (1995: 239). Ways of life and lifestyles are not mutually
exclusive, as they clearly to some extent co-exist in contemporary experience.
However, as people increasingly treat their lifestyle as a project articulating who
they are, then they will invest it with more signi ficance than ascribed structural
expectations associated with gender, age, ethnicity, or religion, for example.
Lifestyles then are ways of categorizing people that could only have
developed in an era of modernity or even late-modernity. The distinctiveness
of modernity is that access to consumption and leisure is more widely spread in
post-industrial societies, both in terms of economic resources and in terms of
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far-flung distributive networks of communication and entertainment. These
networks produce images that make styles and experiences familiar and desir-
able on an unprecedented scale, but also contextualize those images. What I
mean by contextualize is that images are given social location – both historical
and cultural. Thus in everyday use symbolic repertoires are both more diverse,
and users more self-consciously aware of alternatives. Lifestyles are self-
consciously reflexive because actors making cultural choices are necessarily
aware that taste could be otherwise. Every aspect of life becomes a matter of
style, or we could call it fashion – to wear something or to go somewhere is to
be aware of the sort of person who makes that choice and thus the self becomes
more clearly an object of cultural mapping.
We must recognize, though, that fashion often has negative connotations.
In some accounts it indicates the exploitation of the gullible by those who
creatively manipulate images in order to create constantly changing criteria of
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the desirable. There is, we can note in passing, in this usage at least a suspicion
of gender bias in that, as women have traditionally been assumed to be more
concerned with fashion, it seems that they have been displaying their irrational-
ity and vulnerability to exploitation (unless protected by men’s greater com-
mon sense). Although a detailed discussion of the politics of consumerism
would take too much space, I should say that recent emphases on audiences’
active engagement with cultural choices (e.g. Lull 2000) have been a welcome
corrective to the paternalism of many accounts stressing exploitation. I have,
however, already emphasized that cultural symbolism has become a commodity
marketed as image and it is then clearly true that fashion is a key adjunct of the
marketing of consumer culture. It is therefore unsurprising that lifestyles have
been used as frameworks for marketing – whether it is the audience delineation
of market research organizations or the identification of social variables
associated with positive or negative ‘health behaviors’ (e.g. Blaxter 1990).
To write then of lifestyles as new social forms does not mean that they are
being portrayed as untrammelled avenues of emancipation – although it is
important to acknowledge the number of ways in which fashion, and other
associated aspects of lifestyle, have acted as the means of contesting orthodox
moralities and stimulating change (see for example some of the ambiguities in
interpreting a figure such as Madonna in Schwichtenberg 1993). I accept that
as the instability and capriciousness of fashion have come to characterize values

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