Page 150 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

LITERACY

kinship, the social organisation of furniture, food, and fashion have all
been considered as examples of underlying systems.

See also: Code, Parole, Syntagm
Further reading: Culler (1976); Saussure (1974)

LIFESTYLE

As a term in cultural and media studies, lifestyle crops up in two
contexts. The first relates to identity. Here, ‘lifestyle’ may be added to
the list of identities covered in affinity politics, as another marker of
difference: thus, ‘class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, lifestyle,
etc.’. This sort of lifestyle may relate to urban subcultures or to fanship,
music, sport and the like. The second relates to the content
industries. Here ‘lifestyle’ refers to a genre of TV programming and
of general interest magazines devoted to non-news journalism about
household matters (home improvement, gardening, pets), bodily
enhancement (fitness, health, beauty) and consumerism (shopping,
travel, fashion). This is the fastest growing sector of journalism,
outperforming news journalism and establishing whole new market
sectors, for instance the ‘lad mags’ which led the boom in lifestyle
magazines aimed at both men and women and were such a feature of
the 1990s. In the US (and on many international cable bundles) there
is a TV channel called Lifestyle, which targets women viewers.
‘Lifestyle’ in both of these senses is a kind of ‘middle-of-the-road’
version of DIY culture.

LITERACY

The social institution of writing; by extension, the social institution of
communication by any means other than speech. Literacy is not and
never has been a personal attribute or ideologically inert ‘skill’ simply
to be ‘acquired’ by individual persons. Nor is it a mere technology,
although it does require a means of production both physical (a tool to
write with and material on which to write) and social (a recognised
notation or alphabet and a way of transmitting the knowledge required
to manipulate it).
As a social institution literacy is subject to similar kinds of forces to
do with its distribution and regulation as are other kinds of institution.
Its early history is usually characterised by strict controls as to who had

135