Smart Living; Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (15) (Popular Culture and Everyday Life)

Smart Living; Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (15) (Popular Culture and Everyday Life)

by TaniaLewis (Author)

Synopsis

What do the Fab Five from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the Supernanny and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver all have in common? Lifestyle gurus are increasingly intruding on everyday life, directing ordinary people to see themselves as projects that can be made over through embracing an ethos of relentless self-improvement. Smart Living argues that they represent a new form of popular expertise sweeping the world. Written in a lively and accessible manner, the book examines this cult of expertise across a range of media and cultural sites and offers the reader a range of critical tools for understanding the recent emergence of this popular international phenomenon. Smart Living is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between popular media culture and contemporary social life.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 180
Edition: New
Publisher: Peter Lang US
Published: Feb 2008

ISBN 10: 0820486779
ISBN 13: 9780820486772

Media Reviews
`Smart Living' explores the increasing prevalence of `lifestyle' expertise in the mass media and in the process tells us something important about the forms of selfhood we have and aspire to today. Tania Lewis's lucid readings of the popular genres of advice on the management of the self offer serious insights both into the media and into the social underpinnings of malleable selfhood. `Smart Living' is an exemplary analysis of a shift in some of the fundamental categories of social life. (John Frow, University of Melbourne)
Lifestyle formats work within the familiar, contrastive dynamics of modern popular culture. Enhanced `personal development' and the chance to get closer to happiness go along with the further reach of commerce into who we are and what we do. Tania Lewis offers a thoughtful exploration of origins, communicative forms and impact, setting this within a broader appraisal of the future of public identity. (John Corner, University of Liverpool)
`Smart Living' explores the increasing prevalence of `lifestyle' expertise in the mass media and in the process tells us something important about the forms of selfhood we have and aspire to today. Tania Lewis's lucid readings of the popular genres of advice on the management of the self offer serious insights both into the media and into the social underpinnings of malleable selfhood. `Smart Living' is an exemplary analysis of a shift in some of the fundamental categories of social life. (John Frow, University of Melbourne)
Lifestyle formats work within the familiar, contrastive dynamics of modern popular culture. Enhanced `personal development' and the chance to get closer to happiness go along with the further reach of commerce into who we are and what we do. Tania Lewis offers a thoughtful exploration of origins, communicative forms and impact, setting this within a broader appraisal of the future of public identity. (John Corner, University of Liverpool)
Author Bio
The Author: Tania Lewis is Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her work in the fields of media and cultural studies has been published in Media, Culture and Society, Television and New Media, Cultural Studies<>Critical Methodologies, Continuum, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.