Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Questions of Consumption: What
Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden
'Lifestyle' Media
Margaret : We don't watch them for instructions.
Hugo : No!
Margaret : We're critical.
Phoebe : (about Diarmund Gavin, Homefront in the Garden ) I like his ideas very much. I
wouldn't steal them, but some of the … like painting the walls that marrakesh blue, that
was lovely. That was a nice idea but we wouldn't necessarily do it in paint. It might be in
plants instead.
Introduction
This chapter turns to the relationship between my respondents and the garden lifestyle
media texts they were consuming in the late 1990s. In earlier chapters I argued that
lifestyle texts might be conceived as agents which enable subjects to make the
transition from 'ways of life' to 'lifestyle' (Chaney 2001). Central to processes of
'ordinari-ization' adopted by such texts, however, was their address and formal ability
to hook into the ordinary rhythms, practices and sites of everyday life. Such 'ordinari-
ization' strategies included the more popular tone of contemporary public service
broadcasting (Bondebjerg 1996; Ellis 2000); the accessibility and achievability of
the presentation of lifestyle projects; and the increase in more ordinary 'experts' and
lifestyle subjects. This chapter examines the lived consequences for ordinary subjects
of the shifts in the ethos of public service broadcasting, programme changes and
promotional lifestyle culture at the time the data was gathered. It investigates how
those changes concretely interacted with the sites that ordinary gardening viewers
both experienced and imbued with meaning. In these ways, it aims to contribute to
an historical understanding of how such macro changes are experienced at the micro
level by people at the point of media consumption.
This chapter is divided in to three sections. Firstly, I investigate how and
what viewers consumed. In chapter 5, I argued that ordinary people had a larger
representational stake in mediated garden lifestyle texts, however, I argued that
media representations of ordinary people were still located by class and gender. In
this first section, therefore, I ask if the consumption of lifestyle media was also
subject to locations of class and gender. Section two looks at how ordinary viewers
read garden lifestyle texts. Lifestyles are seen as the new social form, replacing
 
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