Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
These studies usefully contextualise my own findings on how gardening
lifestyle programmes and journalistic features were consumed. My respondents,
regardless of gender or age, consumed lifestyle texts across a range of media -
from television, magazines and radio to the local and national press -
casually
.
Lifestyle media texts certainly failed to command total attention, or cover-to-
cover modes of reading. Keith for example, described his own way of using the
local press for features on new plant varieties as 'browsing'. In fact, the argument
that Hermes mounts, that magazines are read with 'less concentration and …
detachment', could be extended to the way in which my respondents consumed
lifestyle across the media (Hermes 1995, 14). There was a lack of attention to the
detail of gardening lifestyle that tended to pervade the atmosphere of several of my
interviews. The following exchange typically demonstrates what I came to think of
as 'garden lifestyle amnesia':
Lisa T
: Do you watch gardening programmes?
Catherine
: Yes, watched one last night but I don't know what it was.
Lisa T
: Was it
Carol Vorderman's Better Homes?
Catherine
and
Philip
: Yes.
Philip
: I think I fell asleep.
Respondents forgot programme titles, the names of personality-interpreters and
generally had a medium to low lifestyle information absorption level. One makeover
programme became 'that building gardens thingie', Diarmund Gavin was called 'the
Irish chap' or 'the Irish gardener' and another presenter, 'the young woman with curly
hair.' Casual media consumption, for most of my respondents, became intertwined
with everyday inattentiveness: being an audience for such texts was a humdrum
activity and the meanings my respondents took away were half-remembered, partial
or even fuzzy.
There were references to casual consumption of lifestyle texts throughout the
sample. However, class made a difference to the ways in which respondents talked
about their agency in relation to the selection of lifestyle texts: some respondents
made quite careful statements about how they came to be either watching a lifestyle
programme or reading a gardening magazine. For example, in relation to television,
the lower middle-class respondents were concerned to distance themselves from
the act of
consciously selecting
lifestyle gardening texts. I was told by Millie and
Jack, for example, that they would only watch makeover programmes, 'if they are
on', thereby signifying a complete lack of interest in seeking such programmes out.
Rosemary tried to suggest that lifestyle television entirely dominated broadcast
television, thereby suggesting that she and her mother only watched them because
they had no choice - 'we watch them because they are always on' she told me.
Similarly David denied his own agency in turning lifestyle programmes on with
the following comment, 'I do watch them if I happen to just be sitting down … just
toddling.' In these ways, these viewers generated the sense that they watched lifestyle
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