Questions of Consumption: What Ordinary Gardeners Do With Garden ‘Lifestyle’ Media - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 167

Reading Garden Lifestyle Texts
In chapter 5 I drew on social theory as a means of understanding the impact of rapid
social change on the media and culture industries. In this section I examine how
ordinary people consumed the 1990s shifts in media policy and programming in the
context of wider cultural change.
According to recent social theory, contemporary culture is still in the process
of social and cultural transition: mass societies are moving from 'ways of life' to
'lifestyle'. Traditional cultural forms offer a high degree of social stability to their
subjects; whereas those in the process of building lifestyles out of the freeplay of
cultural symbolism lack firm social grounding and are relatively insecure. In this way,
the lifestyle project as a new social form becomes a primary identity marker. People,
according to critics like Chaney (2001), make serious investments in using cultural
forms as a means to actively express their identity and differentiate themselves from
others. For Chaney, lifestyles, 'offer a set of expectations which act as a form of
ordered control' in the face of changes wrought by modernity (Chaney 1996, 11).
Seen in this way lifestyles can act as resources of stability or coping mechanisms
which help people to manage their own relationship to social change.
Chaney is careful to point out, however, that the move from 'ways of life' to
'lifestyle' is currently in transition ; in this way his work offers an interpretation
of, 'social change as it is happening - a form of contemporary history' (Chaney
2001, 86) . It is not simply the case that ways of life have been wholly replaced by
lifestyles, as he argues: 'Ways of life and lifestyles are not mutually exclusive, as
they clearly to some extent co-exist in contemporary experience' (Chaney 2001,
83). In what follows, I asked whether ways of life are currently in the process of
being replaced by lifestyle in the small semi-industrial town of this study, in the
manner Chaney describes. As a means to do this I asked: what do ordinary people
think about the makeover, the personality-interpreter and the social uses of garden
lifestyle practices?
Approaches to the makeover
As Chaney (2001) argues, a central feature of the changes wrought by modernity is
the breakdown of old established communities. Lifestyle media programmes of the
late 1990s recognised the inherent instability of contemporary social life - indeed
lifestyle producers understood that the wane of civil society was producing stand-
alone subjects capable of inventing their own present and future identities. Yet my
empirical data revealed that there were enclaves in British culture, beyond the urban
anonymity of the city or the suburb, where subjects still retained strong community
ties and roots. All my respondents had been born, brought up and had lived to middle-
or old-age in the small town where they were interviewed. Even in cases where
respondents had studied for qualifications at Universities located outside the region,
they had returned 'home'. As a consequence, the majority of my interviewees lacked
the need to utilise lifestyle as a coping mechanism and tended to reject the idea of
gardening as a consumer activity. Indeed, several of them interpreted lifestyle garden