Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Lisa T
: What features interest you most?
Millie
: I like to see the country ones, the bigger ones, where they go 'round and they're all
… and they're saying well you could grow this, but we've tried now and you know.
Jack
: And they give you various plants that you grow in a certain situation, you know, like
shade, or they like dry … this will grow in acid soil and this will grow in a clay soil …
These responses give weight to Moseley's (2001) argument: that the 'citizen-
consumer' address of lifestyle was designed, at the micro level, to help people make
a small personal difference and thereby contribute to the national good.
Others recognised that the role of these programmes was to address audiences
as consumers and some respondents were grateful to the media for showcasing new
products and for proffering product advice. Anne and Phoebe, for example, used
the media to find out about products for pest control and mulching. But perhaps
even more significantly, some of them recognised the part presenters played as
adjudicators whose role is to
interpret
new ideas for the would-be gardener. As Kate
describes:
Kate
: They show you what you can do. They show you what is available and, you know,
whereas you just have these set ideas and they come up with different variations of it. Like
flagging, you know, we don't just want square flags everywhere, we want it nice.
Preparation, plans and ideas: gardening and modern imaginative hedonism
What is perhaps most interesting about Kate's response above, was that her remarks
testified to a willingness to
apply
media interpreters' ideas to her own garden. While
most of my respondents were too 'rooted' to traditional garden ideas as a way of
life to be hooked in to what the lifestyle media had to offer, I found that not all of
them were immune to lifestyle ideas. For some, lifestyle captured the gardening
imagination; the new ideas of lifestyle tapped into their dreams and aspirations.
For Kate and Geoff, for example, the lifestyle media had captured their fantasies of
making a Mediterranean garden. Notice the imaginative possibilities sparked by the
lifestyle media in the following exchange:
Geoff
: I was going to create our own bit of the Mediterranean, aren't we?
Kate
: Yeah. Terracotta, definitely, I love the terracotta. We love Greece. You see things
out there and these television things show you …blue … to tell the truth and the brilliant
colours. It's just lovely.
And Anne and Phoebe showed enthused engagement with lifestyle images,
particularly in relation to the ways in which personality-interpreters used design
in the garden. As fine art and textile graduates, they were able to use their cultural
capital as a means to both understand and imaginatively appropriate the post-modern
eclecticism of how design is used in the makeover genre:
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