Consumer Culture, Media and Lifestyle

What is lifestyle? When and how did the concept develop, and what functions does it serve in consumer culture today? How is it represented and constructed through contemporary media cultures? How does it relate to parallel concepts like taste, style and identity? This subject frames lifestyle as the site where consumer culture and individual identity intersect, where identities are produced through our interactions with the commodities and media we consume. It approaches lifestyle as the relatively recent invention of advertising, marketing, popular media and related institutions and discourses, contextualizing it within the broader rise of modern consumer culture, in order to provide a historical framework for understanding the rise and global spread of lifestyle culture today. The subject engages key theories for understanding consumer culture and media from Marxist accounts of commodity fetishism and alienated labour to social theories of DIY-selves and reflexive individualism. On completion of this subject, students should be able to analyse the complex relations between contemporary consumer culture, lifestyle discourse, popular media and individual identity formation, and to trace the workings of these relations through selected cultural sites that may include advertisements, streaming series, apps and digital platforms, and everyday practices like shopping.

• 1Discuss the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of modern consumer culture.
• 2Explain how modern consumer culture has produced the concept of lifestyle as an amalgam of consumption, taste and individual identity.
• 3Critique the complex relationships between the economic structure of late capitalism and the cultural phenomenon of lifestyle.
• 4Apply major critical approaches to the study of consumer culture and cultural sites in their own work.