Lifestyle Gurus. Chris Rojek

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of attention capital because the rewards assigned to them are valued as public confirmation that they possess talents and people skills that are in short supply, and therefore highly valued. Since ‘people skills’ are indispensable for nearly every walk of life, from successful family relationships to achievement in the labour market, celebrities are readily absorbed as role models for upgrading and polishing lifestyle. Like celebrities, lifestyle gurus exploit and develop techniques and conventions of ‘informal life coaching’ (Rojek 2012, 2016). That is, a sphere of dedicated knowledge combing the spectrum of intimate relations, and expressing insights regarding behaviour, self-presentation and social impact. Revealingly, sharing experience, and offering accessible practical solutions to life problems and life opportunities, is often presented with conspiratorial overtones. When Oprah Winfrey advises her audience about how to deal with weight issues, we forget that in 2015 she bought a ten per cent stake in ‘Weight Watchers’ and joined its board of directors or that her net worth in 2018 was estimated to be $3 billion (Wiener-Bronner 2018). Instead, she communicates with the audience as if she were outside of the system and living on equal terms with them, traversing the ostensibly contradictory values of religious piety and consumer capitalism (Lofton 2011). For the most part, social and economic distance is a requirement for the attention capital of celebrity status. However, when celebrities present themselves as lifestyle advisers they take care to step off their pedestal and espouse the philosophy of being accessible and on a level playing field, not only with ordinary people, but in the case of celebrities who advocate environmental responsibility, with the Earth itself.

      Celebrities who engage in expanding lifestyle consciousness generally do so on the presumption that they are, in the end, just ‘one of us’. The marginalisation or absence of recognisable party political affiliations is a crucial part in this process. In privileging ‘humanity’ over ‘race’ and ‘party politics’, celebrity lifestyle campaigners boost their apparent integrity and, in doing so, have an easier job of bringing people ‘into confidence’. Additionally, while claiming to have real and relevant knowledge about the human and environmental issues that they address, they are at pains to avoid being labelled as ‘experts’. In cultivating informality, the apparatus of celebrity life coaching is defined as offering an alternative route to the ‘us and them’ polarity that is often thought to mar transactions with professionals and experts. Lifestyle gurus also make a virtue of being non-judgemental. They appear to offer a world that is beyond ‘us and them’. Informal coaching fetishises the value of ‘native’ knowledge drawn from lay experience rather than training or professional expertise (Keen 2008). The race to win in life is the final arbiter of trust and useful knowledge. Lifestyle gurus appeal directly to ‘common sense’ and ‘plain speaking’ and contrast this with the ‘abstraction’, ‘aloofness’ and ‘insensitivity’ of the professional canon.

Digitally ‘Sitting Next to Nellie’

We can perhaps illustrate the point with an example from work relations. Lifestyle gurus frequently offer a variation of what is known in human relations management as the ‘sitting next to Nellie’ phenomenon. The notion developed from the nineteenth-century factory system. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it refers to on-the-job training by unqualified instructors (fellow workmen and women) who have been doing the job for years. Instruction is unplanned and unsystematic. While trainees may learn the nuts and bolts of the job, they may also acquire the good and bad work habits of the instructor. All of this can be extended to apply to lifestyle gurus. For them, lifestyle issues, rather than work practice, are the crux of online transaction. Lifestyle gurus offer the chance to copy and learn from receptive strangers who position and advance themselves as significant others. The passport of their attention capital is the claim either to have directly experienced identical lifestyle challenges that perplex the audience, or to have devised resources to overcome them. They appear not just as knowledgeable practitioners, but as successful role models in overcoming life’s hazards and hurdles. Following the rise of reflexive modernisation, a series of ordinary people with ‘know-how’ today claim the authority to advise people on how to live. The example of ‘sitting next to Nellie’, also helps to consolidate another important point about the character of lifestyle guru dynamics. The apparatus of self-improvement is often presented as the basis for play, self-discovery and self-revelation. Whatever truth rests in these perceptions must not be permitted to obscure the equivalent characteristic that lifestyle gurus provide people with an additional form of work. Acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are not achieved at the drop of a hat. They require planning and labour. It might be said that the original lifestyle advisers and guides such as Smiles, Beecher and Beeton in the nineteenth century also understood this. Smiles’ Self-help, Beecher’s Treatise and Beeton’s Household Management are paeans to hard, muscular, organised work and the moral superiority of Christian values. They led readers to believe that being faithful to the enunciated principles of self-help will result in full graduation from ‘the school of life’ – entry to heaven. This implies that, once learning is complete, successful life management will simply consist in the robust application of the same learned principles that are fit to match any occasion until the end of one’s days. Today’s lifestyle gurus offer not so finite a scheme in their compass of advice. They make the same pledge that successful inculcation of the lifestyle values and strategies that they enunciate will produce personal fulfilment. However, when one explores the various multitude of online sites, one finds that a common part of their message is that we live in a rapidly changing world. Successful lifestyle planning and application is not just adaptive, it is presented as eternally evolving. The type of labour that today’s lifestyle gurus offer, therefore, is not a once-and-for-all undertaking. On the contrary, in the race to achieve acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation, the discipline that lifestyle gurus preach is cultivating attention capital by continuous labour. If you want to make the most of yourself in life, which changes in rapid and often unpredicted ways, you must make a lifelong commitment to work without end (Crary 2014).

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEBLAEsAAD/7RmEUGhvdG9zaG9wIDMuMAA4QklNBCUAAAAAABAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAOEJJTQPtAAAAAAAQASwAAAABAAIBLAAAAAEAAjhCSU0EJgAAAAAADgAAAAAAAAAA AAA/gAAAOEJJTQQNAAAAAAAEAAAAHjhCSU0EGQAAAAAABAAAAB44QklNA/MAAAAAAAkAAAAAAAAA AAEAOEJJTScQAAAAAAAKAAEAAAAAAAAAAjhCSU0D9QAAAAAASAAvZmYAAQBsZmYABgAAAAAAAQAv ZmYAAQChmZoABgAAAAAAAQAyAAAAAQBaAAAABgAAAAAAAQA1AAAAAQAtAAAABgAAAAAAAThCSU0D +AAAAAAAcAAA/////////////////////////////wPoAAAAAP////////////////////////// //8D6AAAAAD/////////////////////////////A+gAAAAA//////////////////////////// /wPoAAA4QklNBAgAAAAAABAAAAABAAACQAAAAkAAAAAAOEJJTQQeAAAAAAAEAAAAADhCSU0EGgAA AAADTwAAAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAADrUAAAnEAAAADQA5ADcAOAAxADUAMAA5ADUAMwAwADEAOAAyAAAA AQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAnEAAAOtQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAABAAAAAAAAbnVsbAAAAAIAAAAGYm91bmRzT2JqYwAAAAEAAAAA AABSY3QxAAAABAAAAABUb3AgbG9uZwAAAAAAAAAATGVmdGxvbmcAAAAAAAAAAEJ0b21sb25nAAAO tQAAAABSZ2h0bG9uZwAACcQAAAAGc2xpY2VzVmxMcwAAAAFPYmpjAAAAAQAAAAAABXNsaWNlAAAA EgAAAAdzbGljZUlEbG9uZwAAAAAAAAAHZ3JvdXBJRGxvbmcAAAAAAAAABm9yaWdpbmVudW0AAAAM RVNsaWNlT3JpZ2luAAAADWF1dG9HZW5lcmF0ZWQAAAAAVHlwZWVudW0AAAAKRVNsaWNlVHlwZQAA AABJbWcgAAAABmJvdW5kc09iamMAAAABAAAAAAAAUmN0

СКАЧАТЬ