Media Effects and Beyond

Chapter 12

Late modernity, consumer culture and lifestyles: toward a cognitive-affective theory

Johansson Thomas

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Lifestyle is not a term which has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within a plurality of possible options, and is ‘adopted’ rather than ‘handed down’. Lifestyles are routinised practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity. Each of the small decisions a person makes every day — what to wear, what to eat, how to conduct himself at work, whom to meet with later in the evening — contributes to such ...