“Lifestyle Instruction” as an Internet Genre in Consumer Culture: A Communicative-Pragmatic Perspective

The aim of the article is to explore the linguistic features of the so-called lifestyle instruction (LI) vis-a-vis the sociocultural practice it is embedded in. To this end, a text from a popular men's online magazine was analyzed in terms of its lexicogrammatical properties. The text is an instance of fashion/style advice ubiquitous in lifestyle media, and discusses several rules that a man in his thirties is highly recommended to follow. The analysis draws on a theoretical framework, primarily associated with Fairclough's version of Discourse Analysis, where genre and discourse are seen as two complementary categories informing two sets of textual meanings - actional and representational respectively. It is contended that one distinctive variation of the LI are texts that draw, as it were, on the instructive generic “form” and consumerist discourse “content”. Methodologically, the study relies on the analysis of the text's schematic structure, its patterns of transitivity, as well as the analysis of presuppositions, and attitudinal and stance-taking locutions. Results of the analysis show that, as regards actional meanings, the most salient features of the text in question and similar texts found in lifestyle media are their well-defined generic structure and sentence speech function. The text starts with an introduction, which is then followed by several numbered paragraphs. Each paragraph instantiates an almost identical pattern of semantic relations and comprises a descriptive, motivational, and instructive phase. The most salient speech function used in the text is that of demand, which is realized either (congruently) by the imperative or (incongruently) by the declarative mood. Both these features and the tentative communicative purposes of the LI can be traced back to more traditional types of instructions. In terms of representational meanings, this and similar texts arguably draw on consumerist discourse. This is primarily manifested in ways the “appropriate” identity of a man in his thirties is constructed vis-a-vis consumer goods. Lexicogrammatically, the first participant of most processes is the addressee. This makes the addressee the main social subject of the practices referenced by the text, with consumer products being positioned as indispensable tools for the realization of these practices and enactment of the identity. Important resources in such positioning are attitudinal locutions, which are primarily used to evaluate consumer goods as “befitting” the referenced identity. The results contribute to the exploration of contemporary (Internet) genres in terms of linguistic features, the study of contextual embeddedness of genres, and the role of discourse in social practices at large. Specifically, the actional textual features can be seen as primarily reflecting the professional practice of lifestyle journalism with its distinctive set of communicative goals, while the representational features may be seen as manifestations of consumer culture and the role it plays in shaping people's identities in today's world.

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