Lifestyle Gurus

Constructing Authority and Influence Online

Stephanie A. Baker, Chris Rojek

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509530205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The rise of blogs and social media provide a public platform for people to share information online. This trend has facilitated an industry of self-appointed 'lifestyle gurus' who have become instrumental in the management of intimacy and social relations. Advice on health, wealth creation, relationships and well-being is rising to challenge the authority of experts and professionals. Pitched as 'authentic', 'accessible' and 'outside of the system', this information has produced an unprecedented sense of empowerment and sharing. However, new problems have arisen in its wake. In Lifestyle Gurus, Baker and Rojek explore how authority and influence are achieved online. They trace the rise of lifestyle influencers in the digital age, relating this development to the erosion of trust in the expert-professional power bloc. The moral contradictions of lifestyle websites are richly explored, demonstrating how these technologies encourage a preoccupation with the very commercial and corporate hierarchies they seek to challenge. A timely account of how lifestyle issues are being packaged and transacted in a wired-up world, this book is important reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology and related disciplines.

1
What is a Lifestyle Guru?

How to be among, and what to expect from, and rely upon, Others? These questions occur to every child, and are repeated, over and over again, in countless different settings, by every adult, for a lifetime. In part, the rise of today’s lifestyle gurus may be conceived as a response to these imperatives in the digital age. In this book, we use the term ‘lifestyle guru’ to refer to unlicensed native agents of awareness, positioned in conventional and social media, to offer emotional support, an identity matrix and pedagogy for self-discovery and well-being. By the term ‘unlicensed native’ we aim to highlight that lifestyle gurus are ordinary members of society, who possess limited, or no certified qualifications, and hence, no professional standing to claim expertise in emotional management, health, constitutional law and licensing matters. Lifestyle gurus employ a mixture of selective scientific knowledge, folk tradition and personal experience to offer alternative advice and guidance on medical, psychological and social problems afflicting others. The stance that they adopt is often dismissive of professional, elite knowledge and practice on the grounds that it under-values lay traditions and ordinary experience. While lifestyle gurus typically present themselves as anti-establishment, it would be an overstatement to propose that they are part of an anti-scientific movement. A sounder way of looking at things would be to describe them as generally adopting a selective, instrumental approach to science. Given that much scientific knowledge about lifestyle issues is conflicted, and often turns out on inspection to be tainted, lifestyle gurus cherry pick information to advance the profile and appeal of their own views. The media often collude in making these views newsworthy in an attempt to capture public attention. Lifestyle gurus embrace a broad range of editorial newsroom concerns from health to beauty, fitness, fashion, food, wealth, relationships and travel. They provide practical advice that people can apply in order to function more optimally and effectively under the guise of well-being. Against the implied remoteness of scientific and professional authority, with its lofty jargon that bespeaks insinuated superiority, and the uncomfortable rituals of privilege that distinguish it from habitual, mundane experience, lifestyle gurus propagate knowledge and applications that are a mixture of science, ordinary life experience, plain speaking and marginalised, discarded, or forgotten, ways and means of coping and wellness.

Lifestyle gurus typically portray themselves as offering practical, no-nonsense advice on life issues. Using psychological concepts, they propagate a cult of perfectionism that mostly celebrates and affirms middle-class values. Although there are manifold inflections of this cult, at its core are four life goals:

1. Acceptance
   The attainment of recognition and access in social groups and society at large.
2. Approval
   The achievement of positive reactions from individuals, groups and society that reinforce a sense of self worth.
3. Social impact
   The acknowledgement by individuals, groups and society of bearing markers of elevated status associated with achievement, significance and attention value.
4. Self-validation
   The affirmation by individuals and groups of valued personal characteristics of the self that contribute to a sense of positive self-worth.

The cult of perfection is part of the wider culture of achievement and high-status differentiation. It treats the goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation as universally desirable. This is manifest in the exceptionally high number of lifestyle platforms dedicated to techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation, covering the topics of beauty, fitness, fashion, relationships, wellness, wealth and business success. It might be thought that questions of improving lifestyle immediately raise related social and economic questions of inclusion, equality, justice and social engineering. Be that as it may, the vast majority of lifestyle guru sites pass over these questions in seraphic silence. Instead, their typical approach is determinedly person-centred. They address an audience for whom the complexities of life have proved challenging with practical, plain speaking, oracular, non-hierarchical remedies. Gaining practical, positive self-knowledge is the bugle call rallying audiences to lifestyle communicators. Although most lifestyle gurus regularly participate in conferences, symposia and teach-ins, digital communication is the overwhelming and decisive point of exchange.

Despite the strong ethos of non-hierarchy, and the deliberate emphasis upon empathy (co-partnership), accessibility (friendship) and complicity (against ‘the system’) between Communicators (gurus) and Communicants (audiences), the latent power dynamics typically privilege the former over the latter. The paradox of these lifestyle sites is that they generally claim to solve various challenges of complexity in life with simplicity. This is communicated to followers in three main ways:

1. Lifestyle gurus present themselves as having faced, and vanquished, the same or analogous life traumas that their audience encounters. Among the most common traumas are serious physical illness, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, career disappointment, relationship troubles and chronic self-dislike. Emotional disturbance may derive from continuing concrete health issues and their consequences, or more general anxieties about not possessing desired levels of acceptance, attraction and approval, or just not ‘fitting in’ with others. The persuasive power of lifestyle gurus is directly related to their apparent ordinariness and receptivity. The first rule of effective on-site contact is to create a culture of exchange in which audiences trust that communicators genuinely understand, and feel, their pain. A compelling narrative of self-transformation, articulated by those who have already successfully made the journey, is key.
2. They advance a step-by-step programme to enable people to improve themselves and, in doing so, to extract themselves from the negative thinking that prevents them from optimal conduct and reaching their full potential. This programme is typically supported by products and services of commercial benefit to the lifestyle guru in question. From a psychological standpoint, positive thinking, celebrating inner strength and the need to love oneself are the most common remedies.
3. Programmes of intervention may draw on selected strands of scientific knowledge to appear credible and true. However, although lifestyle gurus commonly appeal to scientific knowledge, they are generally defined in antithesis to professional expertise and elite diagnosis and treatment. While lacking any objectively adequate certification of probity, and with surprisingly low responsibilities to subject themselves to independent regulatory discipline, the lifestyle solutions and motivational programmes advanced by lifestyle gurus carry the enamel ring of common-sense. Virtue signalling is the means to achieve the end of life satisfaction. The power of positive thinking, self-knowledge and level-headed acceptance of one’s limits along with consciousness of one’s potential, prevail over all other proposed solutions to lifestyle dilemmas and problems. Although much online advice wears its ‘alternative’ credentials with pride, solutions to life’s problems are generally exclusively focused on the individual. Testimonials to the value of collective mobilisation, organisation and protest are thin on the ground. Complicity against the domination and power of professionals is a crucial resource in social bonding and trust building. Lifestyle gurus offer lifestyle solutions that are crucially, outside of the system. Remedies are usually presented in a ludic way, involving escapism and fun. In the country of wounded amour propre, the smiley solution set by the lifestyle guru is king.

The Generalised Other and the Looking-Glass Self

The rise of lifestyle gurus as a component in the lives of ordinary people reflects a change in the ratio of inter-personal relations in society. For over a century, sociologists have studied how spatially segregated relationships influence self-formation. In doing so they have devised a variety of concepts to investigate and clarify the issue. For example, George Herbert Mead (1934) developed the concept of the ‘Generalised Other’ to refer to the assembly of roles and attitudes of others that provide role models of behaviour. Integral to the concept is the nuance that this assembly includes ‘Significant Others’ – those who play a major role in providing direct and indirect advice and guidance. They may take the form of family relations, friends, artists, scientists, politicians, religious leaders and other types of celebrity, whose example is internalised and pursued as a lodestar of personal well-being. Lifestyle gurus are unequivocally ‘significant others’ for their subscribers and followers. Earlier, Charles Horton Cooley (1902) had already introduced the famous concept of the ‘Looking-Glass Self’. The term refers to the construction of a self-image through the reading of how we imagine ourselves to appear to others, based on their reactions to our behaviour. Our judgement of what motivates their reactions, and the feelings of pride or shame that result, either reinforce or undermine our self-image. The result is a social self based on co-presence, imagination and reflection: ‘each to each a looking-glass reflects the other that doth pass’ (Cooley 1902: 93). While Mead included indirect relations in the formation of the self, for the greater part Cooley concentrates on the direct, inter-personal relationships that individuals have with others. Mead was a great advocate of the value of Cooley’s social psychology. As he notes approvingly, Cooley’s definition of society is ‘the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named “I” … I do not see how anyone can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind’ (Mead 1930: 694). Not surprisingly, Mead’s view of the Generalised Other echoes the basic tenets of Cooley’s concept of the Looking-Glass Self. It holds that one has an idea of oneself through interaction with others and the perceived impressions of others that one attributes to them. At the heart of the self is self-reflectivity and self-feeling. However, the content of this private, inner reserve is largely a product of the observable emotional, rational and imaginary relationships that one forges with others.

Mead and Cooley wrote before the age of modern mass communications. It is generally accepted that the rise of modern mass communications, particularly television, has altered the ratio between the influence of direct and indirect relationships in the construction of self-feeling and self-knowledge. A key concept here is ‘para-social relationships’. Coined at the dawn of the television age, the term refers to the affective and imaginary relationships that audiences form with figures transmitted to them through the media of film and television (Horton and Wohl 1956). On-screen Others became significant affective resources for modifying the Looking-Glass Self. These para-social relationships were understood to challenge the primacy of kith and kin networks, especially in the lives of vulnerable and isolated people (Horton and Wohl 1956). In general, the discussion accepted that it was the fate of para-social relationships to loom larger in the field of interpersonal contact. Horton and Wohl did not speculate upon the form and content of imaginary and fantasy relationships in the para-social field. However, it is clear that these matters are integral to the concept.

Today, the ubiquity of digital technologies in the West means that the concept of para-social relationships needs to be radically recast. Horton and Wohl took it for granted that para-social transactions are located within the organised system of media transmission. In contrast, online transactions in social media are conducted outside of the system. Emotionally speaking, the internet has enabled vlogging sites, political platforms, chat rooms and crowdsourcing, in which interaction is founded upon an alternative sense of complicity rather than obedience to hierarchy. Transactions on social media sites, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, carry the ring of authentic co-existence, because they are essentially understood to be beyond the control of corporations and the other media giants (although, as discussed in Chapter 2, commercial and corporate hierarchies persist on these platforms). Psychologically speaking, to dip into these conduits of data exchange is ultimately to swim free of the transmission belts of organised media culture and its corporate paymasters. Some commentators refer to an increasing ratio of ‘micro-celebrities’ (Senft 2008; Marwick 2013) or ‘influencers’ (Trammell and Keshelashvili 2005; Gillin 2008) in the texture of online life with others. If you feel that your parents and siblings are not listening to you, or your friends fail to understand your point of view, there are now forums, chat-rooms, blogs and social media sites organised around what we refer to categorically as online awareness agents, with whom relations of intimacy and complicity can, in theory, evolve and lead to sustaining affective balances of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation. Lifestyle gurus are part of this general upheaval in the dynamics of para-social relationships. They constitute new Significant Others in the lives of ordinary people. Their raison d’etre as accessible, non-hierarchical, plain-speaking sources of advice and guidance about life issues represents a genuine challenge to the knowledge, hegemony and status of professionals. In creating new Looking-Glass Selves for the modern world they offer new imaginary standards and relationships for bringing out the best in oneself.

De-Traditionalisation and its Discontents

The view that we have escaped the myths and superstitions of the past is at the heart of what is understood by the term ‘de-traditionalisation’. In late modernity, individuals have learned to cultivate the self-image of escaping the burden and behavioural scripts of tradition (Giddens 1991). The decline of traditional religious and political structures has been accompanied in the public domain by the widespread conviction that there is little to be achieved by trying to revive them. In a word, their day has gone. It has become fashionable, as Frank Furedi (2013) notes, to treat traditional forms of authority – the monarchy, church and parliament – with ridicule and scepticism. The challenge to authority, and the preoccupation with the individual, has its origins in the Judeo-Christian tradition as personified by Christ. The emphasis on the rational individual to which this tradition subscribed reached its pinnacle in the Enlightenment, notably in the writings of John Locke, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. However, there are grounds for holding that the so-called escape from tradition is a hand overplayed by Enlightenment supporters. Since the late-1970s, the revival of Islamic fundamentalism, culminating in the project by ISIS to establish a new ‘caliphate’ of eternal certainties in Arabia, has dramatically called into question the belief in the inevitable superiority of Western Reason. Westerner’s rightly abhor the fundamentalist moral system, and particularly the use of violence by ISIS against individuals and heritage. Conversely, there was also grudging envy that the leader of the so-called caliphate, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, was able to inspire levels of mass passion and certitude that some felt were absent in the West. This reaction among Westerners suggested two things. Firstly, wherever its hand had touched, the Enlightenment revolution of Reason had produced a bloodless quality in everyday life. As Weber (1905) argued, it has let predictability, routine, regimentation and standardisation out of the traps and contributed to feelings of disenchantment. Judged on an emotional level, the tolerance, mutuality and respect generated by the Enlightenment were no match for the passion and exultation produced by magic, myth and religion. Second, disquiet with the bloodless character of political life in the West provoked the insight that the Enlightenment may have been over-confident in holding that Science and Reason must necessarily diminish magic, myth and religion.

This should not be a surprise. From the very beginning, de-traditionalisation inevitably precipitated a counter-reaction. Science and technology saw no place for traditional philosophical and religious questions having to do with the meaning, purpose and the mystery of existence. The Enlightenment assumed that these questions would gradually wither and die to be universally replaced by the secular, verifiable benefits of Reason. This has not turned out to be the path that history actually followed. Despite being dismissed by strict Enlightenment values, religious belief, and various forms of myth and magic, survive. Collective emotion, thought and identity continue to be organised around the sacred and profane. This was an outcome observed by Émile Durkheim (1912) in his analysis of the religious dimensions that bind social life. The sacred is not confined to religion or tradition. It refers to the idealisation of group beliefs as manifest in the social movements, scandals and political events that characterise modern life. The non-rational factors driving these events highl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is a Lifestyle Guru?
• 2 The Rise of Lifestyle Gurus in the Digital Age
• 3 ‘Be Authentic’: Lifestyle Gurus as Trusted Companions
• 4 ‘Your Person as a Product’: Commodifying Influence
• 5 ‘Don’t Eat That!’: Lifestyle Gurus as Unregulated Advisers
• 6 The Two Cults of Lifestyle Perfectionism
• 7 Living in a Low-Trust Society
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement