Written by Zoe Davies

Annette Hill (2005) has described the blurring between information and entertainment as ‘infotainment’. This ‘infotainment’ will be the primary basis surrounding our study as we examine the ways that Reality TV promotes a certain lifestyles and sets of  behaviours that ‘ensure self improvement’. Before deconstructing our focus programs, we need to first to understand the audience’s relationship to lifestyle television and to themselves.

“Emerging out of a broader rise in lifestyle-oriented modes of consumption, the west has seen an explosion of makeover shows over the past decade, many of which focus not only on home and

garden transformations but on ‘renovating’ ordinary people and their lifestyles and relationships” (Lewis, p.318)

At present Australian primetime TV features a mixture of lifestyle make-over shows oriented towards consumerist modes of self and life improvement. Shows such as The Biggest Loser, 10 Years Younger in 10 Days, How to Look Good Naked and Make me a Supermodel each promote different ways ‘normal people’ can become better ‘versions’ of themselves by following the advice and motivation provided by these programs. With the recent surge of food related lifestyle shows, we have seen a new set of people being characterised on television and compared with these notions of selfhood. The shows contain suggestions at how we ‘as Australians’ should live our lives, and subtly hints at ways that non-Australians do or do not conform to these ‘ideal’ lifestyles.

Jonathan Bignell suggests that the transnational mobility of reality television may indicate the growing universalisation of a ‘Western’ preoccupation with ‘personal confession, modification, testing and the perfectibility of the self’ (Bignell 2005, 40).

We are beginning to see lifestyle television embody an auxiliary set of values that underpin these suggestions and instil them into the Australian psyche. The shows display a concern with teaching audiences how to reflexively shape and optimise their personal lifestyles as well as shape their attitudes and perspectives on certain issues.

“These Anglo-American modes of programming also share a concern with providing life lessons in middle-class taste and distinction, often modelling forms of consumption that are linked to particular kinds of normative, morally-inflected lifestyle practices e.g. maintaining a healthy body” (Lewis, 2010 p330)

So, how is this affecting the Australian lifestyle, and how is reality TV morphing its audiences into different types of citizens? How does reality TV define a healthy and fulfilled life and moreover how does it suggest we go about achieving it? It is clear that lifestyle shows are playing a significant role in promoting certain lifestyle behaviours and social identities; programs offer not only consumer advice but lifestyle guidance in a period of shifting cultural and social mores. As John Hartley argues about television more broadly, it can be seen to use ‘oral, domestic discourses to teach...‘‘lay’’ audiences modes of ‘‘citizenship’’ and self-knowledge based on culture and identity’ (1999, p. 41)

It is this element of education we hope to fully understand. By repositioning the educative value of reality television to perhaps embody politically and culturally mindful messages we could perhaps take reality television into a completely new sphere and spread messages of accepting diversity as a positive quality for citizens to embody.

Reality television has arguably become ‘the quintessential technology of advanced or neo liberal citizenship’ (Ouellette and Hay 2008 p. 4). Australia exists in a particularly neo-liberal setting where citizens rely more on popular culture to ‘teach’ them as the state devolves more and more responsibility for public concern onto the media. Ouellette & Hay (2008) describe as the ‘self-regulating consumer-citizen’ as one who is media literate but unconsciously accepts the hidden messages of reality television while they take away the elements they feel relate to their lifestyle.

By combining advice and instruction on how to improve one’s everyday life with voyeurism, suspense, emotional intensity and humour, reality television present individuals as actors in charge of their own destiny, capable of empowering themselves privately without government intervention or support. They are masters of their own destinies. Winnie Salamon (2010)

The key element of reality television and lifestyle television in particular is the empowerment it affords the ‘everyday’ people it represents. In recognising ourselves as empowered, we immediately become more active citizens, more capable of affecting change in areas we feel need addressing in the public sphere.



Bignell, J, 2005 Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-First Century Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan.



Salamon, W, 2010,  What about me? Identity, subjectivity and reality TV participation, PhD thesis, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne,  Available at [http://dtl.unimelb.edu.au//exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNjg4NDk=.pdf]



Hartley, J, 1999, Uses of television. London, Routledge.



Ouellette, L, & Hay, J, 2008,  Better living through television. London, Oxford, Blackwell.

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Lewis, T, and Martin, F 2010, 'Learning modernity: lifestyle advice television in Australia, Taiwan and Singapore', Asian Journal of Communication, Vol 20, No 3, pp318 — 336