Читать книгу Lifestyle Gurus - Chris Rojek - Страница 13

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).