Examining several local engagements with this globally prominent genre for comparative consideration, Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia captures a moment when “lifestyle television” has flared onto TV screens across a vast and varied Asian context. It explores how the impact and evolution of lifestyle TV in postcolonial, post-socialist and post-“economic miracle” Asian nation states speak to the changing relationships between popular media, audiences and civic spaces, imagined and real.
The book is a welcome addition to the existing scholarly work on media and Asia studies for its three-country (and one city-state) comparative approach, for including down-market, less urban and heretofore mostly invisible local television markets in its compass, and for treating Chinese and Indian contexts in the same study while comparing both to Taiwan's more cosmopolite Asian example. Another rare instance of putting China and India in direct scholarly context is Robin Jeffrey and Ronojoy Sen's edited volume, Media at Work in China and India: Discovery and Dissection (Sage, 2015).
Discussing the political economy of lifestyle programming in India, China and Taiwan, chapter one of the book combines policy analysis with institutional and historical snapshots as well as interviews with industry staffers to outline the political, economic and cultural forces that have shaped the rise of lifestyle oriented TV programming. Chapter two focuses on Shanghai TV and Bengbu TV as instances of local media cultures, as the authors explore the relations between lifestyle formats, structures of taste and perceived needs, and place. Chapter three examines India's vast televisual landscape while chapter four looks at how the American cable Travel and Living Channel works in Taiwan. Chapter five examines the proliferation of life experts on Chinese and Indian TV and discusses the rise of psychologized and individualized models of “everyday expertise.” Chapter six turns to religious, spiritual and supernatural life advice television in India and Taiwan to explore the distinctive counter-narratives of modernity as the result of the confluence of religious, supernatural beliefs and late modern media cultures. Chapter seven moves into the territory of love and relationships in both China and India. Chapter eight surveys a range of women's lifestyle advice shows from China and Taiwan to explore models of feminine identity in the transnational Sinophone world. The concluding chapter summarizes some of the central themes of the book and asks how developments in these rapidly shifting and emerging media spaces might speak back to and transform conventional understandings of the mediated relations between social identities, politics, and citizenship.
We have yet to see another study on this scale comparing local engagements with a particular television genre in Asia or anywhere else. Telemodernities succeeds at revealing “distinct and variegated modernities” (p. 5) in its locales, the “concrete manifestations of … modern dreams in particular media contexts – dreams of ideal selfhood, of good taste, of appropriate consumption, of optimally functioning relationships, of proper gender – are very location-specific…” (p. 15). The study's approach that compares a few particular markets including smaller, less urban television markets alongside the usual national and large urban markets while revealing the multiple “telemodernities” in play at these different levels is its main innovation.
Telemodernities is a nicely imagined, extensively planned and pursued study with a triangulated design, combining industry interviews with textual analyses and audience interviews, but the interviews seem few and rather open-ended and at times haphazard, and the textual analyses prone to subjective and pat interpretations. Triangulation lends shading and detail to the descriptive work but does not turn these anecdotal accounts into reliable indicators of the direction and strength of effects between viewers and programming. The book seems dedicated to the idea that lifestyle TV is a substantial agent of identity formation and re-formation, and of new aspirations, habits, expectations and so on, mostly in line with a consolidating world order of consumerism, commodified individualism, low political and civic expectations, and resignation to high economic disparities. They relate that idea extensively and lucidly, but in the end this is an anecdotal, interpretive study, not that there is anything wrong with it.
The lifestyle genre serves here as a fine platform for getting a view on the various intersections of television and society in the study's extensive range. Because of its low production costs and the proliferation of successful and locally adaptable formats, it is, at least for the moment, well positioned to afford exactly the kind of cross-cultural and multi-market-level comparison study that this project pioneers. The lifestyle genre also lends itself especially well, perhaps too well, to arguments about the supposed disciplining or re-training effects of the media in our new millennial climate of destabilized and dislocated selves. By definition, lifestyle television suggests something about how to live your life, usually by making choices to consume appropriate commercial products and services. So it's easy to claim that lifestyle TV is helping to make the world safe for hyper-capitalism, meanwhile letting governments off the hook by proffering self-help pseudo-solutions in place of disappearing social services, and doing little or nothing to promote civic engagement or democratic ideals and aspirations.
A funny thing has happened on the way to Francis Fukuyama's “end of history” – a Hobbesian neoliberal economic consolidation has arrived ahead of political reform and it seems to be burning bridges behind it. All the post-modern, post-socialist, post-welfare state, consumption-based economies, and the emphasis on self-reliance have left people in need of instruction. So, the argument goes, we witness this systemic proliferation of self-help culture, including lifestyle television. However, while it is clear that the global economy has been consolidating and working in an inequitable, iniquitous fashion for some decades now, its particular mechanisms in all their multiplicity and complexity, and in all their engagement with particular social formations, present real problems of cause and effect. Certainly, it is difficult to establish that lifestyle television is more cause than effect. Perhaps it is most useful simply as an indicator.
