‘In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour’ (Giddens 1991: 5). Explain and evaluate making use of examples of your choice

1. ‘In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour’ (Giddens 1991: 5). Explain and evaluate making use of examples of your choice.

2. ‘In conditions of high modernity, we all not only follow lifestyles, but in an important sense are forced to do so – we have no choice but to choose.’ (Giddens 1991: 81) Explain and evaluate making use of examples of your choice.

3. The tastes and practices of different classes are meaningful because they are involved in the struggles for cultural power between classes. Explain and evaluate making use of appropriate examples.

4. To what extent are some lifestyles seen as more legitimate than others? Discuss using examples from contemporary British culture.

5. Do lifestyle media democratize ideas about taste?

6. Miller argues that we are becoming a ‘consumer society … one in which commodities are increasingly used to express the core values of that society but also become the principal form through which people come to see, recognise and understand those values’ (Miller 2012: 40). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples.

7. ‘Shopping is not merely the acquisition of things, it is the buying of identity’ (Clammer qtd. in Lewis and Bridger 2001: 130). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples.

8.  Lifestyle connotes ‘individuality, self-expression and a stylistic self-consciousness’ (Featherstone 2007: 81). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples.

9. ‘Travel increasingly caters to the predispositions of the new middle classes’. Discuss.

10. Baudrillard argues that the postmodern is characteristic of a universe that ‘has destroyed itself. … So all that are left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces – that is postmodern’ (Baudrillard 1984: 24). Discuss this statement with reference to your own examples.