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Abstract

Persuasion has been extensively examined in broadcast contexts such as political speeches/debates and advertisements. In contrast, it has only been tangentiallyconsidered in relation to the increasingly popular lifestyle media. This is despite both scholarly consensus that these programmes actively promote certain lifestyles as desirable over others and that general views of these programmes being nothing more than trivial, mindless entertainment belie their influence on viewer patterns of living and spending time and money.

In view of this, I examine the resources and strategies that the lifestyle media deploy in order to persuade viewers to pursue specific lifestyles, drawing upon a corpus of 45 episodes of British primetime television property shows. Textual analysis of this corpus reveals the shows' promotion of ready-made lifestyle packages which interlock material, lifestyle and identity choices and use ease and aesthetics as incentives. The analysis also focuses upon the shows' persuasive combination of two participation frameworks: diluted didactics and melodrama. This article therefore contributes to the current debate on the purchase of lifestyles in contemporary, mass-mediated societies by critically examining a broadcast genre in which lifestyles are not only showcased but persuasively offered to viewers.

Keywords

(critical) discourse analysis didactic melodrama lifestyles participation framework

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Buying and selling: mediating persuasion in British property shows

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