ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a four-year collaborative research project on lifestyle media in Asia undertaken by Fran Martin, Tania Lewis, Wanning Sun, John Sinclair and Ramaswami Harindranath, and funded by the Australian Research Council. The starting point for that project was our observation of the ubiquitous presence, across Asia, of popular media instructing audiences on aspects of 'living the good life', from home decoration and healthy eating to guides to workplace etiquette and personal makeover narratives. In Asia, as elsewhere in the world, it seems, lifestyle media are playing a role in teaching audiences how to live a modern life, and potentially shaping people's understandings of identity, culture and citizenship serving, in a sense, as etiquette manuals for the 21st century. The rising popularity of lifestyle media in Asia can be seen as offering people aspirational guides for managing and imagining emergent modernities.
