ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 connects contemporary lifestyle blogging to the longer history of lifestyle media. Since the mid-2000s, there has been a thriving ecosystem of lifestyle blogs, websites, and social networking sites like Pinterest and Instagram where the most successful “influencers” achieve fame, book contracts, and lucrative sponsorship deals. This chapter draws on analyses of global economic shifts and theories of labor, as well as discursive and textual analysis, to chart how lifestyle media production became an entrepreneurial form of domestic labor in the new millennium. It argues that lifestyle blogs conflate production and consumption, and leisure and labor, in the ways they circulate images of lifestyle perfection alongside discussions of the challenges of being self-employed and entrepreneurial in an era of neoliberal precarity. It explores how fantasies of production are bound up in ideas about “passionate work” that circulate in the digital lifestyle realm, and the increasing pressure that women and digital media producers feel to make both work and home life productive. In framing blogging as passionate work and instructing audiences in how to become successful lifestyle bloggers, blogs have turned lifestyle media into something about their own creation. With their logics of ordinariness, sociability, and inspiration, digital lifestyle media focus on the leveraging of one kind of labor (the work of everyday life, that is, women’s work) into another (lifestyle media production) in a precarious labor market.
