ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the lifestyle and reality television as a cultural technology of citizenship. It discusses how a range of programs, in partnership with commercial sponsors and non-profit agencies, steer self-governing individuals toward the desired outcomes of experts and authorities, and point to some contradictions. Techniques of governmentality are circulated in a dispersed fashion by a range of experts and intermediaries, and the institutions that authorize their knowledge and expertise. Developments like entertainment-education and social marketing are especially suitable to strategies of governing at a distance. In the United States, social marketing techniques have been integrated into lifestyle and reality entertainment promoting weight loss, recycling, delayed parenting and other objectives. In the United Kingdom (UK), television's relationship to welfare reform is more overt, due in part to national differences. While the United States has historically provided minimal State assistance to citizens in need, the UK and many other European nations developed a collective approach to public welfare.
