Everyday Epiphanies: Environmental Networks in Eco-Makeover Lifestyle Television

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the New Zealand eco-makeover program, WA$TED! It outlines how eco-makeover programs are an emerging sub-genre of the makeover phenomenon of lifestyle television where people and homes are subject to transformation by lifestyle experts, culminating in the revelation of the transformation at the end of the program. The article argues that the featured families in WA$TED! experience “everyday epiphanies” where they learn about their implication in existing environmental networks and they are ushered into new, more environmentally friendly networks. Drawing on actor-network theory, the article deconstructs the featured environmental networks, examining the roles of the program hosts, the transformations in the subjectivities of family members, and the functions of everyday household technologies and objects. The article argues that the significance of the program resides in the way the revelations make visible previously concealed linkages between families, everyday objects and practices, and the broader social and environmental domain.

Keywords:

• Makeover
• Environment
• Networks
• Lifestyle
• Television
• Actor-Network

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at a seminar at the Center for Communication & Public Engagement at the University of Washington, Seattle. My thanks to Professor W. Lance Bennett and the Department of Communication staff for their feedback in that seminar. As always, the responsibility for any errors or omissions resides with the author.

Notes

1. The concept of “epiphany” has origins in the Christian narrative, referring to the Adoration of the Magi and the incarnation of the infant Christ, although its more modern and secular understanding is often said to derive from its invocation and use in modern fiction, particularly in the work of James Joyce (Beja, 1971). Epiphanies are often attributed with tremendous power given their sudden and dramatic nature, although the significance of epiphanies in cognitive change has been also questioned (Gardner, 2004). “Epiphany” is used here in a general sense of a sudden revelation, although it is noted that the spiritual nature of an epiphany can be distinguished from revelations that derive from more rational forms of sudden illumination (Beja, 1971, pp. 15–16).

2. Frances Bonner (2003, p. 32) prefers to use the term “ordinary” rather than “everyday” because her concern “is not primarily with ‘real’ people and how they make use of television in their everyday life, but rather with the use of everyday life by television (including its incorporation of ‘real’ people into its programmes).” Significantly, the agency of everyday life is facilitated by its ordinariness: “the more or less secure normality of everyday life, and our capacity to manage it on a daily basis” (Silverstone, 1994, p. 166). In his invocation of “ordinariness,” Silverstone distinguishes it from the “popular” (Fiske) and the “mediocre” (Lefebvre) as a way of describing everyday life, stating that the term is “both sociologically more accurate and evaluatively less extreme” (Silverstone,1984, p. 183).

3. The space of the home—its physical boundaries and organization, the social relations that occur within it, and its emotional significance—has been the subject of wide-ranging critique (Bachelard, 1994; Cullens, 1999; Felski, 1999–2000; Heller, 1984; Young, 1997). The home can be a source of comfort, intimacy and security but it can also be a site of social dislocation, exploitation, and violence.

4. The concept of the makeover is not the invention of lifestyle television but has a long media history in films (Now,Voyager; Funny Face; Pretty Woman) and women's magazines and has structured “feminine beauty culture” more generally (Moseley, 2000, p. 303; see also T. Miller, 2008).

5. The environmental audit of families involved weekly readings of electricity, gas, water and fuel, and an analysis of the household's rubbish. The program makers also collected all shopping receipts, monitored the distance family members travelled each week, talked to family members about their weekly habits, and inspected the insulation and appliances in their home. A carbon footprint refers to the total greenhouse emissions caused by an individual, household, organization, event or product. The household's footprint was calculated by measuring the household's resource use and translating that into an actual land size.

6. The carboNZero program is a New Zealand based, internationally accredited greenhouse gas certification program that provide tools and resources to help companies and organizations measure, manage, and mitigate your greenhouse gas emissions. See http://www.carbonzero.co.nz/index.asp for further details.

7. It is something of a misnomer to call ANT a “theory.” John Law (2009, p. 141) states that ANT is “descriptive rather than foundational in explanatory terms” and should be viewed more as a methodological approach or a “toolkit” to account for the formation and structure of networks.

8. The criticisms of ANT include charges that its descriptive basis does not, in turn, yield sufficient explanatory theoretical perspectives; that its focus on material networks does not sufficiently account for the ongoing polysemic interpretative status of networks once particular interpretations help facilitate the establishment of those networks (Couldry, 2004); and that it underplays the role of cultural values in the establishment and flow of networks (Murdoch & Miele, 2004; Parkins & Craig, 2009).

9. This claim is supported by the way that ANT has been applied in the study of global and alternative food networks. See, for example: Busch and Juska, (1997); Whatmore and Thorne, (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Craig

Geoffrey Craig is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Otago