Apartment Therapy, Everyday Modernism, Aspirational Disposability

Television & New Media2014, Vol 15(1) 68 –80© The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/1527476413482738tvnm.sagepub.com

Article

Apartment Therapy, Everyday Modernism, and Aspirational Disposability

Maureen Ryan1

AbstractIn this article, I consider the formal and textual attributes of Apartment Therapy, a popular design blog, to argue that it offers “aspirational disposability” as an imaginative solution to commodity capitalism’s problems of both overconsumption and conformity. I first historically ground my discussion in an examination of the roots of midcentury modernism and the notion of the home as a curative space. I then discuss “everyday modernism” as a consumerist formation that informs aspirational disposability, particularly through Ikea goods. Finally, I turn to an analysis of the main features of Apartment Therapy that articulate aspirational disposability. Midcentury modernism, and its disposable incarnations from Ikea, allows readers to “hack” material culture to construct an affective domestic space, engaging in therapeutics of the self while substituting taste for class mobility.

Keywordsblogs, gender, Internet, cultural politics, design, new media

On the popular design blog Apartment Therapy, contributor Rachel Grad posted a survey asking readers, “Do you have ‘placeholder’ furniture?” (Grad 2009). Many readers had commented disdainfully on a pair of Ikea side tables in a house tour earlier in the week, and Grad reported, somewhat apologetically, that the occupants “are looking for the perfect pieces, but the Ikea tables do the job for now.” She asked read-ers whether they also keep “placeholder” pieces while they search or save for the

1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:Maureen Ryan, Department of Radio/TV/Film, Northwestern University, 1920 Campus Drive, Annie May Swift Hall, 2nd Fl, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email: [email protected]

482738 TVN15110.1177/1527476413482738Television & New MediaRyanresearch-article2013

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“perfect piece”; of 222 respondents, 208 responded “yes.” The question sparked a lively discussion in the comments section, with readers chiming in about the state of their own furnishings and what they hoped to someday acquire.

Although the survey question was informal, and somewhat self-selecting in its results, the issue clearly resonated with Apartment Therapy readers, who seemed to implicitly accept the notion that good furniture is a prerequisite for entrée into the “real” world. Design blogs are widely read, and Apartment Therapy in particular gar-ners seven million readers monthly (Apartment Therapy 2012). The interest in design media that Apartment Therapy readers share is constitutively related to the logic of lifestyle—a formation that is everywhere on television, in magazines, and on the web. Today, the Internet is abundantly populated with lifestyle blogs and publications like Design Sponge, Remodelista, Dwell, and Lonny, in addition to the web presences of old media standbys like Martha Stewart and Elle Décor. Their popularity can be attrib-uted to a constellation of interrelated historical developments: the aestheticization of everyday life associated with consumer capitalism (Postrel 2003), the rise of cosmo-politanism in global cities, and the reorganization of social life in relation to broadcast—and now digital—media. In this article, I consider the formal and textual attributes of Apartment Therapy’s blog and argue that it interpellates its readers as subjects of a mobile, aspirational class, constructing a discourse of “therapy” through consumer practices. Although I only examine this blog (albeit one of the most widely read in the design blogosphere), its cultural logic is borne out across broader media publics. I call it “aspirational disposability”: the notion that one’s domestic space should be person-ally reflective, uplifting, functional, and above all, mutable so as to allow for upcy-cling as fashions, tastes, and identities change with time. Aspirational disposability is a kind of social mobility, embedded in the material culture of the home, and though it often strives to work against consumerism, it nonetheless is predicated on the array of material and semiotic tools that income, cultural capital, and class position make avail-able. In short, aspirational disposability is the imaginative solution Apartment Therapy presents to commodity capitalism’s problems of both overconsumption and confor-mity. On Apartment Therapy, vintage shopping, eclecticism, and midcentury modern-ist design are tools in the quest to calibrate the ideal home, and thus the ideal self (Figure 1).

I first historically ground my discussion of this contemporary taste public through an examination of the roots of midcentury modernism and the notion of the home as a curative space, both of which are fundamentally rooted in consumer culture. I then discuss “everyday modernism” as a formation dating from midcentury that informs aspirational disposability, particularly through Ikea goods today. Finally, I turn to an analysis of the main features of Apartment Therapy, which articulate aspirational dis-posability: the Ikea Hack, which allows for customization and the substitution of eco-nomic capital for cultural capital, the House Tour, which narrativizes mass-produced goods, and finally the Fall Cure, which literalizes the process of identification with one’s home. Throughout, I will be concerned with the gendered dimensions of design, mass culture, curation, and excess.

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Gendered Modernity, Gendered Homes

By the late nineteenth century, the notion of the home as a curative space designed to protect dwellers against an increasingly alienating modern environment had become a common trope. As mass production accelerated throughout the 1900s, an increasingly complex array of styles, makes, and models became available on the market, and “good taste” was seen as a way for shoppers to navigate this proliferation to produce a curative, comfortable home. Good taste became strongly linked to the bourgeois sen-sibility, enabled by consumption but also embattled by it. Homemakers must purchase the right items, and not too many of them, for their domestic idyll, or risk reproducing the confusion and clutter of the outside world. Moreover, taste was the arena in which the struggle for signification took place between the amateur woman charged with decorating her home and the newly professionalized interior designer, who stridently decried the festooning of Victorian domestic spaces with feminine knick-knacks, flo-ral patterns, and ruffles (Sparke 1995). At the height of the Art Nouveau period, home design became increasingly the purview of the expert—and thus masculinized—in the face of the increasing range of goods available to everyday consumers (i.e., women). This conflict between the amateur and the professional was of course in part driven by

Figure 1. Apartment therapy’s post from November 20, 2009: “Do You Have Placeholder Furniture?”Image grab from http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/dc/surveys/do-you-have-placeholder-furniture-102067.

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concerns about gender and “a woman’s place” in an evolving social field, and these anxieties bled into those about the influx of “kitsch” into the realm of material culture (Greenberg 1961). High and mass culture continued to be coded as masculine and feminine (respectively) into the midcentury period, when the majority of high modern-ist artists, designers, and architects were male (Huyssen 1986; Sparke 1995).

High modernism ruled artistic circles in the first half of the twentieth century, but by midcentury, its ideological directives had gradually made their way into architec-tural, interior, and product design on a mass scale, through the work of designers like George Nelson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Eventually, their designs set the mode for postwar domestic visual culture, and were adapted and embellished by both imita-tors and consumers.1 As consumerism took hold as a dominant paradigm, it was explicitly in dialogue with femininity and female tastes and identities, particularly through its valuation of the domestic space as a site of ideological and material articu-lation of American identity. The resulting postwar economic boom, the popularization of television as a mass medium, and the growth of the American middle class led to fears about the quality and uniformity of dominant culture. But against conventional understandings of audiences as “dupes” who naively accepted mass media’s stultify-ing ideologies, a more complex assessment reveals that audiences formed taste publics around particular aesthetics and genres in very deliberate ways (Spigel 2009, 15).2 Through mass media and consumer products, modern art and design did reach the American public, who, thanks to the postwar boom, began to have more leisure time to devote to hobbies, including crafting, and home improvement and design (Marling 1994; Spigel 2009).

Everyday Modernism

On the mass scale, modernism was necessarily adapted and embellished by manufac-turers and designers outside of high art. As Penny Sparke (1995) shows, the “threat of contamination” that emanated from the domestic sphere and the objects designed for use therein remained a concern for (male) high modernist designers and architects. The “twin demons of streamlining and built-in obsolescence” were particularly abhor-rent to the gatekeepers of modern design, yet ironically, they remain the defining fea-tures of design in the postwar period (Sparke 1995, 216). Lynn Spigel (2009, 22) calls the modernism that was adapted and embellished for use in the home “everyday mod-ernism,” a “hybrid of historical styles that viewers could ‘poach’ and recombine in ways that would surely have offended the tastes of orthodox modernists.” Everyday modernism was a result of mass production and mass media, but it was less a codified style than a heightened sense of design-consciousness, play, and recombinance through the use of old and new styles of consumer goods. Everyday modernism’s hybridity is the result of, on one hand, the sheer availability of goods designed for domestic consumption, many of which were mass market iterations of modernist design, and on the other, the determining role mass media has played in educating audiences about design aesthetics. More than ever, people were able to “steal from a

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variety of artistic and decorative orthodoxies to create their own more eclectic sense of style” (Spigel 2009, 304, n.11).

Today, Ikea is the prime purveyor of everyday modernism, with its mass market versions of modern design, its huge range of products, and its low price point. On Apartment Therapy, Ikea’s bright, functional, low-cost goods appear in tours of starter apartments and designer lofts alike regularly. Founded during the 1940s in Sweden, Ikea grew to an international behemoth, with its most significant period of growth occurring in the 1990s. Ikea’s success has much to do with the conditions of the 1990s bubble economy, in which consumer goods had saturated the market, and manufactur-ers were looking for new ways to sustain growth. One strategy manufacturers used was the “upmarketing of downmarket goods” in which inexpensive, trend-oriented, often disposable goods were packaged with the prestige and quality of durable “upmar-ket” goods (Leland 2002). Upmarketing is a phenomenon of packaging and design. “Appropriate to the new economy,” Leland (2002) notes,

The value of upmarketed goods lay not in the materials but in an overlay of information, a narrative of design. They told a story that flattered both the owner and his audience . . . For Ikea, this was a recipe for opportunity. Marble was expensive; color could be done cheap.

While Ikea maintains its modernist design heritage, “democratizing” (as it pro-fesses) good design through affordability, it ultimately produces downmarket goods that are not meant to last for generations, as furniture had tended to do prior to the 1950s. Meanwhile, as midcentury modernism entered the design canon, the cultural capital of Ikea’s aesthetic only increased. Apartment Therapy’s unabashed embrace of Ikea is emblematic of its larger relationship to commodity capitalism, and of the sur-plus value that cheap, design-conscious commodities create for the aspiring classes.

Blog Form and Logic

Over the course of the Internet’s relatively short history, the blog structure has coalesced around a set of visual and formal characteristics, such that it is recognizable in a wide range of websites beyond the more diaristic personal blogs that popularized them initially. In general, a blog is a website with “instant text/graphic publishing, an archiving system organized by date and a feedback mechanism in which readers can ‘comment’ on specific posts” (Hookway 2008, 92). I would append this already capa-cious definition with another, to my mind crucial, characteristic. The very temporality of blog posting—each post being marked by the moment at which it was published—affords the blog a propensity for everydayness that is intimately bound up in the sub-jectivity of the poster. Blogging is not only a form of media production but also fundamentally a social practice that foregrounds aesthetics, affect, and intimate con-texts in the creation of shared texts and experiences. Less formal than a televisual address, the blog post seems more akin to a kind of sociable chatting, as the opening “placeholder” post shows. Like television, however, blogs are a feminized form. Lena

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Karlsson suggests that the dearth of scholarly attention to blogs is due to their femini-zation: blogs are often personal, subjective, and thrive on readerly attachment (readers are invited to enter into and identify with the thoughts and feelings of others), and they run in installments with no end point, just like the feminine genre par excellence, the television soap opera (2007, 139).3

I am calling Apartment Therapy a blog because of its format and personal tone, although it is run by a team of writers. The main channel aggregates the feed of entries chronologically. The stream of content can be subdivided by using the “tabs” that organize content thematically and mimic the form of tabbed web browsing. Directly above the main heading, tabs link to Apartment Therapy’s more thematically focused channels: “style,” “renovating,” “tech,” “family,” and so on. Below this, there are tabs for different types of content: “Tours,” “budget living,” “Classifieds,” and seasonal features like the Fall Cure. This spatial dispersal of content helps to orient the reader to archived content, beyond what has been most recently posted. Even though the blog entries are arranged chronologically, the site simultaneously resists that spatio-temporal configuration by also functioning as a kind of resource database, offering specialized tools for the reader to find solutions to their specific problem via Apartment Therapy content.

Ikea Hacks and House Tours

The term hack, taken from computer programming culture, describes a creative inter-vention into a static program (or object) to make it serve a different purpose. Ikea hacks are ultimately about modifying a mass-produced object to suit individual needs or desires. For instance, a post from July 31, 2009, featured reader-submitted photos of a replica of a midcentury modern George Nelson jewelry cabinet made entirely from elements bought from Ikea (Laban 2009). The project emphasizes individual taste, adapting mass objects in a cost-efficient, aesthetically unique way. Thus, the Ikea hack seeks to efface class, transforming the materiality of the home, and corre-spondingly, the social structures articulated therein (Sparke 2009, 92). It is the cheap-ness and modularity of Ikea furniture that enables the additional labor and/or economic costs that the hacker incurs in transforming the object; paradoxically, the potential prestige of the finished object offers a great return on those investments. This is one way that the disposability of downmarket commodities like low-cost Ikea furniture enables the accumulation of cultural capital—or more precisely, the substitution of economic capital for cultural capital.

House Tours, Apartment Therapy’s best feature according to the New York Times (Green 2008), are also premised on everyday modernism as a form of aspirational disposability. The House Tour showcases a real, lived-in home whose occupants did all the design work. House Tours exemplify the website’s mission—“the basic ele-ments of good home design can be learned and achieved by all”—by presenting occu-pants who have successfully navigated the manifold offerings of consumer culture and curated a home that is functional, stylized, and reflective of the personalities contained therein.4 Included with the photo set is a survey in which the occupants detail their inspirations, the challenges the space posed, and the resources they used to overcome

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them. The House Tours are thus a kind of affective tool kit, providing not only mate-rial resources and advice for the aspiring nester but also images of beautiful living spaces that invite imaginary adaptation to the reader’s own context. While the homes showcased on Apartment Therapy run the gamut of styles, sizes, influences, and levels of expense, midcentury modern furniture and design is a consistently showcased, and reader-revered, element in many tours. Often the occupants profess to finding midcen-tury modern furniture on the website Craigslist.org or in thrift stores, imbuing the object with the additional value of savviness: the occupant had the cultural capital to recognize a “good” object in a debased context, and advantageously transferred the object to his or her own home, where it became, by virtue of its new context, an ele-vated object of design. This recontextualization creates the eclectic vernacular of everyday modernism.

Dangerous Excess: Gender, Collecting, Temporality

One especially instructive House Tour, “Amy and David’s Modern + Tiki = Home,” exemplifies both functionality and eclecticism in the extreme (Laban 2007). The occu-pants own a two-floor building on the southwest side of Chicago. The upper floor is the living unit and is a veritable who’s who of midcentury modernism, boasting George Nelson clocks and coconut chairs, an Eames storage unit, a Saarinen womb chair and settee, as well as an extensive collection of midcentury art and ceramics (Figure 2). The lower floor is an elaborate tiki lounge, complete with lurid lighting, two bars, tiki statues, and a floor-to-ceiling collection of tiki barware (Figure 3).

Figure 2. The living area from “Amy and David’s Modern + Tiki = Home.”Accessed at http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/house-tour-davi-21030. Image courtesy of Pegboard Modern.

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Because the tiki craze dates from the midcentury period, its kitschy sensibility seems banished from the restrained upper living space, functioning as a peep show of modernism’s Other, mass culture. The Eames had indigenous artifacts in their home; today, their middlebrow schlock iterations are imbued with nostalgic appeal for mid-century enthusiasts. In Western culture, collecting “has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity” (Clifford 1988, 218). Collecting represents an obsessive impulse to know and possess; as such, it is unwieldy and, if improperly managed, pathological, as shows like A&E’s Hoarders demon-strates. As James Clifford (1988, 218) notes of collecting, “An excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have is transformed into rule-governed, meaningful desire. Thus, the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies—to make ‘good’ collections.” The good collector, if she is to stay on this side of respectable, must be “tasteful and reflective” in her choices (Clifford 1988, 218). Careful editing is one of the most basic tenets of modern design, and it is also one of its most deeply and constitutively masculine, linked to the desire to exert con-trol over externalities. In this house tour, where the upper floor is an exercise in cura-tion and display (with objects all designed by men), the mass-cult origins of the tiki collection, and its sheer immersiveness, renders it overwhelming, feminizing, and decidedly not tasteful.

More commonly seen on House Tours are artful “vignettes,” smaller and more gestural arrangements of personal artifacts embodying Charles Eames’ axiom that “the details are not details” but rather tell a story about the occupants. Photographers attend to these details scrupulously, framing shots to highlight their storytelling qual-ity, and the results often appear as stylized as consumer product displays. Midcentury

Figure 3. The tiki room in “Amy and David’s Modern + Tiki = Home.”Accessed at http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/house-tour-davi-21030. Image courtesy of Pegboard Modern.

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pop artifacts often surface in these vignettes, from Fire King Jadite or milk glass to Marimekko textiles. Many of these objects have currency as kitsch or vintage objects because of their relationship to the media, especially television programs, on which such items are the primary indicators of the time period. As Clifford suggests, “The increased pace of historical change, the common recurrence of stress in the systems under study, forces a new self-consciousness about the way cultural wholes and boundaries are constructed and translated” (1988, 231). The collecting of vintage kitsch is therefore an attempt to navigate the “cultural wholes and boundaries” of dif-ferent historical and national cultures, to come to grips with history in an ever-faster moving global culture, as well as a renarrativization of those cultures as taste and identity markers for contemporary publics.

Flow, Breath, Bones: The Fall Cure

Although Apartment Therapy embraces the multiplicity of goods Ikea offers and the modularity of those goods, which allows one to “poach” objects at will to construct a fulfilling, useful domestic space, the blog also cautions against both its potential to overwhelm a space with useless stuff and that nefarious by-product of modularity, conformism. It is when the irrationality of collecting verges into chaos and clutter that Apartment Therapy presents itself as therapist, proffering the tools and guidance to help the reader develop and maintain a healthy relationship to their home. This is the purpose of the Fall Cure, an eight-week long semiannual feature that Apartment Therapy hosts, instructing participants in how to “literally ‘heal’ [their] home, trans-forming it into a place that is beautiful, enlivening and healthy, which [they] will be proud to share” (Gillingham-Ryan 2009).

As Mimi White argues, forms of mediated therapy such as talk shows are “engaged toward finding one’s ‘proper place’ as an individual and a social subject, even as they are mediated through the apparatus of television. This proper place is overdetermined by family/gender relations and models of consumption” (1992, 11). The notion of therapy suffuses the discourse of the blog in a similar manner, offering models of subjecthood predicated on class mobility through proper modes of consumption and normative family life. In so doing, it constructs the domestic space as an extension and reflection of its inhabitants’ subjective disarray, thereby figuring the inhabitant as the real object of therapy. Readers can sign up at the beginning of the Cure and commit to the full process, sharing their progress in the comments section of weekly posts that outline the week’s goals and reflections.5 This style of address is both mass and inti-mate, encouraging intimacy in experiencing one’s home sensually and in sharing those experiences online. The first four weeks involve mental therapeutics: inspiration, planning, and establishing a mental engagement with the space. For instance, partici-pants are advised to run their hands over every wall to rekindle their relationship to the space, and to begin purchasing fresh flowers weekly (Gillingham-Ryan 2006). The second half involves repairs, removal of unwanted items, organizational projects, and the purchase and installation of new fixtures and furnishings. Readers are encouraged to rethink their floor plan, furnishings, colors, and textures, and to change everything that is not useful or pleasurable. The Cure asks readers to pay attention to their home’s

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“flow” of energy, “breath” or vitality, and its “bones” or structure, discursively map-ping, in effect, the body of the individual (or the familial body) and its health and happiness onto the home. The Cure, like the other elements of Apartment Therapy I have discussed here, is a process that requires a careful engagement with mass cul-ture and the continual work of balancing the mass and the unique, a process that has historically been charged with the overdetermined symbolism of gendered tastes. The whole process of Curing, and of aspirational disposability, involves both the “mascu-line” urge to exert decisive editing and to control the boundaries of material culture, and the “feminine” desire for expressiveness in a subjectively pleasurable space.

The discourse of therapy on the blog articulates home improvement as self-improvement, corresponding to the upwardly mobile bourgeois consumer whom it addresses, and who hopes to gain certain kinds of class access through presentations of style and taste in a culture that is highly attuned to the semiotics of consumption. Of the many kinds of homes on Apartment Therapy, apartments are indeed represented most frequently. It is the apartment that signifies upward mobility, allowing access to urban centers and their cosmopolitan lifestyles. The fixes and improvements are in the form of tension rods and coats of paint, with the implicit assumption that much of it is in fact temporary, a holding station before occupants move on to bigger and better homes. Particularly in the post-2008 economy, it is an assumption that is increasingly less likely to pan out.

Conclusion

As I have tried to show, Apartment Therapy, in its mission to educate publics on good home design, premises this goal on participation in consumer culture, but it is a com-plicated participation. On one hand, Apartment Therapy encourages the values of thrift, reuse, and its more contemporary digital-era incarnation, the hack, all of which embrace Certeauian models of making do with less while generating cultural capital for the individual. However, these values are put in curious contradiction alongside posts that celebrate new gadgets and consumer goods. In her discussion of television, Spigel (2009, 105) notes that “the stylistic continuity between on-air title art and the modern designs used for package art [for the commodities advertised during commer-cials or sponsor plugs] created a continuous perceptual loop that made the act of watching TV and the act of buying products extremely compatible visual experi-ences.” On the blog, with the immediacy of hyperlinks to online stores, and the blurred boundaries between posts that feature consumer products and outright advertisements, this perceptual loop between the act of reading, viewing, and shopping is even shorter and more totalizing. Furthermore, Apartment Therapy works in conjunction with other design blogs and sharing sites like Pinterest to reinforce the interest in and the per-ceived need for aspirationally styled homes.

In the comments on the Apartment Therapy post asking whether readers had place-holder furniture, one respondent mused, “How privileged we are to consider some of our things placeholders!” (Grad 2009). Amid the seventy-three other comments, most ruminating on the pieces they would most like to replace, though some avowing that

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they did not acquire anything they do not love, this was a small voice, the only one to question the notion of placeholding at all. Overwhelmingly, the discussion reflects a public still struggling within the confines of consumer capitalism to rework and rei-magine its relationships to goods, particularly ones that figure so heavily into concep-tions of selfhood. Although there is some imagination of a collectivity and some resource sharing—instructions for how to carry out your own hacks, for instance—sharing ultimately only informs one’s ability to reflect those tastes and aesthetics already valued in the group, and to display them “back” to the community. Furthermore, hacking, thriftiness, and making do have environmental and economic upsides, to be sure, but by and large, they tend to underpin, rather than work against, consumption, because they enable the saving of resources in order that they might be spent later. Concern with the environmental consequences of consumerism has shifted the debates within lifestyle media to an emphasis on green products, but it has nonetheless contin-ued to produce disposability as a solution for problems of taste and aspiration. Old items must go to make room for new: at best, they might become someone else’s treasure—at worst, someone else’s problem.

What seems important in the whole scenario of aspirational disposability, and which in fact is reflected in the very form of the blog itself, is an open-endedness that suggests that the project of improvement is an ongoing, ever-upward orientation, rather than a bounded goal. One may finish with a renovation, an Ikea hack, a cure, but one is never finished with the project of lifestylization and of the continual labor it requires. Space is, after all, mutable, and old furniture can always be kicked to the curb with low-cost, high cultural-capital options abounding at Ikea and vintage shops. As Ikea of Sweden’s managing director suggests, “Our feeling is: It’s just furniture. Change it” (Leland 2002).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Although modernism and midcentury modernism were international movements, occurring in the United States as well as in various parts of Europe, in this article, my use of the term midcentury modernism is limited to its American context, and the ways in which midcentury modern designs took hold in postwar American mass culture as an eclectic vernacular, what Lynn Spigel (2009) calls “everyday modernism.”

2. In conceiving of the Apartment Therapy readership, I follow Michael Warner’s (2005) understanding of a public, articulated in Publics and Counterpublics (2005). He argues that a public is an effect of discourse; for Warner, discourse literally means the circulation of texts through time, around which a group of people “become” a public as such: “[P]ublics

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do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them” (2005, 72). It is not, therefore, an audience in an ethnographic or quantitative sense. A taste public, then, as Spigel (2009) uses it in her discussion of everyday modernism, is one that is constituted in a discourse that negotiates what is “good,” “tasteful,” or “valuable” about everyday design objects and practices.

3. See also Jodi Dean (2010, 44–53) for a discussion of the way blogs have been taken up in popular and scholarly discourse as either a form of diaristic production (and thus marginal-ized as trivial) or as a form of citizen journalism and thus a “threat” to the institution of journalism.

4. Warren Susman (1984) identifies a shift in the early twentieth century away from a cul-ture of character and toward a culture of “personality” as the ideal form of selfhood. Correspondingly, Sparke notes that by the fin de siècle, the more intimate living room had come to replace the formal parlor as a place where “personality,” rather than character, could be depicted (Sparke 2009, 35).

5. The 2009 Fall Cure had, according to the site, 1,753 participants, although it is impossible to gauge the degree of participation of each member by their online presence.

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Author Biography

Maureen Ryan is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Her dissertation focuses on the emergence of lifestyle media and its relationship to subjectivity, women’s domestic labor, and everyday life.