Online memories of 1980s–2000s lifestyle and consumption politics in Greece during the current economic crisis (2009–2015)

Abstract

Lifestyle media very successfully promoted (conspicuous) consumption as a major referent in the social and cultural convergence between Greece and Western Europe between the mid-1980s and the late 2000s. Perceiving the Internet as a crucial component of the contemporary public sphere where testimonial cultures abound, this article explores how during the current economic crisis particular communities of web users dealt with the breakdown of previous consumer certainties, placing emphasis on the downfall of the lifestyle media industry and on how and why publisher Petros Kostopoulos is discussed as a metonym of this media field. Using comments published below articles about the collapse of lifestyle in popular media and posts in a popular men’s forum, the article examines the uses of contemporary history in the construction of arguments about the origins of the current crisis and explores how the dismantlement of recent consumer utopias echoed questions of Europeanization and often carried traumatic loads.