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

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.

Keywords

Internet lifestyle consumption economic crisis trauma Greece mass media netnography

Introduction: Consumption, lifestyle, and media in times of crisis

This article explores the (re)negotiation of pre-crisis consumption politics in Greece on the Internet from the beginning of the current crisis (2009) until 2015, focusing on lifestyle. Sociologically, lifestyle is a form of social differentiation based on social status, discriminating between individuals not according to their social and professional position but according to consumption patterns (Chaney, 1996: 14). In Greece, lifestyle came to describe media discourses that emphasized changing consumption patterns and marked the increasingly commercialized mediascape from the 1980s when international franchises launched titles such as Playboy (1985), while commercial radio (1987) and TV channels (1989) also appeared. From 1980, consumption standards improved. Cars, motorcycles, and modern electronic devices (e.g. VCRs) became commonplace (Notarakis, 2017; Zestanakis, 2016: 257); many (even lower-class) consumers became familiar with lavishness (Papadogiannis, 2015: 288) and expensive entertainment practices such as going out to bouzoukia¹ proliferated (Zestanakis, 2016: 257). Expressing demands for glamor, lifestyle associated conspicuous consumption with emergent Europeanization.

This article explores how lifestyle is constructed online, which meanings do particular communities of Internet users give to changing consumption patterns and to their involvement in them, and what does lifestyle say about identities, politics, and differences between the local and the global. In the late-19th century, Thorstein Veblen analyzed conspicuous consumption as a feature of the social performances of the members of the leisure class whose status derived from public displays of wealth and lavish expenditures on consumption and leisure.² From the 1980s, Greek lifestyle media promoted activities such as expensive holidays and practices accessible to the broadening middle class such as dining in ethnic restaurants. I use the term lifestyle to refer to consumer behaviors associated with growing economies of pleasure not necessarily implying extreme flashiness.

I examine how web users discussing lifestyle have seen the overturn of the consumerist utopias that Greeks experienced between the 1980s and the late 2000s and how these debates express cultural traumas. Such traumas occur when people feel subjected to horrendous events that leave indelible marks upon their consciousness, marking their memories and fundamentally changing their future identity (Alexander, 2004: 1–3). Cultural trauma is a concept usually used in examining events entailing extensive human losses (e.g. wars, physical disasters). I argue that interruptions of pleasant consumption routines are also culturally traumatic events, something evident in online discussions. The permeability does not affect all individuals (Demertzis, 2013: 33). In economic crises, as well as wars and disasters, some individuals remain untouched. Indicatively, in Spain, owners of properties valuing more than US$1,000,000 (€890,000) increased by 40% during the crisis (Sánchez, 2015).

Europeanization – a highly debated term that can range over history and culture, politics, and society, generating structural change affecting actors, institutions, ideas, and interests (Featherstone, 2003: 3) – is a major referent in discussions about lifestyle. Democracy was re-established in Greece in 1974. The country joined the European Economic Community in 1981 and then experienced unprecedented political stability and prosperity that culminated after 2002 when it joined the Eurozone. In Greece, Europeanization of the public sphere was then mostly viewed positively and entailed socioeconomic and cultural modernization and the enrichment of cultural life intended to converge with “European standards”. However, recently, due to Greece’s debt bailout agreements, social consensus has largely been replaced by anxieties over forced Europeanization, namely, measures that ensured economic viability but heightened social tensions (Maravegias, 2011).

I perceive the public sphere as a discursive space where people congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest (Hauser, 1998: 86). Jurgen Habermas’ (1989) argument that contemporary media deconstructed the bourgeois public sphere and commercialized society has been challenged (for example) by feminist thinkers who argue that Habermas was trapped in the patriarchy of traditional epistemology, which saw individuals as disembodied and self-centered (Pajnik, 2006). From 2010, the Greek public sphere has attracted international interest as prestigious media (e.g. The Financial Times) saw the Greek case as the potential prelude to a wider crisis (Laskos and Tsakalotos, 2013: 57). The Greek crisis cannot be analyzed here: briefly, Greece lost around 25% of its gross domestic product (GDP) between 2008 and 2013, social inequalities broadened, unemployment increased, and living conditions worsened (Afouxenidis, 2012). The end of the 1980s–2000s “consumption utopia” affected living conditions and destabilized the historical certainties, which underpinned Greece’s contemporary “European” identity. The Greek GDP per capita fell from US$26,919 in 2006–2010 to US$21,672 in 2011–2015, although remained larger than that of other Eurozone members such as Estonia, the Slovak Republic, and Latvia (20,147, 18,500, and US$15,692 per capita, respectively; World Bank, 2016).

The political map was dismantled. PASOK (the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement), the party of government for 21 years between 1981 and 2012, won only 4.68% of the vote in the January 2015 national elections. SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), a party criticized for its populist politics and media strategies based on the scheme of “us” versus “the establishment,” which aimed to capitalize on frustration and anger against austerity (Pappas, 2015; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014), multiplied its share of the vote by nine getting 36.34% of votes in January 2015. Golden Dawn, a far-right party influenced by Neo-Nazi ideology, evolved into a major political contender (Ellinas, 2015). The success of xenophobic rhetoric differentiated Greece from other crisis-stricken countries (e.g. Portugal) where far-right parties remained marginal (Freire et al., 2014: 415–416). The crisis affected everyday life (e.g. food politics, solidarity practices) generating new performances of resistance and (self)representations of Greekness and otherness (Kalantzis, 2015; Rakopoulos, 2014).

Changes in media flourished. In Greece, as in Spain, the media and advertising expanded rapidly after 2000, although with the onset of difficult times journalism was adversely affected. The advertising industry, which grew by 4.3% globally, declined in Southern Europe: in Portugal, it reduced 10.4% in 2011–2012 (Anon, 2012a). In Spain, public investment in advertising fell by 39% from €7718 million in 2007 to 4735 in 2011; 197 media enterprises shut down between 2008 and 2012; there were 3247 unemployed journalists in 2008 and 27,443 in 2012 (Gómez, 2012). In Greece, advertising investment reduced by 30.2% between 2009 and 2011 and 55.5% between 2008 and 2013 (Anon, 2014c; Ntarzanou, 2014); many lifestyle media enterprises closed between 2011 and 2013, a fact that preoccupied the public sphere (Zestanakis, 2016: 260).

Participatory media simultaneously popularized. Before 2008, most Greek users were young, (relatively) affluent, well-educated urban residents (Παρατηρητήριο για την Kοινωνία της Πληροϕορίας (Observatory for the Information Society), 2005: 16–21, 2010: 5, 14–17). There were about 410,000 Facebook users in 2008, roughly 1.5 million in early 2011 and around 3 million in April 2012, when 60% of Internet users had a Facebook profile compared to 17% in 2008 (Anon, 2013a; Kapsomenakis, n.d.). As smartphones popularized (a wider European trend), the profile of Greek Internet users changed; 6.18% (aged over 16 years) used smartphones in 2012 and 33% in 2013 (Ipsos MediaCT, 2013: 6). In early 2015, 69.7% of Greeks used the Internet each day (135 minutes daily on average); 52.4% of them were social media users. Internet use popularized even among elders, so online interactivity on the crisis linked users from different generations (Anon, 2015b). Hate speech flourished, touching even theoretically consensual arenas of dialog such as academia (Marantzidis, 2015).

Supplanting the traditional political opposition between left and right, austerity established new dividing lines between those for and those against the so-called “memoranda politics” – austerity measures imposed by Greece’s creditors as a condition of financial bailout (Vamvakas, 2014: 16). The first Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece – signed between the Greek government, the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund in May 2010 – involved €107.3 billion of financial assistance. In March 2012, this program was superseded by a second program signed by the same institutions comprising the undistributed money of the first program, plus €130 billion for 2012–2014. In August 2015 (the end of the chronology discussed here), the Greek SYRIZA and ANEL (Ανɛξάρτητοι Έλληνɛς – Independent Greeks) government reversed its political stance and signed a third memorandum involving €88.5 billion of financial assistance.

Methodology: Choices and limitations

This article is mainly based on netnographic findings. It draws on testimonies available in online forums and sites permitting anonymous comments so effectively functioning as forums, on common netnographic sources (Kozinets, 2010: 56). Since contributors publish using nicknames in sites open to any user, the testimonies constitute semi-published material for research (Allen et al., 2006: 607; Kozinets, 2010: 149–151). I participated in the community as a “lurker” observing and collecting information on historical phenomena (Garton et al., 1999: 90).

Many scholars have examined the proliferation of testimonial cultures in contemporary societies (e.g. Kurasawa, 2009), which the Internet facilitates. Researchers using netnographic material must be careful to avoid assumptions about contributors’ identities and social profile as some age and social groups (e.g. elders) are under-represented in web cultures.³ The Internet is not an environment of absolute freedom; indicatively, cyberbullying influences how (mainly young) users perform online identities (Smith et al., 2008). However, the identities that users perform online still broadly reflect wider trends in local and global politics, and the Internet enables freedom of expression under difficult conditions (e.g. political and economic crises) publishing opinions that out of fear or respect for politically correct communication may not otherwise have been expressed publicly (Kozinets, 2010: 28, 70; Ligaga, 2012).

Since the media are supplementary (Jenkins, 2006), a focus on the mediascape components may marginalize questions of interactivity; nevertheless, the Internet encourages the organization of groups sharing memories about the past – “communities of remembrance” (Worthy, 2014) – and fosters discussions about the (recent) past. This “amateur history” (Rubinstein, 2014) is a form of public history focused on everyday life issues within the memory of the writer, but which professional historians often ignore. Online communities have influenced the production of such history at least since the 2000s (Hilderbrand, 2007). This article analyzes two such communities: the first comprises commentators on articles devoted to lifestyle’s collapse usually (re)published in popular media (e.g. the free press journal Lifo). The second community involves participants in the forum of the site www.bourdela.com (2011-2015) (henceforth: Bourdela (Whorehouses)). Any form of virtual ethnography is partial since a rounded description of any informant, location, or culture is impossible to achieve (Hine, 2000: 65). Nevertheless, these two large communities can illustrate Greek web users’ main approaches to lifestyle.

Netnographic research requires in-depth understanding of the selected communities (Kozinets, 2010: 60). Bourdela is an engaging source for the study of lifestyle. Created in 2005, it started as a site where customers evaluated paid sex services. Gradually, its forum included threads on various topics (e.g. sports, politics), popularized, and attracted media attention. In interviews, its owners saw (relatively) affluent young and middle-aged, well-educated males predominating among its readers (Oikonomopoulou, 2008), a claim largely corroborated by traffic statistics (Alexa, 2015). Eventually, many visitors uninterested in paid sex services used the site as an information forum (Oikonomopoulou, 2008). In late 2015, the site had about 148,000 registered users “clones” included (ranked 293rd in Greece).⁴ As Bourdela favors sexist and discriminatory vocabularies (Raptis, 2016) discouraging females or homosexuals from participation, the thread about lifestyle – 1642 posts between 2011 and 2015 and the longest relevant discussion I found during my research – mainly expresses the (heterosexual) male gaze on the relations between lifestyle and the crisis. The young and middle-aged educated men among Bourdela’s users are subjects who, since the crisis, are less able to realize the traditional “man-provider” profile and are consumers affected by the transformation of gender hierarchies that lifestyle boosted from the 1980s. It refers broadly to sexual economies, a field much discussed in lifestyle media. Lifestyle’s collapse preoccupied males as its upturn had coincided with shifting constructions of masculinity (Zestanakis, 2016: 258–261), hence a male forum is a particularly relevant source.

Discussions often revolve around one person: Petros Kostopoulos. The thread used is entitled “Kωστóπουλος, Kωστóπουλοι, νɛοέλληνɛς. H αλλοίωση των χαρακτηριστικών του Έλληνα” (One Kostopoulos, many Kostopouloi, New Greeks.⁵ The alteration of the features of the Greek man). As we will discuss, Kostopoulos, a journalist, radio producer, and media owner, emerged as a cultural referent – a metonym of lifestyle journalism. Compared to Northern Europe or the United States, the Greek urban population was smaller and so was its publishing industry and mediascape. Hence, Kostopoulos had greater prominence than the literature based on other societies might anticipate. The polemic against lifestyle has often revolved around Kostopoulos, his media projects and vocabularies, the representational politics he introduced in Greece, and how he himself performed the consumption and gender politics that his media promoted. Discussions often emphasize how with Kostopoulos lavishness met provocative masculinity.

Member of PASOK as a youngster, after a long stay in France and Belgium for studies and work, Kostopoulos returned to Greece in the mid-1980s. Between 1987 and 1995, he directed Click, a lifestyle magazine discussed during the crisis as a milestone publication that negatively affected everyday politics and alienated its readers. In 1995, he co-established IMAKO, a lifestyle media company. Kostopoulos adopted an expensive lifestyle (e.g. building a luxurious villa on Mykonos Island) and performed a rather macho masculine identity. He was often considered in the media as a successful self-made businessman. In 2004, he presented the Greek version of NBC’s show The Apprentice. When IMAKO went bankrupt in 2012, Kostopoulos came to symbolize the edge and the decline of lifestyle. Consequently, many discussions about the phenomenon revolved around him. Echoing the wider moralization of consumption politics in crisis Greece (Lekakis, 2017), these discussions are often dogmatically conducted as participants search for the innocents and the culprits of the crisis.

The following analysis has two parts. The first part scrutinizes how narratives about lifestyle involve expressions of dismantled utopias and cultural trauma. They carry traumatic loads in stories about lifestyle within the communities of remembrance described above, relating them to historical and political narratives. The second part explores how these communities use contemporary history, highlighting consumption politics.

Echoes of utopia, resonances of trauma

Discussions about lifestyle’s collapse refer to the dismantlement of the pre-crisis “consumption utopia.” The concept of utopia, a dimension of time and social expectations often undervalued by historians (Liakos, 2007: 20), is useful here. Utopian thoughts reflect how history is conceptualized (Karpozilos, 2012: 532) and help us show that consumption choices are understandable only through examining their logics and their articulation of the ideals and hopes actors have. By relating consumption to utopia, we can understand how consumption connects with expectations for a better world (Bossy, 2014: 179).

Since after 1980 in Greece extreme poverty belonged to the past, utopias largely revolved around demands for life quality in conditions of socioeconomic security (Panagiotopoulos, 2015a: 341–342). Europeanization developed into a recognizable cultural referent of the country’s identity (Voulgaris, 2008: 336). Before the crisis, Greeks trusted the European Union more than most Europeans – a condition that has recently changed since “consumption utopia” was associated with convergence with Western Europe in terms of life quality (Zestanakis, 2016: 263). This trend culminated after 2002 when, as a Eurozone country, Greece obtained cheap access to loans that the banking system largely channeled into consumption.

Data on luxury car sales – a commodity relevant to debates about lifestyle – substantiate the trend. Cars became widely accessible from the 1980s (Notarakis, 2017), but few consumers owned luxury cars before the 2000s. Lexus, Porsche, and BMW sold 2, 19, and 2219 cars in Greece, respectively, in 1998; 58, 399, and 6314 in 2004; and 676, 461, and 7809 in 2008. In 2014, these brands sold only 60, 15, and 2529 new cars, returning to 1990s levels (Autotriti, 2015). Car sales also decreased in Spain and Portugal (Anon, 2012b; Muñoz, 2013). Car ownership had characterized modernization in Southern Europe after 1970. If in Spain the mass production of the Seat Ibiza in 1984 signified prosperity (Anon, 2014d), in Greece affordable cars symbolized convergence with European living standards. In the 2000s, luxury cars indicated wealth and success, a development currently reprimanded by intellectuals and politicians such as the ex-minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis (Anon, 2015a) as evidence of promiscuity.

As a Bourdela discussant points out (Anemodoura, 2014a, 2014c), “consumption utopia” also involved the popularization of credit cards, a banking product reflecting not only the holders’ current economic status but also their supposed future potential. Carrying connotations of historical linearity, credit cards express expectations of perpetual prosperity. Greeks owned 3.03, 5.15, 6.91, and 2.9 million credit cards in 2000, 2002, 2008, and 2013, respectively. In 2009, Greeks owned 6.14 million credit cards, while Swedes, Germans, Danes, and Bulgarians owned 5.61, 3.55, 1.95, and 1.05 million, respectively (Tsiros, 2015). Greece resembled Portugal where credit cards represented 18.6% of bank credit in 2010 and Spain where credit card use in 2013 had returned to 2005 levels (Artunes, 2010; Centro de Estudos Sociais, 2013: 40–41; Santamarta, 2012).

The proliferation of credit cards from the late 1990s epitomized a wider mentality change. Then, many Greeks looked to make money quickly as Sotiris Gkoritsas noted in Bαλκανιςατέρ [Valkanizater] (1997), a film narrating the adventures of two friends hunting quick profit in the post-communist Balkans. The success of the first TV reality games that promoted the early-2000s careless aesthetics offering outrageous prizes reflected this change (Tziantzi, 2002). Anticipating Greece’s participation in the Eurozone, the Athens stock market boomed from 960 units in early 1997 to 6335 units in 1999. There were about 1.5 million active accounts at that time. Between 1999 and 2001, the annual average values of transactions were about 140% of the country’s then GDP (Anon, 2014b). Although shares rolled down in 2000–2001, consumerist utopias survived as banking facilities influenced the relations between representations and potential for their materialization. Indicatively, Piraeus Bank (2003) was making holiday loans of up to €6000 to consumers desiring expensive travel experiences. Following a trend evident in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ireland where bank funding reduced 47% between the beginning of the crisis and 2013 (Anon, 2013b), such banking products soon disappeared.

Recent online (re)interpretations of such developments carry traumatic loads. As the definition of an event as traumatic reflects subsequent interpretations and power relations (Edkins, 2003: 44–45), potential (re)interpretations of lifestyle online are (re)mapped through current power relations. The crisis’ traumatic status revolves around a decline in living standards and questions of national identity entailing disenchantment about Europeanization. This disenchantment is expressed two-fold. Several contributors see the pre-crisis period as a “wasted opportunity” as Greece failed to align with affluent Western Europe, while others criticize Europeanization as an alienating process. Trauma is reflected in the fact that many Bourdela contributors deny interest in lifestyle media – something odd given the site’s audience demographics. Indicatively, a commentator claims that he only encountered the magazines casually. Resonating with the site’s aesthetics, he also condemns interest in lifestyle as a primarily feminine concern:

I read [Kostopoulos’ magazines] occasionally […] in doctors’ offices, in friends’ homes and from girlfriends who were […] buying them. (asia_fun in Bourdela, 2012)⁶

Interest in lifestyle stigmatizes the narrator even in conditions of anonymity, something undesirable for systematic forum users claiming the identity of respectable interlocutors within the community. We can identify a change in relations between gender performances and consumption: before the crisis, conspicuous consumption and interest in issues such as fashion disassociated themselves from femininity and were recognized as compatible with modern urban male identities. Recently, such gender performances are increasingly discussed as pathetic (Zestanakis, 2016: 261). Mainly addressed to heterosexual men and replete with web machismo, Bourdela came to associate a pre-crisis interest in consumption with femininity.

As lifestyle has been blamed as a cause of the crisis by the increasingly influential left-wing media, many users’ reluctance to admit interest in lifestyle shows the power of SYRIZA’s media politics to August 2015, the party’s position toward conspicuous consumption, and their subsequent uses of contemporary history. While it was an opposition party, SYRIZA attributed post-1974 positive developments to the Greek people blaming the pre-crisis political establishment for all recent adverse events (Panagiotopoulos, 2013: 275). SYRIZA’s rhetoric identified lifestyle with elitist consumerist values and the establishment and saw it as a cultural enemy. Kostopoulos was damned as a carrier of the corrupted values that PASOK represented.

The 1980s expansion of consumption opportunities helped heal the divisions that had traumatized Greek society for decades following the Civil War (1945–1949), and which then fed into the trauma of crisis after 2009. Since 1980, consumption emerged as a link among groups with different political beliefs (Close, 2004). Gradually, many Greeks, even those who self-defined as socialists, adopted lavish consumer behaviors (e.g. visiting expensive nightclubs) that lifestyle media identified with Europeanized gender identities, mainly masculinities (Papadogiannis, 2015: 288; Zestanakis, 2017: 100–101). In 1998, Evangelos Giannopoulos, then a PASOK minister, condemned those criticizing bouzoukia describing them as “cultural centers” (Anon, 1998). Sentiments of security intensified in the 2000s when Greece joined the Eurozone and organized the 2004 Olympic Games. This “European” identity came into question after 2009 because of recession and forced Europeanization: 23% of Greeks trusted the European Union in late 2014 compared to 56% in late 2009 (Tακτικó Eυρωβαρóμɛτρο (Regular Eurobarometer), 2014: 1–4). As a Bourdela user argues, when the “consumption utopia” weakened, populism gained popularity:

90 per cent of those abusing him [Kostopoulos] were bigging it up as long as they had cash in their pockets. When there was no more cash some of them became left-wing intellectuals, others patriot voters of Golden Dawn and others “sprayed” Greeks.⁷ (Anemodoura in Bourdela, 2014b)

Trauma also lies in the fact that the historical trend toward better living standards was interrupted and that the purchasing power of Greeks decreased. Many consumers adjusted to cheaper choices: in 2014, Lenovo, an affordable electronics brand, ranked first in Greece (Anon, 2014a); similarly, low-cost airline Ryanair attracted more than 5 million passengers in its first year of operation in the country (Tsakiris, 2015). If “traumatic statuses can be attributed to events overturning the emotional and cultural expectations that provide subjects with a sense of security and capability” (Alexander, 2004: 10–11), online debates about lifestyle reflected the passage from a period of consumer optimism to one dominated by insecurity and anger. In the Internet, dynamics of (re)politicization as a result of austerity bring together users from different generations debating about contemporary history often through a “black and white” prism: what did (and did not) “go wrong” in the recent past. This question is examined further below.

Narrations online

The crisis years saw the publication of many articles about lifestyle that can roughly be divided into those discussing the decay of lifestyle media written by people who had previously worked in that area (e.g. publishers, journalists) and those written by journalists working for media-affiliated organizations or belonging to political parties. Many contributors identify lifestyle with PASOK and Kostopoulos. The promotion of lifestyle by Kostopoulos and its relations with PASOK create an occasion for ironic comments. Anthropological research reveals that Greeks tend to use irony to condemn (actions of) the political system not only in critical (Knight, 2015: 232–234) but also in prosperous times (Brown and Theodossopoulos, 2000: 4–5). In our case, irony in comments below articles authored by persons with key roles in lifestyle’s success is frequent and usually based on the commonest pattern of irony, the description in positive terms of a situation the narrator sees as negative (Kreuz and Link, 2002: 128). Comment writers often talk in terms of “revenge”. Following an international trend (Benwell, 2004), Greek lifestyle magazines employed masculine patterns of expression entailing extensive irony which created representational hierarchies in aesthetic and stylistic criteria between their readers and their detractors. Irony in comments reverses this prior irony, expressing a desire for “revenge” against lifestyle. This desire culminated in early 2012 when IMAKO went bankrupt. Graffiti visualizes political trends and disputes on urban walls (Basea, 2016). The “revenge” theme was depicted in a sarcastic graffito in Kolonaki⁸ showing Kostopoulos next to the phrase “Πɛτράν γɛρά” (Petros don’t give a damn and move on) (Anon, 2012a).

Comments below articles by ex-lifestyle journalists fall into two categories. First, some saw lifestyle as part of Greek mediascape modernization. These users argue that despite ending what was a key encouragement to excessive consumption, lifestyle’s collapse had a negative effect as it contributed to increased unemployment. Second, others welcome lifestyle’s collapse as a positive development viewing it as the cause of a consumerist utopia when many Greeks became accustomed to living above their means and were negatively influenced by western cultural models. The first two extracts belong to the first category and those following to the second:

60,000 enterprises will close in 2012. The problem is not [… that] Kostopoulos was spending money on bullshit […] [The problem is] what the fuck is going on with this state and us as [a] society. We are sinking and instead of swimming we smother those swimming next to us. (μπουρζουά (bourgeois) below Kostopoulos, 2012)

Even if I did not agree with lifestyle […] I think that we don’t need so much dissipation. These people and their businesses collapsed like all entrepreneurial activity in the country. (angelos below Aριστɛρóς Ψάλτης (left-wing chanter), 2013)

[Petros Kostopoulos] thanks for your priceless gift to our generation. Your contribution to our critical thinking, our taste and culture pays off in our current situation. (Anonymous user below Terzopoulos, 2012)

May I have a copy of the PhD of this crypto-intellectual [Petros Kostopoulos]? It will help me sleep better in the nights after the collapse of the scoundrel with the raised eyebrow. (Antonis Evangeloulis below Papadopoulos, 2012)

Many posts in Bourdela echo the comments below such articles. Lifestyle is identified with PASOK and castigated as morally harmful. The relations between Kostopoulos and Andreas Papandreou, PASOK’s founder and prime minister in 1981–1989 and 1993–1996, are commented on. The gender politics are interesting. Lifestyle media questioned the established identities of “man-fighter” and “man-provider” and associated successful masculinities with commodities that were previously considered as directed at women and homosexuals (e.g. cosmetics; Zestanakis, 2017: 99). They also promoted interest in fashion, travel, and casual sex colliding with left-wing ascetic culture that in general (at least officially) had promoted stable sexual relationships in the initial post-dictatorship period (Papadogiannis, 2015: 252–260):

Kostopoulos. PASOK’s curse that maimed [the] Greek man’s DNA. After PASOK [the party] of Andreas [Papandreou] and Kostopoulos came into power the hard-working and thoughtful Greek man became the scummy, noov person of nowadays. […] For this reason we went morally, politically, socially and economically bankrupt. (jstar in Bourdela, 2011)

[Kostopoulos] is one of Papandreou’s favourite children and […] promoted the style of PASOK’s nouveau riche who […] fucks everything, goes to bouzoukia with chicks, spends a lot, has a Rolex [watch] and a [Porsche] Cayenne. Contemporary Greece’s decline […] is the result [of the activities] of Kostopoulos and his friends. […] Before the 1980s […] when someone was a hustler people were spitting on him. Afterwards, if you were not a hustler they were calling you idiot. […] Beforehand they were saying well done to the homemakers who were saving money for their old age. Now people say “well done” to those spending much to show their cunningness. (drclaw in Bourdela, 2014)

Contrarily, some discussants underline that lifestyle succeeded through people’s selective choices servicing new needs in prosperous times. They associate lifestyle with new trends in entertainment, mediascape modernization, and more systematic contacts between Greek and European media:

The magazines were sold at the kiosks. Nobody bought these titles at gunpoint. […] I used to buy lifestyle magazines as a teenager, nobody advised us to […] sell our grandmothers’ fields in the village to [buy] better cars. […] The magazines showed us a way of life but we were not obliged to follow this path […] Sometimes we were buying these magazines to see a piece of ass or to see if any new clubs had opened. (str81977 in Bourdela, 2011)

I don’t sympathize with Kostopoulos and I never bought his filthy magazines. But we can’t charge him with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Before the 1980s Greece was more or less an isolated country. […] After the 1980s the political situation stabilized, new [consumption] models came from abroad […] Greeks started to dream. These magazines started […] when we were watching […] CNN, BBC and the French TV5. We were watching how other Europeans were living. (Bet_Rantanplan in Bourdela, 2014)

[Kostopoulos] had lived abroad […] and thought to publish such magazines here [in Greece]. New products are dynamic in a new market. Especially when they flatter [the audiences]. [Kostopoulos] was [a] buddy [of the political system] […] Just a jumped up peasant and smart arse. But beyond a few slickers, the rest of us, we were benighted; we were admiring whatever was polished. [We were a] backward society recently liberated at that time. (obiwan in Bourdela, 2011)

Some participants historicize their arguments invoking personal experiences as youngsters while other contributors do not clarify their age. As many contributors claim to be young, it seems that participants not old enough to have experienced the first steps of lifestyle in the 1980s are formulating their opinion drawing on the last phases of the phenomenon when lifestyle sidelined the references to politics that had characterized its first stage. Discussants comprise a “community of remembrance” combining memories with postmemories, a term describing how a second generation relates to powerful experiences that preceded their births but were transmitted to them through elders (Hirsch, 2008). Here, postmemory does not refer to the birth of the discussants but rather to their emancipation as consumers. For youngsters, the trauma of the collapse of pre-crisis consumption certainties lies in the “elimination” of their generation from the prosperous pre-crisis Greece.

Many discussants use vulgar words. Although in the past, profanity usually characterized urban people, recently it has been dispersed among non-urban residents (Young and Travis, 2012: 50). Consequently, vulgarity does not convey the sociocultural profile of the contributors. Moreover, as anti-memoranda radicalization brought rural and urban individuals closer in terms of identification and desire (Kalantzis, 2015: 1064), such distinctions become less relevant. People use profanity for emphasis, shock value, or because it is a learned habit evoking some social risk (Young and Travis, 2012: 50). In Bourdela, profanity is favored by the site’s context. Moreover, I would locate online vulgarity within the sociolinguistic condition that sociologist Panayis Panagiotopoulos (2015b) defines as the “warization” of everyday life, a development significantly attributed to SYRIZA’s combative media politics, such as the divisive slogan “Tους τɛλɛιώνουμɛ ή μας τɛλɛιώνουν” (We finish them or they finish us) before the September 2015 general elections. Not all left-wing parties adopted such strategies. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has been cautious in the use of social media (Stavropoulos, 2012), while SYRIZA used cadres as trolls fighting for the party’s positive image online and openly encouraged its supporters to blame political opponents (Anandranistakis, 2014; Ekloges12, 2012).

The roots of this effective use of communication can be located in the Athens revolt of December 2008 – a moment that re-energized anti-establishment discourses and practices in Greece (Kornetis, 2010). Since then, the victimization of young people has increasingly been presented as a condition justifying even extreme forms of reaction (Pantazopoulos, 2013: 34–39). As cyberspace is a privileged field of interaction among youngsters, sentiments of anger and disappointment abound online. As we saw, several narrators invoke youthfulness as an alibi in terms of age and media literacy: as they were inexperienced about the representational politics of novel media, they had the right to taste them. The 1980s are discussed as a period of “media puberty” and lifestyle media as a temptation that consumers – “children” in terms of media literacy – reasonably were curious to try.

The power of Kostopoulos as media icon is expressed by the fact that many narratives identify him with lifestyle as a whole ignoring that he joined the field only in 1987 and that other enterprises had published lifestyle magazines earlier.⁹ Shared memories are mutual reference points often not actively attended to yet retaining their ability to shape present perceptions, thus collective memory acts as a socially articulated and maintained “reality of the past.” Earlier, as the main means for memory articulation was talk, family gatherings or other meetings represented occasions for the (re)construction and repair of memory (Irwin-Zarecka, 2009: 54–55). Nowadays, the Internet constitutes a terrain of (re)formulation of memory. Kostopoulos is discussed not so much because of his role in the 1980s but because of his identity and itinerary later on: the arrogant masculinity that he often performed, the ways he ideologized it, his connections with the political establishment, and probably – in terms of male antagonism – his relations with beautiful women before he married model Jenny Balatsinou – a 1990s Greek sex symbol – in 1996:

This guy [Kostopoulos] had a deplorable, arrogant style in his editorials: I fuck models because I am [a] hotshot, I wear awesome clothes, go to hip places and go out with cool guys. […] [He was] simply disgusting! (asia_fun in Bourdela, 2012)¹⁰

Although the discussions include tensions, a number of contributors historicize their arguments writing texts that are less polemical than articles by professional journalists who used pejorative vocabularies analyzing lifestyle (e.g. Anandranistakis, 2013). Some users take the opportunity offered by interactive media to develop alternative discourses to those circulated by mainstream media; others reproduce the arguments and the style of “traditional” media. This point echoes recent developments in the relations between Greeks and the Internet. “Democratization” of Internet use alongside the popularization of social media contributed to the repoliticization of the public sphere. The crisis introduced new citizens to politics. To a degree, the public sphere polarized because audiences previously not accustomed to develop political arguments did so for the first time in public under the conditions of increased anonymity that the Internet offers (Vamvakas, 2014: 9–14). So those disliking lifestyle had chances to denigrate it, but the Internet also created a platform for lifestyle’s few sympathizers as we see in the first two extracts below. Although this requires further research, it seems likely that opponents of lifestyle share various political beliefs transcending the cleavage between those standing for and against memoranda politics. The last two extracts are from sympathizers of pro-memoranda politics:

I am one of the few sympathizers of Kostopoulos. […] He was writing about a slightly better way of life […] dress codes, nice looks. I liked it. (xilnik in Bourdela, 2012)

Bow to Kostopoulos. (palermo in Bourdela, 2012)

[I] can’t hear serious people saying that lifestyle has no responsibility for our decline. They were writing that you should have a summer house in Mykonos and another one for the winter in Arachova,¹¹ not to say to have both […] regardless of your [real] economic status with borrowed money. So, lifestyle has big responsibility for today’s comedown. (gianevan in Bourdela, 2012a)¹²

Conclusion

This article examined how lifestyle was online discussed in Greece web between 2009 and 2015. Using web testimonies as a primary source, it aimed to show netnography’s potential in the study of contemporary history, encouraging historians to engage further with this methodology. We followed changes in the media and how consumption and lifestyle were mediatized and emerged as crucial topics of public debate and how the Internet stood out as a terrain on which experiences of the crisis are discussed, politicized, and historicized. The article also scrutinized how discussants (re)approach the recent consumerist utopias and detected the traumatic dimensions of this (re)evaluation. Finally, it explored the uses of contemporary history and its relations with current politics in this changed narrative perspective.

Users discuss how consumption marked contemporary Greece, often formulating arguments combining personal experiences with general – not infrequently historicized – remarks, effectively writing “amateur history”. Such debates corroborate the Internet’s importance as a site of production of narratives about the (mainly recent) past. Debates bring together users who experienced lifestyle’s first steps in the 1980s with younger consumers who lived it, partially corroborating consumption’s centrality in the construction of contemporary Greek subjectivities and their reflections online. Consumption has been a milestone referent in Greece’s European identity and its media representation. As the disruption of consumerist certainties questioned pre-crisis prosperity, (conspicuous) consumption is often discussed in polarized terms. The historicization of personal experiences influences such debates. The progress of “amateur history” touching consumer and lifestyle politics amounts to an ongoing exercise of self-awareness testifying to consumption and lifestyle’s importance in everyday life experiences. Hence, Petros Kostopoulos is castigated for the cultivation of foreign-origin flashy and alienating consumer attitudes that contributed to the country’s current economic situation.

Europeanization is associated with changes in media politics and consumption patterns from the 1980s. While a number of contributors recognize lifestyle’s modernizing dynamics, more discussants believe that it promoted “wrong” ideas about Europeanization and influenced audiences negatively. The crisis interrupted consumerist certainties and affected the organization of memories: the transformation of consumption standards is experienced as a “fateful event” to use an Anthony Giddens’ (1991: 113) term. Almost ironically, this fatalism tempted even the usually optimistic Kostopoulos in 2011 when he wrote, “seeing how the International Monetary Fund has fucked us, I realize that most things I believed in in my life […] proved wrong. I find stability only in my five friends, my children and my wife” (Kostopoulos, 2011).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Efi Avdela and Mitsos Bilalis for reading an initial version of this article and Shani D’ Cruze for commenting on multiple previous drafts. I am also grateful to the participants of the conferences ‘Crisis and Solidarity in European History’ (Vienna, April 2015) and ’Μνήμη και αϕήγηση‚ (Memory and Narration) (Thessaloniki, June 2015), and to the anonymous referees for their remarks.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is partially based on research conducted for my PhD research project Lifestyles, Gender Relations and New Social Spaces in 1980s Athens, that was supported by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation between 2010 and 2014.

Notes

Author Biography

Panagiotis Zestanakis earned a PhD in contemporary European history from the University of Crete in 2017. His research interests include the history of everyday life in post-dictatorship Greece, the history of media and representations and the uses of contemporary history in participative web cultures. His work has appeared in several international journals such as Film, Fashion and Consumption, Transfers and Journal of Greek Media and Culture.

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