Selling Sustainability: How Digital News Constructs Home Gardening as an Ideal Lifestyle in Indonesia
home gardening, digital news discourse, sustainability communication, critical discourse analysis, lifestyle ideology, Indonesia
Abstract
This study examines how Indonesian digital news constructs home gardening as a discourse of an ideal lifestyle rather than merely an agricultural practice. Using a corpus of 45 online news headlines, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis integrated with the perspectives of mediatization and lifestyle ideology. The findings reveal that home gardening is framed through five major dimensions: spatial efficiency, domestic economic productivity, the aestheticization of green living spaces, individualized sustainability, and selective community empowerment. Linguistically, the headlines strategically combine ecological morality, visual appeal, and financial benefits through terms such as productive, aesthetic, eco-friendly, profitable, and easy. The study also demonstrates that these narratives normalize a neoliberal citizen model in which individuals are expected to optimize limited domestic spaces, secure family well-being, and privately address environmental issues. This article proposes the concept of domestic sustainability as an aspirational media lifestyle, in which sustainability is commodified as a middle-class identity within contemporary digital culture.
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