Routines – Made and Unmade Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren
Introduction
– So what did you do today?
– Nothing, just the usual things . . . .
Such an exchange presents a challenge for cultural analysis. What’s going on when nothing seems to happen? If you ask people to narrate what they have done during the day, they might answer like this or just mention something that happened out of the ordinary. It is rare that people start listing all the minor routines that carried them from the bed to work, and if they did, all the details would probably feel extremely tedious. If we were really persistent ethnographers, trying to either observe or interview about such routines, the chances are that even then we would miss many of the small micro-routines, bodily reactions or examples of ‘just going through the movements’, which seem more like reflexes than culturally learned habits.
Doing Nothing?
This problematic has been a starting point for a research project titled The Secret World of Doing Nothing (see Ehn and Löfgren 2007, in press). In this chapter we draw on our ongoing work, looking at the large undercurrent of routines, creating rhythms and temporalities in everyday life, rarely noticed or reflected upon. We want to explore some aspects of how this undercurrent is made visible or slowly sinks into invisibility. How is an activity routinized into a habit? Why is it that some activities form more or less unnoticed platforms for other, more conscious activities? In many everyday situations the autopilot takes care of the routines and sets the body or mind free for other parallel activities.
Routines are interesting because their seeming insignificance or invisibility may hide questions of power, freedom and control, for example in the power play of ‘my routines, your bad habits’. By looking ethnographically closer at certain routines, we also want to destabilize the notion that they are about ‘just going through the same movements’. The repetitious nature of routines often hides important micro-changes that eventually may transform them into something else.
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