{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":110,"pdf_page":113,"physical_index":113,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b65588d91e53a128c8cf72b98be1156e0847406ce6c4676423f8eb4a02a82343"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Same Procedure as Last Time?\n\nIn our discussion of the cultural potentials of mundane routines we have looked at ways in which they are made and unmade. We have been interested in how they may sink into oblivion or taken-for-granted in ways that make them work as a seamless flow in everyday life or as unconscious reflexes.\n\nThere is also the transformation when routines all of sudden come up to the surface and demand attention, as in our examples of confrontations between different habits or times of crisis when the fabric of everyday habits collapses. We have mentioned make-up and other morning routines as culturally interesting cases of temporarily coordinating practices with different rhythms that sometimes are disturbed or disrupted. The loss of such self-evident routines – often connected to bodily functions, hygiene or eating and drinking – shows how necessary they are both for personal identity and for social organization. Their importance becomes clearer when we understand how they may give security, power and freedom in everyday matters.\n\nIt is easy to get stuck in the reassuring idea of a constantly repeated pattern. If we look at the transformations of making and unmaking, another more dynamic picture emerges. The times and rhythms of everyday life, at home and at work, can be analysed as a temporal order of material practices that are reproduced and rearranged.\n\nBy looking at the coordination and disruption of routines we have tried to approach the question of what shapes the temporal patterns of our lives. The evolution of daily, weekly and yearly calendars, in the disguise of ordinary, inconspicuous routines, is a fruitful arena for looking at the interplay between material, natural, social and emotional forces in everyday actions. In this chapter we have focused on two main themes. The first is the surprising complexity of everyday routines as temporal practices. One cannot be sure of what routines mean to different people in various situations. We have to observe behaviour or ask people to describe it and tell us about its importance. On the one hand the routines express a common need for predictability and security in social life. On the other hand when they produce feelings of entrapment – to feel captured by routines is a common experience – they are associated with a robot-like life.\n\nThe other theme is the art of multi-tasking. The ability to combine different tasks simultaneously – for example, driving the car, shaving, listening to the radio and having a conversation on the cell phone – is an acquired skill. Routines may create arenas for daydreaming or problem solving, as well as a chance to be both present and elsewhere at the same time. (A mode of being that others may find provocative.)\n\nOur conclusion is therefore that it is important to look closer for traces of the subversive potential of routines. This aspect probably is not the first thing that comes to mind in connection to inconspicuous repetitive behaviour. But when you examine ordinary ways of everyday life, hour after hour, day after day, you may find that these seemingly repetitive acts in fact may produce small and successive changes, hardly perceived, but possibly important in the long run. What one sees as ‘the same procedure as usual’ does not have to be that repetitive at all. It may hide some surprising transformations, just as a trivial argument about morning routines may really be about something much grander.\n\n110\n\nBilly Ehn and Orvar Löfgren","previous_page":109,"next_page":111}