{"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":21,"pdf_page":26,"physical_index":26,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"02e9fadd81f02ebc2b10d6056761e47b1dd264e9d48005398e7c7c3ea3012472"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Should evidence like this exist for a large population and over a significant number of years, it would undoubtedly reveal changing habits on a massive scale. For example, the arrival of daily showering as opposed to weekly bathing would show up as traces both of time and of water consumption, with people now devoting more minutes and litres to ‘personal hygiene’ than before, and with these minutes now being spread more evenly across the week. Sure enough, data on each ‘microcomponent’ of water use, gathered by Anglian Water since 1992, reveal increases in the proportions of water used for showering and a parallel decrease in bathing.\n\nNone of this is especially surprising, but these examples are useful in highlighting relevant differences between complex systems of practice and consumption in this case of energy, water and time. While the demand for energy and water increases and decreases over the year and during the day depending upon the resource intensity of what people do, this is not so of time. Strategies of multi-tasking arguably allow individuals to increase the intensity of time use and so extend the envelope of the day (a Yahoo–OMD study [2006] identified a 43-hour day made possible by multitasking), but a great many practices are mutually exclusive: doing them simply precludes doing something else at the same time.\n\nIt is because of this quality that data showing how the twenty-four hours of the day are on average allocated to specific activities (Figures 1.2 and 1.3) reveal interesting differences in the profile of what Finnish and French people do when, and in the homogeneity of the sample.\n\nThese graphs demonstrate that French respondents spent more time eating and that on a number of counts lunchtime is more pronounced than in Finland, a country in which food consumption is fairly evenly distributed across the day. They also illustrate the extent of collective variation, for example, in the duration of the normal working day, the spread of morning and evening rush hours and the level of societal synchronicity. I shall return to this issue of inter-personal scheduling, but for the moment it is enough to recognize that going to sleep and waking up are effectively collective processes – even for those who do them alone (Lefebvre 2004: 75).\n\nFigures 1.2 and 1.3 are snapshots of a particular year (2000), so although they depict differences and similarities, they tell us little about how such arrangements come to be as they are. Providing it has been collected consistently over a number of years, time-use data can reveal changes in the profile of what people do. Based on a comparison of time-use studies from the Netherlands, Norway, France, UK and USA, Southerton et al. (2007) suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, reading practices are not converging, nor are rates of participation declining dramatically in the face of other competing activities. While this research gives a sense of the ebb and flow of specific ways of spending time, and hence the relative vitality of different practices, it does not show how discrete rivalries develop,<sup>2</sup> for example between print-based reading, TV viewing or reading on the internet.\n\nEveryday Practice\n\n21","previous_page":20,"next_page":22}