{"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":28,"pdf_page":33,"physical_index":33,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"de43dba9edd7e1e334a27ae00937d9df8f13aead5478da4410ffb011112d9d9e"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Given the economic and environmental costs of social synchronization, it is perhaps not surprising that governments and others have sought to level these peaks by setting lower tariffs for night-time electricity use or through more forceful methods designed to spread the times at which people take their holidays. In the Netherlands, for example, dates for school summer holidays are decided by the Ministry of Education, which sets different periods for each of three regions. Although this strategy might have advantages for the country as a whole, and for holiday resorts in particular, such methods generate new problems of coordination for those who want to enjoy the summer with people who live in another region.\n\nWhile some forms of coordination ‘just happen’, the effective accomplishment of many practices – like that of holidaying as a family – frequently requires deliberate scheduling and synchronization. In documenting the growing importance of diaries and, as they are so aptly named, ‘personal organizers’, Symes argues that their popularity indicates a shift from highly structured ‘industrial time’, characterized by a collective societal rhythm, to a more contingent form of ‘professional time’ in which each individual has a timetable of his or her own (Symes 1999: 372). Whether this distinction holds or not, a proliferation both of autonomy and of convenience devices is likely to increase the sum total of arranging required to bring several people, each locked into idiosyncratic schedules, together in the same place at the same time.\n\nObservations of this kind have led numerous commentators to claim that there has been a loosening of shared temporal order, a decline in social capital and a consequent loss of community (Putnam 2000). However popular and persuasive these claims might be, it is difficult to put them to the test without first devising some way of characterizing and comparing the practice-time complexion of different societies and of showing how they change. In the final part of this chapter I speculate somewhat wildly on what this might involve.\n\nCharacterizing Practice-Timescapes\n\nIn these last few paragraphs I stray beyond the limits of methodological plausibility and fantasize about how practice-timescapes (these being composed of the intersection of all coexisting practice-time profiles) might be represented, starting with an imaginary societal synchronization index (SSI). Not quite the same as a measure of organic or mechanical solidarity, but not entirely unrelated either, such an index would capture the extent to which the practice complex of a given society generates and requires synchronous performances. Assuming the SSI could be deployed over time, it would show whether more solitary practices are edging collective ones out of the frame and taking more time than before. Based on Figures 1.2 and 1.3, and all other things being equal, one might expect France to score higher on such an index than Finland – especially at lunchtime. More fanciful still, a suitably subtle version of such an index (the SSSSI) might be sensitive enough to detect feedback circuits in the personal and collective logistics of daily life. Understandably enough, efforts to assess the social and temporal impact of London’s congestion charging scheme<sup>7</sup> focused on the immediate aftermath. However, before and after surveys suggest that the scheme’s effects are continually reconfigured as people adjust to the responses of others – for instance, visiting friends and family at the week-end, when charges do not apply, but resorting to other strategies when faced with the new problems of social coordination that arise now that everyone wants to visit at the week-end (MORI 2004). In effect, Londoners and visitors create and re-create the consequences of congestion charging as they respond not only to the scheme itself but also to the responses and reactions of other people. This results in ebbs and flows in the spatial and temporal distribution of practices and is in turn of consequence for competitive relations between them.\n\n28\n\nElizabeth Shove","previous_page":27,"next_page":29}