{"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":70,"pdf_page":73,"physical_index":73,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8ba51d33b372cdb664c9dee616addfcf278fd15cf82166112c24d975ac82c38b"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"1999. It lasted eleven days, affecting 600,000 residents. Protests and battles over compensation, however, continued well after reconnection (Ullberg 2005). In other cases, the prevention of disasters can require deliberate smaller-scale disruption and the active participation of people willing to adapt their habits. Rolling blackouts or rota-cuts of water that hit certain groups of users sequentially can avoid a systemwide collapse. So, too, can campaigns to induce consumers to use less water and energy in expectation of a serious shortage. At this level, it becomes important how people think about the nature of the challenge. In the early 1970s, Americans who saw the energy shortage as the ploy of profit-hungry companies were less like to adopt energy-saving behaviour than those who believed it was a genuine geopolitical or environmental crisis (Gottlieb and Matre 1976).\n\nPeople’s experience of disruption is relative and highly subjective, and this influences the elasticity of their responses and the resilience of systems. For some British commuters interviewed in 2005, ‘congestion’ meant standstill, whereas for others it was ‘driving along at 20/30 miles an hour . . . where you’d otherwise be bombing around at 90 miles an hour’ (Department of Transport UK 2005: 41–42). Some drivers had come to hate congestion so much that they refused to visit their children during the day and instead would only drive the 20 miles in the evening. Others lived with congestion by turning their car into an office on wheels. Here are examples of how the rhythm of one practice (driving/congesting) impinges on others (socializing, working). It is important to stress that disruption is not automatically experienced as frustration or altogether negative. A survey of commuters in Austin, Texas, found a correlation between stress and highway mileage, but also noted that 37 per cent felt their commute was ‘somewhat’ or ‘very enjoyable’ (Bhat et al. 2005: 22). The privacy of the car, to be able to select the radio channel of one’s choice or simply open and close the windows whenever one feels like it, makes congestion more acceptable to many than the noise and enforced intimacy of public transport (Department of Transport UK 2005: 70).\n\nThere are, then, good reasons for seeing the production and consumption of disruptions as entangled, not separate processes. The failure of public utilities offers a promising way to probe more deeply into this relationship. Because of their potentially devastating impact on public health, safety and order, power shortages have attracted considerable attention in disaster studies.<sup>1</sup> Here analyses of crowd behaviour loom large, in part because of the historical proximity of disaster studies to military and psychological concerns with panics and the collapse of authority during the Cold War and in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations. At the same time, electricity is also an ‘enabling technology’ for many quotidian practices (Nye 1998), so its disruption affects routines that are not strictly speaking matters of public order and safety, such as watching television, putting the toaster on or reading a book by lamplight. Just as there has been an ever-tighter coupling between organizational systems, so networks and practices have become increasingly entangled.\n\n70\n\nFrank Trentmann","previous_page":69,"next_page":71}