{"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":93,"pdf_page":96,"physical_index":96,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ece31e23d74fefde154a973d4c52007749bf78fd6468e992bab43f78b4c3fde5"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Here I am reminded of the events which unfolded around me on one particular morning commute. One of the last available seats on the train was occupied by a young woman’s book bag. The woman who owned the bag made no effort to move it as I stood before the seat, and only did so reluctantly after I asked if I could have the seat – whereupon she moved the bag down to the floor between the two chairs, where it continued to work as a divide. Before I arrived she had already folded down the table tray in front of her, and placed a book and a notebook on it. As the train departed from Lund, she sat and listened to an iPod through headphones, and, having momentarily looked at the book, wrote ‘50 cl = 500 ml, 30 cl = 300 ml’ in her notebook. After this she picked up her cell phone from her lap, and pressed a few buttons. A few seconds later she looked at her telephone again and wrote some more in her notebook. To my surprise, I realized that she was not alone. She was doing her homework with someone else I could not see. We were on a train, but we could have just as well been sitting at a kitchen table.\n\nHer activities were not unique, but part of a larger flexible pattern of routines which most commuters engage in ceremoniously on each commute as they stake out public space and convert it into semi-private space by furnishing it with their personal possessions. In this sense, iPods, laptops, cell phones, books, cups of coffee and papers from work do not just help people orientate themselves towards the home or work. They also help to ‘warm’ (cf. Ger 2005) public space (in ever-shifting contexts), and make it more hospitable to the needs and wants of the individual commuter. But they also do more than just warm space and make it seem more homelike. Part of their ability to make this space feel more hospitable is derived from their propensity to work as conduits of what Erving Goffman referred to as ‘civil inattention’ (1971: 209, 219), the process through which people can engage with one another in an ordered but seemingly disengaged manner. Working as cultural attractors of attention, they implicitly help to define everyone and everything else in our immediate surroundings as incidental and of peripheral interest. They are in other words both buffering tools of disengagement and symbolic fences demarcating the difference between the here and the there of commuter space. And it is perhaps for this reason that I felt slightly uncomfortable as I watched the woman beside me.\n\nOn my commute over the years I have watched hundreds of people send SMS messages, and always wondered what they were discussing, and with whom. Planning the evening’s activities? Receiving a grocery list? Announcing an arrival time? This, however, was the first time I had ever partaken of another person’s SMS correspondence, and understood its content. I was surprised by my own response. I felt slightly uneasy and dirty. Like a voyeur. Like someone who had secretly opened someone else’s mail. All of this reminded me of how I felt a few years earlier when I began overhearing other people’s private cell phone conversations. In those days I tried not to hear. I even turned my head away from the speaker, as if that would diminish my ability to listen (strangely enough, I still do this).\n\nMy Soul for a Seat\n\n93","previous_page":92,"next_page":94}