Week 5 Seminar Notes
Wednesday Silverstone 325 @ 1pm-3pm
Look over diary entries on study direct. Cover both a weekend and weekday with your own diary.
Spatiality of Technology
- All technologies create a unique spatial environment around them.
TV
- It's both a piece of furniture in a room and a window to an imaged elsewhere, both a commodity and a way of looking at commodities.
- While we remain attentive, fascinated and glued to what presents itself we are unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than....
- It is a ubiquitous technology and is so integrated into our social and subjective lives.
- We don't tend to take into account we could be watching something that is being filmed thousands of miles away that is projected right in front of us.
Walkmans
- "Just as the walkman changes the experience of the home, so the walkman changes the structuring of experience in public" pp.205
- It can be used for company, to create a safe and protective bubble, triggers memories and confidence.
Spatial Flows
- Novelty: Spatial exploration
- Digital mediation of play
e.g. Pokemon Go app
Our orientation through the device that we use, through our senses. We were a culture not comfortable with our own thoughts.
Before the major advancements in technology, people would still commute and not interact e.g. read a book/newspaper.
Ubiquity and surveillance are built together with a structural level.
We experience a form of freedom courtesy of technologies of everyday life. However, our freedoms are also limited by these technologies
FIFA as an example of a technology that enhances the true experience of watching football games.
Monday, 27 February 2017
Tuesday, 21 February 2017
Week 4 [Seminar Notes] - Domestication: Media and Technology becoming Everyday
Week 4 - Seminar Notes
Humans and Technology: Super-human or lesser-human?
Our experimental worlds are shaped by the media in ways that go beyond content
(Pink and Mackley, 2013)
Cyberspace: An Infinite field of Knowledge
- Moving beyond physical constraints through cyberspace.
- Everyday life: how technology fits western ideology i.e. capitalist consumerism
- Materialism: limited to our senses: Technology as an upgrade of lifestyle
- Modern lifestyles: out of our hands
- Taking back control: we use technologies to save time when time is scarce and obtain a sense of power when we may feel powerless; e.g. Shove and Southerton's Freezers
- Concerning secondary needs, does the emotion the individual gets from their actions trully explain why he/she does it i.e. pleasure, feeling a sense of belonging
- Escapism: Subconscious desires or fears?
Human and Non-Human
- Flux of human needs reflected in the non-human technologies i.e. The sociology of a door-closer (Johnson, 1988)
Society is not made up of only human relations, nor are technologies withing society separate from human paradigms.
(Johnson, 1988)
Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability are not properties of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters. Since of each of those delegates ties together parts of our social world, it means that studying social relations....
The SMART phone: Consequences
No obligitory passage point - no amount of enerfgy to spend (Johnson, 1988) An instant connection to the virtual world
Liberation
- Delegating to the smart phone e.g. sending mail - an hour spared googline something
- Bypassing the necessary, we can fulfil the desirable e.g. online shopping
...our analyse must be sensitive to both the grand stratergies of geopolitics and the little tactics of habitat
(Foucault 1980, cited in Morley 2003:437)
Distraction and Alienation
- We often overlook what is right in front of us: a 'habitat, distracted mode of perception' (Felski, 2002)
- We engage less in unmediated interaction Highmore, 2012
And we take no notice - the smart phone has become an extension of ourselves. (McLuhan, 1964)
Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground
A brave new cyberworld at our fingertips
Always connected - Cyberspace
Often absorbed and communicated globally
Always grounded - Reality
Often distracted and isolating ourselves
2 sides to daily life: we are increasingly alienated and more sociable than ever before...
Conclusions
- The cyberworld melts into the 'real' world
- The two worlds affect each other: an on-going feedback loop
- Technologies fulfil hectic lifestyles and desires
- Technologies serve us, while possibly isolating and alienating us
- There is a price we pay for the affordances of new ICTs: the digital barrier
'Our most significant alienation is the way we are alienated from being able to recognise the extent to which we are alienated.'
(Highmore, 2012: 2)
Alienation
- Stems from captalism.
- Objectification.
- It means to be alienated from youself, to some extent it is to see yourself as an object and not a human.
- It regards themes of objectification and is embedded in the exchange in things.
How do you recognise your own alienation?
- In a contemporary view, to be alienated is to replace our own natural desires with popular culture and consumerism
Monday, 13 February 2017
Week 3 [Seminar Notes] - Technologies of Everyday Life: A Narrative
Do not focus your presentation on just the readings. Do a small case study on a technology/medium.
Each week you will be given a supplementary reading you must source from the library resources (online or physically).
First Class Diary resources and examples for the first assessments of the module will be put on Study Direct.
Week 3: Seminar Notes
Technologies of Everyday Life: A Narrative
Non-Representational (Theory)
The use of a medium where it is not necessarily used for its primary function. e.g. mobile phone as an alarm clock
The context of how you present yourself is the representation of the self. Goffman argues that life is one of many different roles with regards to how you present yourself in your private and public spheres.
Phenomenology - A structure of everyday roles and a description of them.
We have routines to make us feel secure.
Week 3 [Reading Notes] - Technologies of Everyday Life: A Narrative
Reading for Session 3 Seminar
Technologies of Everyday Life: A Narrative
Reading 1:
Roger Silverstone (1989) 'Let us then Return to the Murmuring of Everyday Practices: A Note on Michel de Certeau, Television and Everyday Life' in Technology, Culture and Society. Vol 6, Issue 1, pp. 77-94
Television, it might be suggested, is everyday life
- TVs are almost in every household in the western world
- They ca be found in bars, cafes, shopping malls etc.
- Their text and images, stories and stars provide much of the controversial currency of our daily lives.
- TVs fulfil our twin desires to influence and to decipher the consequences of that influence
...the most interesting and important work which has been conducted within audience studies in the last few years is that which has taken on board the questions raised about the flow of television, the positioning of the subject, the contextual determinations operating of different types of viewing of different media, alongside a close attention to the varieties of pattern of taste, response and interpretation on the part of specific members of the audience.
(Morley, 1987:28)
Daily life is not the domain of the manipulated mass, inert and passive; and consumption is not 'something done by sheep progressively immobilised and handled as a result of the growing mobility of media they conquer space.
(de Certeau, 1984: 165)
Everyday life is the site of 'guerilla warfare': of the oral against the literary; the voice against the text; the body against the machine; the consumer against the producer.
p. 79
We consume television not just in our relationship to the content of its transmission, but also in our relationship to it as a technology, as an object to be placed in our domestic environment and articulated into our private and public culture. Both sets of consumption practices involve us in some kind of creative work. Our individual and social identities are defined through them.
p. 80
The Scriptural and the Oral
Writing is a strategic activity of modern culture par excellence, occupying a place (the text on a blank page) in the exercise of power - the power to define, to organise, to control. Writing provides the model for the scientific laboratory, industry and the modern city (cf. Goody, 1977). Through writing, bodies (in fashion, car design, food) are defined, codified and controlled. Through writing (in the production of 'folklore', fables, history, in the sciences of language, in the definition of 'progress'), voices are incorporated into the dominant.
p. 83
On the other hand, the oral escapes and opposes. Voices and bodies express pleasure and pain. The oral occupies the spaces of experience and cultural memory: the spaces of everyday life. It lies outside and against the scriptural enterprise.
p. 83
The 'oral' is that which does not contribute to progress: reciprocally, the 'scriptural' is that which separates itself from the magic world of voices and tradition.
(de Certeau, 1984: 134)
de Certeau's celebrations of interstitial places no only allow us to think more critically about the precise role of television in the mediation between everyday life and the places occupied by the Other that is in science, politics or the generically inaccessible) but they also offer a possible route for the exploration of the relationship between television, as a medium, as institution and as technology, with its audience. Above all, the offer a possible framework for rethinking the problem of the television audience as a sociological and anthropological problem - and they hint at a possible methodology for dealing with it.
p. 84
Television and Everyday Life
The defensive/offensive tactics of television de Certeau discusses involve, above all, the construction, based of course on traditional forms and understandings, of boundaries and bridges, separating and linking the products of everyday life with the products of those whose places are guaranteed by the various institutions of contemporary society. Science, religion, law, politics, art and literature are mediated and transformed, converted and perverted, as they cross the border into everyday life.
p. 85
Television is both strategic and tactical, literary and oral, occupying both place and space. It displays in its narratives both the forms and the force of a moral and political order, and it provides in its rhetorics the raw material for the heterogeneous and indeterminant practices of the everyday.
p. 85
Television, Narrative, Rhetoric
TV must be understood as both the focus and expression of an enormous and endless amount of cultural work, in which the practices of the producers, the strategies of the texts and the practices of the receivers are all mutually implicated. TV creates the metaphors of everyday life in the models, the styles, the phrases which are the stuff of daily interaction, and it does so metaphorically, its texts standing in an 'as-if' relation to the reality to the words and image of its acts of representation.
p. 86
TV is a supremely rhetorical medium. Its texts reveal an extraordinarily complex interplay of figurative devices, inscribed in and through its word and images, and in their juxtaposition. Each television genre will develop its rhetorical strategies, of course, from the particular metaphors of the title sequence, to the stylistic minutiae of the figurative images and the tropes of commentary and dialogue. Its manifest variety, the endless profusion of novelty, the significant insignificances of form and character, in drama, in news and in documentary, mark TV as occupying the heartland of the rhetorical displays of contemporary culture.
p. 89
The rhetorical work of TV is indeed almost entirely understood, predictable and familiar, yet it can spark audience into creative work, to new thoughts and meanings, indeed into the new commonplaces of everyday life. (Billig, 1987)
p. 90
Reading 2:
Sarah Pink & Kerstin Mackley 2013) 'Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life' in Media, Culture & Society, Vol.35(6), pp. 677-691
We are concerned with how media are situated as part of the routine, habitual, tacit, normally unspoken sensitivities of everyday life in the home. This refers in part to how people use media content consciously to create the sensory and experiential environment of the home. Yet our main focus is on how, through mundane and not usually spoken about routines of everyday living, media are engaged for affective and embodied ways of making the home ‘feel right’.
p. 678
The practical re-workings of home-media technologies thus create the material context through which routine ways of switching on and off media technologies and content, and the temporalities that these actions operate in relation to, become part of how everyday life is lived. They thus become constituents of the experiential context of the processes through which media are used and through which their presence is ‘felt’.
p. 679
In media studies, the treatment of media as part of the routines of everyday life has been notably developed through a focus on domestication and appropriation. For example, concerning questions related to broadcast programming, David Morley has pointed out how media ‘do not simply have effects on the home, but have rather to be analyzed in terms of how they come to be embedded within pre-existing domestic routines’ (2000: 86) as well as integral to the ‘spatial geography’ of the home (2000: 90).
p. 680
To some extent, routine uses of media to make the home ‘feel right’ do involve using music, radio or TV to create the right ‘atmosphere’. Existing work shows how radio can create part of the ‘texture’ (Tacchi, 1998) and affect of everyday life (Tacchi, 2009), how music is used to create a sense of self and home (Pink, 2004, 2012b), and reveals ‘the imaginative consequences of experiencing temporal “elsewheres” when listening to the music of previous periods or dead performers’ (Keightly, 2012: 16, referring to Pickering, 2012).
p, 680
People ‘know’ how their lives are inextricable from media but their ways of knowing are often embodied and sensory rather than always linguistic. We learned how media are part of everyday routines, precisely because participants could tell or show us how. We argue that the relevance of understanding media from this perspective is two-fold: it enables us to comprehend the situatedness of media in everyday life in ways that acknowledge but go beyond the focus on its content; and, by showing us how media are part of the ways that the routines of everyday life emerge and change, it indicates how media might enable sites for intervention.
p. 682
We approach media in everyday life (here, in the home) through three related analytical prisms: environment/place; movement/practice; perception/sensory embodied experience. Each prism, which guides both the research process and the analysis of the materials, also represents a recent ‘turn’ in contemporary social theory. Our attention to a theory of place understands ‘place’ from two perspectives, both of which depart from the association of place with locality, as well as from the idea that place is the ‘occupation’ of empty space, to see it as what the geographer Doreen Massey has termed a ‘constellation of processes’ (2005: 41). Here place, seen in an abstract sense as a way to comprehend the home as an environment, can be understood as representing the coming together of the multiple processes and movements of things that converge in ways that are constantly shifting and changing, to constitute home. While homes do usually (and did in our sample) include the buildings we call a house, a house alone is not a home and thus does not singularly define home. Instead, our interest is in how a series of tangible, intangible, material, human and other flows become, as Ingold (e.g. 2008) puts it, ‘entangled’ in the constitution of home as place.
p. 683
Turning again to Ingold, through the idea that place is made through the entanglement of the lines of movement of persons and things (see Ingold, 2007, 2011), we can start to consider how, as people move through the home as a place, encounter other persons and things, they become co-implicated with them as their trajectories become entangled. This happens, for instance, with an iPhone, the television sets that are switched on and off as people coincide with them, other humans, breakfast, the ironing, and more as they circulate around/through the home.
p. 683
As the fieldwork developed, two related themes emerged: first, that people’s routes through the home emerged as purposeful and habitual; and, second, how digital and other media accompanied, accommodated, structured or necessitated these everyday routines.
p. 684
In the example of Alan’s home, media uses and switching technologies off at the socket were mutually sustaining activities; they also, however, created the home as a particular environment in relation to media being on/off. Media remain part of the home even when their content is not active. Therefore we might see their embedding in routines as being related to their changing and differing statuses, as being ‘off’, ‘on standby’ or actively mediating content. We have found, among our sample, that while bedtime routines vary in detail, in principle they involve patterns of switching on and off that signify a transition, making the home feel right at night.
p. 684
Media use is, moreover, embedded in what is a characteristic bed time routine of checking, switching off and switching on (usually) electric devices as media and other technologies, lighting and water are habitually used by many of the participants as they move through their homes on their way to bed, making place as they move. These routes and routines enable people to transform their home from an evening to a night environment in which they ‘feel right’ in part because the routine has been accomplished. Media thus play a role in this everydayness, and in making the night-time home feel right.
p. 685
‘On’ is not a fixed category when it comes to media technologies. Instead, the on/off-ness of media might be better thought of as being associated with a quality of the home feeling ‘right’, and this, we suggest, is produced at least in part by the routine ways in which switching on and off, timing and checking are achieved. Indeed although people switch media off in habitual ways, the question of if devices are switched off/on standby or charging, is usually related to the contingencies of the particular environments of which they are part and what people need to do in order to make the home feel right (including the need to accomplish practical things like charging laptops and mobile phones).
p. 686
Our theoretical interest is in advancing the argument that our lives have become ‘media saturated’ in the sense that it is not simply media content that is embedded in the ways we experience the world and make place on an everyday basis. Rather, we also make and experience place with media technologies by engaging their capacities to be on/off and as such helping create environments that ‘feel right’ in creative, diverse and innovative ways. p. 689
In different households media are embedded in bedtime and morning routines in different ways, media are on/off differently and people’s attentiveness to and relationships with content vary. Yet media are often inseparable from such routines and the routes of movement around the home required to complete them. These routines and routes are not fixed and unchanging, or unchangeable, they are part of the ongoing processes through which place is made.
p. 689
Television, it might be suggested, is everyday life
- TVs are almost in every household in the western world
- They ca be found in bars, cafes, shopping malls etc.
- Their text and images, stories and stars provide much of the controversial currency of our daily lives.
- TVs fulfil our twin desires to influence and to decipher the consequences of that influence
...the most interesting and important work which has been conducted within audience studies in the last few years is that which has taken on board the questions raised about the flow of television, the positioning of the subject, the contextual determinations operating of different types of viewing of different media, alongside a close attention to the varieties of pattern of taste, response and interpretation on the part of specific members of the audience.
(Morley, 1987:28)
Daily life is not the domain of the manipulated mass, inert and passive; and consumption is not 'something done by sheep progressively immobilised and handled as a result of the growing mobility of media they conquer space.
(de Certeau, 1984: 165)
Everyday life is the site of 'guerilla warfare': of the oral against the literary; the voice against the text; the body against the machine; the consumer against the producer.
p. 79
We consume television not just in our relationship to the content of its transmission, but also in our relationship to it as a technology, as an object to be placed in our domestic environment and articulated into our private and public culture. Both sets of consumption practices involve us in some kind of creative work. Our individual and social identities are defined through them.
p. 80
The Scriptural and the Oral
Writing is a strategic activity of modern culture par excellence, occupying a place (the text on a blank page) in the exercise of power - the power to define, to organise, to control. Writing provides the model for the scientific laboratory, industry and the modern city (cf. Goody, 1977). Through writing, bodies (in fashion, car design, food) are defined, codified and controlled. Through writing (in the production of 'folklore', fables, history, in the sciences of language, in the definition of 'progress'), voices are incorporated into the dominant.
p. 83
On the other hand, the oral escapes and opposes. Voices and bodies express pleasure and pain. The oral occupies the spaces of experience and cultural memory: the spaces of everyday life. It lies outside and against the scriptural enterprise.
p. 83
The 'oral' is that which does not contribute to progress: reciprocally, the 'scriptural' is that which separates itself from the magic world of voices and tradition.
(de Certeau, 1984: 134)
de Certeau's celebrations of interstitial places no only allow us to think more critically about the precise role of television in the mediation between everyday life and the places occupied by the Other that is in science, politics or the generically inaccessible) but they also offer a possible route for the exploration of the relationship between television, as a medium, as institution and as technology, with its audience. Above all, the offer a possible framework for rethinking the problem of the television audience as a sociological and anthropological problem - and they hint at a possible methodology for dealing with it.
p. 84
Television and Everyday Life
The defensive/offensive tactics of television de Certeau discusses involve, above all, the construction, based of course on traditional forms and understandings, of boundaries and bridges, separating and linking the products of everyday life with the products of those whose places are guaranteed by the various institutions of contemporary society. Science, religion, law, politics, art and literature are mediated and transformed, converted and perverted, as they cross the border into everyday life.
p. 85
Television is both strategic and tactical, literary and oral, occupying both place and space. It displays in its narratives both the forms and the force of a moral and political order, and it provides in its rhetorics the raw material for the heterogeneous and indeterminant practices of the everyday.
p. 85
Television, Narrative, Rhetoric
TV must be understood as both the focus and expression of an enormous and endless amount of cultural work, in which the practices of the producers, the strategies of the texts and the practices of the receivers are all mutually implicated. TV creates the metaphors of everyday life in the models, the styles, the phrases which are the stuff of daily interaction, and it does so metaphorically, its texts standing in an 'as-if' relation to the reality to the words and image of its acts of representation.
p. 86
 |
| p. 87 |
p. 89
The rhetorical work of TV is indeed almost entirely understood, predictable and familiar, yet it can spark audience into creative work, to new thoughts and meanings, indeed into the new commonplaces of everyday life. (Billig, 1987)
p. 90
 |
| p. 92 |
Reading 2:
Sarah Pink & Kerstin Mackley 2013) 'Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life' in Media, Culture & Society, Vol.35(6), pp. 677-691
We are concerned with how media are situated as part of the routine, habitual, tacit, normally unspoken sensitivities of everyday life in the home. This refers in part to how people use media content consciously to create the sensory and experiential environment of the home. Yet our main focus is on how, through mundane and not usually spoken about routines of everyday living, media are engaged for affective and embodied ways of making the home ‘feel right’.
p. 678
The practical re-workings of home-media technologies thus create the material context through which routine ways of switching on and off media technologies and content, and the temporalities that these actions operate in relation to, become part of how everyday life is lived. They thus become constituents of the experiential context of the processes through which media are used and through which their presence is ‘felt’.
p. 679
In media studies, the treatment of media as part of the routines of everyday life has been notably developed through a focus on domestication and appropriation. For example, concerning questions related to broadcast programming, David Morley has pointed out how media ‘do not simply have effects on the home, but have rather to be analyzed in terms of how they come to be embedded within pre-existing domestic routines’ (2000: 86) as well as integral to the ‘spatial geography’ of the home (2000: 90).
p. 680
To some extent, routine uses of media to make the home ‘feel right’ do involve using music, radio or TV to create the right ‘atmosphere’. Existing work shows how radio can create part of the ‘texture’ (Tacchi, 1998) and affect of everyday life (Tacchi, 2009), how music is used to create a sense of self and home (Pink, 2004, 2012b), and reveals ‘the imaginative consequences of experiencing temporal “elsewheres” when listening to the music of previous periods or dead performers’ (Keightly, 2012: 16, referring to Pickering, 2012).
p, 680
People ‘know’ how their lives are inextricable from media but their ways of knowing are often embodied and sensory rather than always linguistic. We learned how media are part of everyday routines, precisely because participants could tell or show us how. We argue that the relevance of understanding media from this perspective is two-fold: it enables us to comprehend the situatedness of media in everyday life in ways that acknowledge but go beyond the focus on its content; and, by showing us how media are part of the ways that the routines of everyday life emerge and change, it indicates how media might enable sites for intervention.
p. 682
We approach media in everyday life (here, in the home) through three related analytical prisms: environment/place; movement/practice; perception/sensory embodied experience. Each prism, which guides both the research process and the analysis of the materials, also represents a recent ‘turn’ in contemporary social theory. Our attention to a theory of place understands ‘place’ from two perspectives, both of which depart from the association of place with locality, as well as from the idea that place is the ‘occupation’ of empty space, to see it as what the geographer Doreen Massey has termed a ‘constellation of processes’ (2005: 41). Here place, seen in an abstract sense as a way to comprehend the home as an environment, can be understood as representing the coming together of the multiple processes and movements of things that converge in ways that are constantly shifting and changing, to constitute home. While homes do usually (and did in our sample) include the buildings we call a house, a house alone is not a home and thus does not singularly define home. Instead, our interest is in how a series of tangible, intangible, material, human and other flows become, as Ingold (e.g. 2008) puts it, ‘entangled’ in the constitution of home as place.
p. 683
Turning again to Ingold, through the idea that place is made through the entanglement of the lines of movement of persons and things (see Ingold, 2007, 2011), we can start to consider how, as people move through the home as a place, encounter other persons and things, they become co-implicated with them as their trajectories become entangled. This happens, for instance, with an iPhone, the television sets that are switched on and off as people coincide with them, other humans, breakfast, the ironing, and more as they circulate around/through the home.
p. 683
As the fieldwork developed, two related themes emerged: first, that people’s routes through the home emerged as purposeful and habitual; and, second, how digital and other media accompanied, accommodated, structured or necessitated these everyday routines.
p. 684
In the example of Alan’s home, media uses and switching technologies off at the socket were mutually sustaining activities; they also, however, created the home as a particular environment in relation to media being on/off. Media remain part of the home even when their content is not active. Therefore we might see their embedding in routines as being related to their changing and differing statuses, as being ‘off’, ‘on standby’ or actively mediating content. We have found, among our sample, that while bedtime routines vary in detail, in principle they involve patterns of switching on and off that signify a transition, making the home feel right at night.
p. 684
Media use is, moreover, embedded in what is a characteristic bed time routine of checking, switching off and switching on (usually) electric devices as media and other technologies, lighting and water are habitually used by many of the participants as they move through their homes on their way to bed, making place as they move. These routes and routines enable people to transform their home from an evening to a night environment in which they ‘feel right’ in part because the routine has been accomplished. Media thus play a role in this everydayness, and in making the night-time home feel right.
p. 685
‘On’ is not a fixed category when it comes to media technologies. Instead, the on/off-ness of media might be better thought of as being associated with a quality of the home feeling ‘right’, and this, we suggest, is produced at least in part by the routine ways in which switching on and off, timing and checking are achieved. Indeed although people switch media off in habitual ways, the question of if devices are switched off/on standby or charging, is usually related to the contingencies of the particular environments of which they are part and what people need to do in order to make the home feel right (including the need to accomplish practical things like charging laptops and mobile phones).
p. 686
Our theoretical interest is in advancing the argument that our lives have become ‘media saturated’ in the sense that it is not simply media content that is embedded in the ways we experience the world and make place on an everyday basis. Rather, we also make and experience place with media technologies by engaging their capacities to be on/off and as such helping create environments that ‘feel right’ in creative, diverse and innovative ways. p. 689
In different households media are embedded in bedtime and morning routines in different ways, media are on/off differently and people’s attentiveness to and relationships with content vary. Yet media are often inseparable from such routines and the routes of movement around the home required to complete them. These routines and routes are not fixed and unchanging, or unchangeable, they are part of the ongoing processes through which place is made.
p. 689
Sunday, 5 February 2017
Week 2 [Seminar Notes] - Everyday life as critical, practical, methodological and theoretical approach
Seminar Notes: Week 2
Presentation - Week 8 (20th March)
The Everyday within 24/7 technology
Each week there will be a journal article for us to access. We will have to use library resources to find them.
Felski's reading was critical of many of the theorists of everyday life, in particular Lefebvre.
- When you look at the theories of everyday life in this reading. there is something cultural snooty about them. The everyday within normal life is burdensome, boring, repressive and depressive. Yet, the task of these theorists is to energise everyday life, which tend to dismiss the mundane in order to create a radicalness of everyday life.
- The everyday is a passive, unconscious and mundane.
- The theories of the everyday are abstractions from everyday life and are not an exact definition.
Ideology
A conscious and unconscious way of thinking, dependent on your close environments. It is a way of thinking about reality.
- There are many different ideology definitions.
- Results from the social practices we engage in.
We all live in the same world, the way in which we are brought up from an early age creates patterns of the ways we think about world.
Mannheim
Ideology are merely sectional interests revolving around some form of a world view.
--> Capitalism is based on the idea of merit. The harder you work and more effort you put in will result in a greater reward/achievement.
Marxist Theory of Ideology
Marxism looks at society as a class divided. How society reproduces itself economically is related to how society
- Are we looking at similarities of differences between the bases of classes.
- Are a set of values that are transmitted to people.
False Consciousness
This is a failure to realise where you are in the world because of ideology. It is a difficult concept to grasp.8
Falling in love is like falling over a banana skin. We are not in control of our emotive responses to most situations in everyday life.
Presentation - Week 8 (20th March)
The Everyday within 24/7 technology
Each week there will be a journal article for us to access. We will have to use library resources to find them.
Felski's reading was critical of many of the theorists of everyday life, in particular Lefebvre.
- When you look at the theories of everyday life in this reading. there is something cultural snooty about them. The everyday within normal life is burdensome, boring, repressive and depressive. Yet, the task of these theorists is to energise everyday life, which tend to dismiss the mundane in order to create a radicalness of everyday life.
- The everyday is a passive, unconscious and mundane.
- The theories of the everyday are abstractions from everyday life and are not an exact definition.
Ideology
A conscious and unconscious way of thinking, dependent on your close environments. It is a way of thinking about reality.
- There are many different ideology definitions.
- Results from the social practices we engage in.
We all live in the same world, the way in which we are brought up from an early age creates patterns of the ways we think about world.
Mannheim
Ideology are merely sectional interests revolving around some form of a world view.
--> Capitalism is based on the idea of merit. The harder you work and more effort you put in will result in a greater reward/achievement.
Marxist Theory of Ideology
Marxism looks at society as a class divided. How society reproduces itself economically is related to how society
- Are we looking at similarities of differences between the bases of classes.
- Are a set of values that are transmitted to people.
False Consciousness
This is a failure to realise where you are in the world because of ideology. It is a difficult concept to grasp.8
Falling in love is like falling over a banana skin. We are not in control of our emotive responses to most situations in everyday life.
Week 2 [Reading Notes] - Everyday Life as critical, practical, methodological and theoretical approach
Reading for Session 2 Seminar
Everyday Life as critical, practical, methodological and theoretical approach
Reading 1:
Ben Highmore (2012) 'Everyday life as a Critical Concept in Everyday Life' in Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Routledge. Vol 1. pp. 1-16.
Everyday life offers an example of a crisis that is critiqued. However, the 'everyday' could be thought of as a location of stability: it is a realm of habit and repetition, it is an arena of domesticity, of our attempts to meet our daily needs (to eat, sleep, drink, wash, play, relax etc.).
(Highmore 2012, p. 1)
The world of the day-to-day is also an arena for conflict and stuggle; struggles to maintain continuity, the struggle to accommodate the constant disruption of tradition and the production of the new; struggles between classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, generations, and so on.
(Highmore 2012, p. 1)
Everyday life points to the material actuality of living through conflict and change: our day-to-day life is the site of the often invisible hurt of discrimination, of the constant negotiation of a changing world of our attempts to live.
(Highmore 2012, p. 1)
The crises of the everyday might well be seen most immediately in a variety f emphatic symptoms. Perhaps the most obvious being the almost constant din of newspaper articles and radio and television programmes telling us about the changing terrain of everyday life.
(Highmore 2012, p. 1)
Everyday life is the managed disruption of tradition and the incorporation of both the new and the traditional within constantly changing social arrangements. It is a process of managing change but also refusing it, altering it and becoming overrun by it.
(Highmore 2012, p. 3)
The everyday is where the modern find its material and complex expression but always in relation to its older forms. For example, shopping. Look at page 4 for a description of modern shopping.
What does shopping look like in the view of everyday life?
Shop Workers
Their jobs have changed and taken on several new dimensions:
- Spend time fulfilling online orders, answering customer queries and helping customers who are having trouble with their automated check-out machines.
- They require a great knowledge about a range of items and procedures and an increase in their 'affectivity', making the shopping experience and efficient and painless as possible.
Shoppers
The experience of shopping may well connect with other patterns of everyday life that are part of the contemporary world:
- Shoppers can feel more alienated by forms of the community that are disappearing to be replaced by a life conducted through 'interfaces'.
- Shoppers can prefer it as they can have uninterrupted contact, meaning no distractions having to interact with people you may not know but who just happen to be in your immediate vicinity.
(Highmore 2012, p. 4 and 5)
Here, automated shopping acts as a continuum with a form of life that could be described as edited and mediated sociability and communication.
(Highmore 2012, p. 5)
Issues and Opportnities
One of the quickest ways to understand the critical power of 'everyday life' is to see it as the mutual testing of theory by social life and social life by theory. So, for instance, one of the most explicit definitions of everyday life by the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre claims that 'Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by "what is left over" after all distinct, superior, specialised, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined at totality' (1991: 97)
To understand this statement we need to shift our understanding of the everyday life away from thunking of it as a given reality outside of our ability to attend to it. In other words, 'everyday life' is not a reality that exists separately from our attempts to make sense of the world.
(Highmore 2012, p. 6)
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| Page 9 |
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| Page 10 |
Another way of thinking about significance and insignificance in everyday life is to think about the taken-for-granted; the world of habit; the world we take no notice of because we have got the hang of it. The world of the habitual may well appear insignificant precisely because it no longer requires our conscious consideration, and yet this is where ts importance lies: it is the world we inhabit through habit.
(Highmore 2012, p. 11)
 |
| Page 12 |
The media bring the world to us in edited and packaged forms. Parts of the world are invisible to us unless they suffer catastrophes; other parts are all too present. The media gives us access to globalisation as an editorial form. But while we might be situated in relation to one 'view' of globalisation, globalisation by its uneven nature on-going to look very different depending on your geography and the editorial forms determining this view.
(Highmore 2012, p. 12)
The cultural politics of the everyday starts out by recognising everyday life as the site and the stake of the negotiation of difference. Its potential as a field of study is that as well as revealing the daily negotiations of difference, it might also discover unnoticed connections and solidarities across difference.
(Highmore 2012, p. 14)
_________________________________________________________
Reading 2:
Rita Felski (2002) 'Introduction' in New Literary History, Vol. 33, Number 4, pp. 607-622
The content of the notion of daily life expands or contracts
according to one’s preferred definition, but it typically encompasses
such commonplace activities as eating, sleeping, getting dressed, work-
ing, home-making, and routine forms of travel, as well as the often
elaborate rituals, taboos, protocols, performances, and other symbolic
activities that encircle and define them. These recurring, un-momentous
yet indispensable events, often spurned or ignored in the mainstream
tradition of Western philosophy, comes to the fore in theories of
everyday life.
(Felski 2002, p. 607)
(Felski 2002, p. 607)
everyday life comprises not just an array of
behaviours and activities but also distinctive attitudes or forms of consciousness. It is often equated with a habitual, distracted, mode of
perception; life conducted in what Alfred Schutz calls the natural
attitude. We act without being fully cognizant of what we are doing,
moving through the world with the uncanny assurance of sleep-walkers or automatons. Everyday life thus epitomises the quintessential quality
of taken for granted-ness; it speaks to aspects of our behaviour that seem
to take place without our conscious awareness or assent and to mundane
events that unfold imperceptibly just below our field of vision.
(Felski 2002, p. 607/8)
(Felski 2002, p. 607/8)
The everyday is seen to harbour
inchoate impulses and unconscious desires that foreshadow an incan-
descent future of revolutionary upheaval. In the anticipated moment of
collective euphoria, the Situationists declared, “everyone will become an
artist in a sense which artists have never before achieved—in the sense
that everyone will construct his own life” (RG 81).
(Felski 2002, p. 609)
(Felski 2002, p. 609)
The extraordinary potential of ordinary life is also
deemed to be latent, buried, embryonic or repressed. “Men have no
knowledge of their own lives,” concludes Lefebvre; “they see them and
act them out via ideological themes and ethical values. In particular,
they have an inadequate knowledge of their needs and their own
fundamental attitudes; they express them badly; they delude themselves
about their needs and aspirations except for the most general and basic
ones.
(Felski 2002, p. 609)
(Felski 2002, p. 620)
(Felski 2002, p. 609)
Everyday life, according to Lefebvre, is belated; it is characterised by
circadian rhythms and forms of repetition that have changed little over
the centuries. Debord refers to the backward and conservative tendencies of everyday life as a form of resistance to history. To redeem the
quotidian is thus to transform the temporality of everyday perception,
unsettling sluggish and habit-bound modes of thought through the
revelatory force of the new.
(Felski 2002, p. 610)
(Felski 2002, p. 613)
(Felski 2002, p. 610)
Michael Gardiner has recently contrasted theories of everyday life and
the life-world. He argues that the idea of the life-world as it has
developed in sociology is essentially formalist, serving a descriptive
rather than critical function. It defines the everyday as a homogeneous
and undifferentiated set of attitudes, practices, and cognitive structures
that shore up the stability of the social order.
Faced with an agonizing multiplicity
of choices and decisions, buffeted by an endless array of stimuli and
sensations, we could not function in the world without the protective
cushion of habit. When individuals change their lives, James notes
astutely, they do not abandon habit so much as replace their old habits
with new ones. Agnes Heller reinforces this point in her pragmatic
account of habit. “We simply would not be able to survive in the
multiplicity of everyday demands and everyday activities if all of them
required inventive thinking.”
(Felski 2002, p. 615)
(Felski 2002, p. 615)
Specialized practices of art or philosophy do not escape their embed-
ding in humdrum dailiness; the everyday, in turn, is imbued with diverse
strands of thought and belief from the scientific to the sacred, is both
heterogenous and hybrid. As Rey Chow points out, appealing to the
everyday as either the “bedrock of reality” or as “collective false
consciousness” is a gesture as predictable as it is arbitrary; each of these
ideas invokes the everyday only to negate it, filling it with the phantasms
of a pre-determined agenda.
(Felski 2002, p. 616)
(Felski 2002, p. 616)
To suggest that theories of everyday life engage with everyday attitudes
to daily life is thus not to suggest a wide-eyed acceptance of what is, nor
to treat the everyday as a transparent or self-evident category. But it is to
begin by addressing the practical and experiential logic of everyday
modes of orientation rather than seeking to transform or transcend
them.
(Felski 2002, p. 617)
(Felski 2002, p. 617)
Rey Chow turns her attention to the presentation of everyday life in
film, drawing on two recent Chinese examples. She describes how a
visual lingering on everyday objects and actions can become a powerful
vehicle for the expression of elegaic emotion. Zhang Yimou’s The Road
Home casts the everyday as meaningful activity, redemptive labor, and
collective purpose, embedding the lives of the main protagonists in a
rural tapestry woven out of traditional actions, textures, and objects. In
Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, by contrast, the everyday is no longer
rooted but in flux, punctuated by aimless and arbitrary rhythms, even as
the camera pans across a plethora of random objects that make up the
flotsam and jetsam of Hong Kong modernity. Both films, however, are imbued with the register of nostalgic sentimentalism, a phenomenon
that Chow suggests may be closely linked to the double nature of
cinema, which combines metaphorical representation with visual refer-
ence to a pre-existent world of semiotically dense and meaningful
everyday things.
(Felski 2002, p. 618)
Mark Poster argues that the impact of new media technologies calls for a thorough-going revision of theories of everyday life. He sees Henri Lefebvre’s turn to lived experience as a challenge to traditional forms of “big politics,” while noting that his attachment to mythic notions of totality and human concreteness leaves him unable to confront the inescapability of mediation. We see an entrenched humanism at work in Lefebvre’s hasty dismissal of poststructuralist theories of language, his portrayal of consumer culture as pure mystification and his failure to theorize the role of the media in daily life. By way of example, Poster details the diverse ways in which media technologies ineradicably defined his own developing sense of self. He concludes by anticipating a future of ubiquitous computing that offers new risks as well as new possibilities, engendering a symbiosis of the human and machine that will reshape the boundaries of experiential possibility.
(Felski 2002, p. 618)
Mark Poster argues that the impact of new media technologies calls for a thorough-going revision of theories of everyday life. He sees Henri Lefebvre’s turn to lived experience as a challenge to traditional forms of “big politics,” while noting that his attachment to mythic notions of totality and human concreteness leaves him unable to confront the inescapability of mediation. We see an entrenched humanism at work in Lefebvre’s hasty dismissal of poststructuralist theories of language, his portrayal of consumer culture as pure mystification and his failure to theorize the role of the media in daily life. By way of example, Poster details the diverse ways in which media technologies ineradicably defined his own developing sense of self. He concludes by anticipating a future of ubiquitous computing that offers new risks as well as new possibilities, engendering a symbiosis of the human and machine that will reshape the boundaries of experiential possibility.
Week 1 [Seminar/Reading Notes] - Introduction
I did not attend this week's seminar and there was no set reading for the first week of the module.
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