2

When Space Feels

Thoroughly Familiar

Having established certain ideas about the changing situational geogra-  phy of social life, I want to come back now to a point that I left unde-  veloped in the previous chapter. In my sympathetic critique of Joshua  Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985), the last of my five difficulties with  his understanding of place was that it fails to deal with what I referred  to there, rather mysteriously, as a ‘something more’. I hinted that this  ‘something more to place’has todo with matters of dwelling or habita-  tion, requiring definitions of place as location to be extended signifi-  cantly. In order to develop my point, itis necessary for me to explain in  detail what these matters are, and the explanation that I offer in the  current chapter involves venturing well beyond what would normally  be regarded as the boundaries of media studies. Much of the academic  literature that I will be engaging with is to be found in the disciplines  of geography, philosophy, anthropology and sociology. The main focus  of this work isnot usually on media of communication and their appli-  cations in contemporary society, and when media do figure they are not  always theorised in a way that I find helpful. For instance, problematic  claims  about  placelessness  resurface  towards  the  end  of  the  chapter.  Nevertheless, I want to insist that the literature I will be reviewing is of  the utmost relevance forthe analysis of media uses, and for an appreci-  ation of how everyday physical and media environments become‘lived’ or ‘inhabited’ spaces. A link with part of the previous chapter (where I  referred to  Heidegger,  1962;  Scannell,  1995,  1996) is provided by my  emphasis over the coming pages on phenomenological perspectives.

Space and Place

The words in the title of this second chapter are taken from Yi-Fu Tuan’s  book,  Space  and Place:  The Perspective  of Experience  (1977),  which  has  been described recently by Tim Cresswell (2008, p. 53) as ‘aclassic text’ inhuman geography (see also Rodaway, 2004, for a profile of Tuan as a

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     27

key thinker on space and place). Tuan is perhaps the best known of a number  of  geographers  who  were  developing,  during  the  1970s  in North America, a distinctive ‘experiential perspective’ on formations of place  in  everyday  living  (for  example,  see  Buttimer,  1976;  Seamon, 1979; Buttimer and Seamon,  1980; Relph, 2008  [1976]). These geogra- phers  drew  on,  among  other  influences,  the  insights  of  European phenomenological  philosophy  (see  especially  Heidegger,  1962,  1993 [1971];  Bachelard,  1969;  Merleau-Ponty,  2002   [1962]).  As  Cresswell (2008, p. 55) observes, the themes opened up by Tuan (1977) (and by his fellow pioneers) foreshadowed ‘much of the most exciting work in the contemporary social sciences and humanities’ (I will be referring to some examples of that contemporary work in due course, as well as to some  of the  older  philosophical  foundations  of what  Seamon,  1980, p. 148, labels ‘phenomenological geography’).

In an article by Tuan (1996a [1974], p. 445) with the same title as his  subsequent book, in which he began tosetouthis conceptualisationsof  space and place, he states clearly that: ‘Place … is more than location.’ Interestingly, with regard to Meyrowitz’s dual definition of place, Tuan  (ibid.)  notes,  too,  that  it  is  more  than  ‘one’s  position  in  society’ (although issues of social difference and power remain important for an  understanding of place). For him, the something more to place has to  do precisely with matters of dwelling or habitation, because he argues  that place is constituted when locations are routinely lived-in and when  what  he  calls  a  ‘habit  field’  or  a  ‘field  of  care’  (ibid.,  pp.  451–2)  is  formed.  With  reference  to  physical  settings,  he  argues  that  place  is  accomplished  through  repetitive,  habitual  practices   (see  Heidegger,  1993 [1971], p. 349, on dwelling as ‘from the outset“habitual”’), giving  rise to ‘affective’ attachments in which ‘people are emotionally bound  to their material environment’ (Tuan, 1996a [1974], pp. 451–2).

It is just such a definition of place  (as an experiential accomplish- ment  binding   people   and   environments)   that   is   missing   from Meyrowitz’s understanding of the term (Meyrowitz, 1985). Indeed, itis only implicit in Paddy Scannell’s phenomenology of radio and televi- sion (Scannell, 1995, 1996; however, I anticipate a further development of  his   phenomenological   perspective   in   Scannell,   forthcoming) . Scannell’s  identification  of  broadcasting’s  dailiness  and  readiness-to- hand is extremely valuable, as is his notion that people can find their way about in its programme output. As I showed in the previous chap- ter, he also points to how listeners and viewers may get caught up in momentous public occasions, and to the implications of radio and tele- vision  consumption  for  ways  of  being-in-the-world.  Still,  the  fact

28     Media, Place and Mobility

remains that in his Radio, Television and Modern Life (Scannell, 1996) the doubling-of-place  idea  remains  one  in  which  place  is  conceptualised primarily as a location, ratherthan as a practical and emotional accom- plishment. The doubling of place is understood, then, as a simultaneous ‘occupation’  of  two  different  yet  continuous  social  spaces.  For  this reason, I see the writings of Tuan, and of others in human geography and elsewhere who broadly share a focus on the experiential dimension of place (on issues of habit, affect and attachment to environment in everyday  living),  as  crucially  important  for  my  book’s  overall  thesis, because they move beyond observing the occupation of space to deal with its inhabiting.

Tuan  (1977),  as  his  book’s  title  suggests,  distinguishes  the  term ‘space’   from   place,   equating   the   former  with   physical   location (although, as Casey, 2002, p. 404, rightly cautions, this must not lead to thinking of space as a ‘raw’ material that is ‘simply there’, and that is ‘coterminous with nature’). Space, writes Tuan  (1977, p.  6),  ‘becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’. Place, for him (ibid., p.  73), is location made familiar, concrete and meaningful through  practice:  ‘When  space  feels  thoroughly  familiar   …   it  has become place.’ The  kind  of  ‘practice’  that  he  is  concerned with  here requires a ‘learning’ process, but it is not necessarily the type of learn- ing that is associated with ‘formal instruction’, as it tends tobe bound up with the apparently unremarkable business of ‘getting around’ and ‘orientation’in everyday environments:

We are in a strange part of town: unknown space stretches ahead of us.  In  time  we  know  a  few  landmarks  and  the  routes  connecting them. Eventually what was strange town … becomes familiar place.

Abstract space, lacking significance other than strangeness, becomes concrete place, filled with meaning … we are oriented … we can find our way.

(ibid., p. 199)

However,  Tuan  (ibid.,  p.  68)  realises  that  the  ordinary  practices  of ‘wayfinding’  referred  to  in  his  example,  which  serve  to  transform initially  ‘unknown’  locations  into  places,  might  not  be  straightfor- wardly translatable into words or pictures:‘People who are good at find- ing their way in the city may be poor at giving street directions to the lost,  and  hopeless  in  their  attempts  to  draw  maps.’  What  he  names ‘environmental experience’ (ibid., p. v; also a central term for Seamon, 1979, whose research will be discussed later) can often be difficult to

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     29

express  symbolically.  This  is  because  the  ‘know-how’  required  to  get around with ease in urban spaces, and to feel at home in everyday envi- ronments more generally, is practical and embodied. In addition, it is important to note that a ‘sense of place’ (Tuan,  1996a  [1974], p. 446), which  emerges  when  ‘we  are  oriented’,  involves  a  combination  of bodily senses.

One of Tuan’s main arguments is that place ‘exists at different scales’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 149; see also Tuan, 1996a [1974], p. 455). In the example  that I have just cited, his interest is informations of place in the context  of city neighbourhoods. At the larger scale of the region or nation, he is  concerned  with  feelings  of  ‘attachment  to  homeland’  (Tuan,   1977,  p. 149; and see Edensor, 2002, pp. 88–98, for an account of how routine  activities  or  ‘habitual  performances’,  including  ritually  tuning  in  to  scheduled broadcast programmes, can be  significant for formations of  collective  identity).  On  a  different  level,  Tuan  (1996a  [1974],  p.  455)  contends that: ‘Place can be as small as the corner of a room’. At this  micro-social  scale,  for  instance,  ‘a  favorite  armchair  is  a  place’  (Tuan,  1977, p.  149). Indeed, following in the footsteps of Gaston Bachelard  (1969), whose book, The Poetics of Space, is a classic philosophical study  of the significance of domestic settings, Tuan (1977, p. 144) writes about  ‘the house as home’ (see also Heidegger, 1993 [1971], p. 348, who gives  a valuable reminder that ‘houses in themselves’ do not ‘hold any guar-  antee that dwelling occurs in them’). Tuan (1977, p. 144) remarks that  the house as home is ‘full of ordinary objects’, which are known inti-  mately and sensually‘through use’:‘They are almost a part of ourselves.’ This point about a household’s ‘ordinary objects’that are ‘almost a part  of ourselves’ reminds me of Elaine Lally’s analysis of the domestication  of the home computer (Lally, 2002), discussed atthe end of my previous  chapter, in which she refers to the integration of the commodity into an  ‘ecology of objects’. It enables me to signal the way forward, too, to a  later stage in the current chapter, when I will be considering ‘embodi-  ment relations’ (Ihde, 1990, p. 74) involving the uses of media technolo-  gies within familiar material environments.

Again and Again

Many years after the publication of Space and Place (Tuan, 1977), Tuan (2004) wrote a piece on senses of place that I find particularly interest- ing  for  its  examples  of  attachment  to  what  I  would  call,  following Meyrowitz’s lead, media  environments  (Meyrowitz,  1985),  although  I

30     Media, Place and Mobility

should make it clear that Tuan does not employ this term in his work. In the piece I am referring to, he picks up the theme of time and place that had been explored towards the end of Space and Place, where Tuan (1977, p. 202) askshow long it takes for people‘to form a lasting attach- ment’ to a location. He does acknowledge the potential for occasional cases of‘love at first sight’ (Tuan, 2004, p. 48; and see again Meyrowitz, 2005, p. 26), but, in his reflections on time and place, he emphasises the importance of repetition and return.

Describing the routine physical movements of everyday living, Tuan (1977, p.  180) notes that these often ‘complete a more or less circular path’. For example:

In  the  home  pieces  of  furniture  such  as  a  desk,  an  armchair,  the kitchen sink … are pointsalong a complex path of movement that is followed  day  after  day.  …  As  a  result  of habitual  use  the  path  … acquires a density of meaning. … The path and the pauses along it constitute a … place.

(ibid., pp. 180–2)

There might also be everyday movements that  ‘swing back and forth like a pendulum’ (ibid., p. 180), such as those involved in commuting between  a  private  house  or  apartment  and  a  public  site  of  work. Whether  it  is  a  cyclical  or  a  pendulum-like  motion,  though,  Tuan’s concern  is with  repetitive,  habitual practices  that  are performed  ‘day after  day’,  which  serve  to  ‘constitute’  places  over  lengthy  periods  of immersion in environments.

In Space and Place, Tuan barely mentions media of communication and their applications in contemporary society. However, in the more recent piece of his that I want to consider now, there is a fascinating discussion of affective attachments to ‘photographs’, ‘movies’, ‘stories and novels’and‘music’ (Tuan, 2004, pp. 49–53). What he highlightsin this discussion is the significance of their repeated use (of returning to them ‘again and again’, see ibid., p. 51).

When writing on photographs, then, Tuan (ibid., p. 50) states that it is possible to‘develop the habit of dwelling imaginatively’in particular images, which‘we … visit andrevisit’ (itis worth adding here that such engagements with photographs  are not  only visual,  since the images have  traditionally been  physical  or  material  things  that  are  handled, and today they  are  often  accessed  on  screen by pressing  a button  or double-clicking a mouse). Similarly, when attending to the example of cinema, he makes the following personal ‘confession’:

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     31

I have seen the movie Gone With the Wind at least a dozen times, the first time … when I was a child. … I returned to the movie again and again. For, after several viewings, Gone With the Wind became a place for me.

(ibid., p. 51)

The last few words of that quote (‘became a place for me’) are pivotal, because Tuan is clearly thinking about place as an experiential accom- plishment, as ‘more than location’. A specific media environment, in this  instance   a   film,   is   transformed   through   repeated  use   into   a ‘lived space’  (the notion of ‘space as  …  lived  …  the space of “inhabi- tants”and“users” ’ comes from Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39; see also Cresswell, 2008, pp. 57–8, who asserts that this idea of an ‘inhabited space’is‘very close  to Tuan’s  definition  of place’).  Indeed,  given  the  availability  of audiovisual  recording  and  playback  facilities  today,  repeat  viewings of films are now common, and it is even possible for viewers to select their favourite scenes from a movie to watch again and again.

Tuan’s next example is that of oral and print fictions. He observes how ‘young children … like to hearthe same story over andover’, and also  how  some  ‘adults  …  revisit  …  favorite  novels’  rather  like  they might revisit a ‘hometown’ (Tuan, 2004, p. 52). Although the narrative ‘paths’will already be‘well trodden’by such hearers or readers, who are well  aware  of  how  the  stories  conclude,  they  nevertheless  return  to them precisely forthe evocation of a familiar fictional world. Finally for Tuan, there is the experience of listening to music, and the intriguing question of why some people return again and again to their favourite musical pieces. He insists that they are not doing so in order to hear and be moved by ‘something new’ every time they listen to such a piece. Rather, they do so in order ‘to be exposed to a presence, to be in the midst of a magical place’ (ibid., p. 53; and note that there are echoes of Scannell, 1996, with this reference to ‘presencing’andthe magical).

From  my  perspective,  it  is  a  pity  that  Tuan  does  not  extend  his  insightful analysis, so as to include experiences of other media environ-  ments. It is also a pity that, in his discussion of photography, cinema,  fiction and music, he chooses to employ a ranking of different types of place.  In  this  ranking,  valued  physical  settings  are  privileged  while  meaningful media settings are relegated to the status of‘surrogate place’ (Tuan, 2004, p. 49), or are seen as mere ‘cousins to place’ (ibid., p. 52).  Personally, I see no reason why any universal hierarchy of place-types is  required. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Tuan’s general approach is  potentially  a  fruitful  one  for  those who work  in  media  studies, with

32     Media, Place and Mobility

wider applications than he seems to realise. For example, his emphasis on  the  importance  of  repetition  and  return  for  the  constitution  of places could help to throw some new light on the uses of an ‘everyday mass medium’ such as the newspaper. Consider the regular readersof a daily  paper.  It  would  be  reasonable  to  assume  that  these  readers  are expecting to find something new every time they buy the paper, since they do so partly on the promise of‘news’. However, itis worth noting that  another, possibly more  significant,  element  of their  engagement with and attachment to the paper is likely tobe the expectation of find- ing the same things ‘over and over’, day after day. The paper’s layout, then, tends to be unchanging, which  can be  a  source  of comfort for readers. They are presumably able to‘get around’in this media environ- ment with ease, physically turning the pages with their fingers, having developed  the  necessary  know-how  to  find  their  way  quickly  to  the entertainment section, the sports pages and so on. They may also get to know,  over  time,  the  styles  of particular  journalists  and  personalities who write for the paper on a regular basis. If Tuan was to extend his analysis in the direction I am advocating here, he might well conclude that the paper is a location or a setting that can be transformed into a place  through  ‘habitual  use’  (that  is,  made  concrete  and  meaningful through practice). As a habit field or a field of care is formed, the space of the daily paper comes to feel ‘thoroughly familiar’.

In relation to my proposal that the daily paper might become a place for its readers, according to Tuan’s definition of the term, I will bring the present  section  of  the  chapter  to  a  close  now  with  a  final  point, concerning the connections between newspapers, radio and television as media of communication. I find it interesting that Scannell  (1996) mentions these connections, occasionally and just briefly, in his Radio, Television and Modern Life. While there are evidently many differences between  print  and  electronic  media,  he  observes  that  ‘the  press  and broadcasting’ (sometimes referred to, collectively, simply as ‘the media’) have a comparable‘everyday worldliness’ (ibid., p. 177) and sharesimi- lar principles of ‘serial production’ (ibid., p.  10). Both ‘provide a daily service’ that is the remarkable outcome of a complex, ongoing indus- trial  process,  yet  they  each  manage  to  do  so  ‘in  such  a  way  that  it appears as no more than what I … am entitled to expect as an aspect of my  days’  (ibid.,  p.  149),  or,  putting  it  more  colloquially,  ‘as  “no big deal” ’ (ibid., p. 177). It follows from this comparison that itis alsopossi- bleto understand the routine uses of broadcasting as place-constituting activities. The media spaces or environments made available by radio and television may, over time, come to feel thoroughly familiar too.

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     33

Walking/Driving in the City

At this stage in the chapter, I want to return to the matter of getting around  in  urban  physical  environments,  which  was  raised  by  Tuan (1977)  in  his  illustration  of the  distinction between  space  and place. This is because it enables me to link Tuan’s important remarks about orientation and wayfinding with the work of another theorist who was writing on a similar theme during the  1970s, but on the other side of the  Atlantic.  I  am  thinking  here  of  Michel  de  Certeau’s  book,  The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), which was published in English a decade after it originally appeared in French (for an early discussion and appli- cation  of  his  ideas  within  media  studies,  see  Silverstone,  1989).  In particular, I am thinking about a chapter of de Certeau’s book on ‘walk- ing  in  the  city’  (de  Certeau,  1984,  pp.  91–110;  see  also  de  Certeau, 1985), on which I will be focusing initially in the present section. I then want  to  make  a  further  link,  this  time  with  Nigel  Thrift’s  work  in contemporary human geography, which goes under the name of ‘non- representational  theory’   (see   especially  Thrift,   2007).   Later  in   the section, I turn to his account of‘driving in the city’ (see ibid., pp. 75–88, for material that was first published as Thrift, 2004a; and see Amin and Thrift, 2002, pp. 100–1). In the course of considering these reflections by de Certeau and Thrift, I will also be referring, along the way, to some interesting work on the significance of media technologies in practices of walking/driving in the city.

De Certeau’s discussion of‘the city’begins with a personal story of an  eventful  experience.  He  describes  how,  on  a  visit  to  the  US,  he viewed New York‘from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 91; that particular perspective is no longer available, of  course,  following  the  tragic  events  of  9/11).  This  experience  of ‘elevation’, he argues, has granted people the extraordinary opportu- nity  of  ‘looking  down  like  a  god’,  as  if  at  a  map,  on  a  city  that  is ‘immobilized before the eyes’ (ibid., pp. 91–2). Meanwhile, writes de Certeau  (ibid.,  p.  93),  ‘ordinary  practitioners  of the  city  live  “down below”   …   they  are  walkers’.  Their  everyday  practices  of  ‘moving about’ (ibid., p. xix) are a crucial part of the ‘mobility characteristic of the bustling city’ (ibid., p. 93), which can be contrasted with the map- like city that is seen from up high. It is ‘on ground level’, then, that the  ‘footsteps’ and  ‘intertwined paths’ of walkers help to constitute, collectively, what Tuan would call places: ‘a process of appropriation of  the  topographical  system  on  the  part  of  the  pedestrian’  (ibid.,

.        .   p  97)

34     Media, Place and Mobility

Elaborating  on that  contrast between  ‘the planned  city’  (‘immobi-  lized’ from above) and ‘the mobile city’ (‘bustling’ with human bodily  activity on the streets ‘down below’) (ibid., p. 110), de Certeau borrows  selected concepts from the discipline of linguistics. At the time he was  writing The Practice of Everyday Life, he was certainly not alone in draw-  ing on ideas from that discipline, as there had been a broader ‘linguis-  tic  turn’  in  the  social  sciences  and  humanities,  which  was  mainly  associated with a movement known as ‘structuralism’. However, what is  interesting  about  de  Certeau’s  appropriation  of  linguistics  for  social  theory is his emphasis on language use in context, ‘the act of speaking  (or practice of language) … in relation to its circumstances’ (ibid., p. 33),  rather than on abstract structures of language. As he points out, this is  the  concern  of  a branch  of linguistics  called  ‘pragmatics’  (ibid.;  in  a  different way, it is also the concern of conversation analysis in sociol-  ogy, see Sacks, 1995), and itis therefore possible to think of his book as  developing a sort of pragmatics of everyday living. For instance, in his  chapter on walking in the city, he writes of‘pedestrian speech acts’ (de  Certeau, 1984, p. 97) or ‘pedestrian enunciation’ (ibid., p. 99), arguing  that‘walking istothe urban system what the speech act is to language’ (ibid., p. 97) as a structure or sign-system. In other words, de Certeau’s  interest is in how the routine physical movements of pedestrians serve  to  ‘articulate’  cities,  creating  ‘another  “spatiality” ’ by  turning  urban  settings into inhabited spaces: ‘Thus the street geometrically defined by  urban planning is transformed … by walkers’ (ibid., p. 117).

Although Tuan (1977) does not draw on linguistics in the same way as de Certeau (and while reading de Certeau, 1984, alongside Tuan can be a little confusing, because the terms space and place are employed therein a way that turns the usual conceptual distinction in geography ‘on its head’, Cresswell, 2004, p. 38), I am nevertheless struck by the parallels between their approaches. Both theorists are concerned with ordinary activities of getting around. Both are concerned with experien- tial  accomplishments  that  bind  people  and  environments.  However, one  significant  difference between  them  has  to  do with  de  Certeau’s connecting of the pragmatics and the politics of everyday living. For me, this connection is simultaneously valuable and problematic. It is valuable because it raises issues of social difference and power  (about which Iwill have more to say later) that are important when consider- ing routine practices, but it is also problematic because, in the specific case  of  de  Certeau’s  work,  rather  too  simple  an  opposition  is  set  up between the ‘clever tricks of the “weak” ’ and the ‘order established by the“strong” ’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 40). Within the terms of that general

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     35

opposition between the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’ in contemporary soci- ety, pedestrian movements, alongside a range of other practices such as ‘talking, reading …  cooking, etc.’, are understood by de Certeau (ibid., p. xix) tobe creative improvisations that are ‘tactical in character’, and he contends that these tactical‘ways of using’involve a contestation of the‘dominant … order’ (ibid., p. xiii). Itis not difficult to see that, while his attention to the improvisational aspects of quotidian cultures is to be welcomed, such a model of resistance relies upon a highly romanti- cised  view  of  ordinary  activities  (see  also  Fiske,  1989,  for  a  similarly romanticised view). Indeed, The Practice of Everyday Life begins, tellingly, with the following dedication: ‘To a common hero … walking in count- less thousands on the streets’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. v).

Today, of course, those who are ‘walking in countless thousands on the streets’ (ibid.) often do so while carrying mobile media technologies, and  this  means  that  it  is  now  necessary  to  expand  on  de  Certeau’s account of moving about on foot. Making direct reference to his social theory, Caroline Bassett (2003, pp. 344–5) contributes tosuch an expan- sion in a piece on mobile-phone use:

I still walkin the city. But I am no longer a pedestrian in the old sense because …  the city streets are full of virtual doorways. …  Countless ways through, ways out and ways into the city … are constructed by … mobile-phone … use. This change … means that … I can walk … in the streets and simultaneously connect with other people  …  far away. … I can be reached on my mobile phone but also … I can use it to reach out … to move and actin multiple spaces.

What  she  seeks to do here, then, is precisely to develop de  Certeau’s notions  of  movement,  action  and  space,  by  putting  the  matter  of getting  around  in  urban  physical  environments  together  with  the matter of technologically mediated mobility or of finding ways about in media environments. Incidentally, itis worth noting Bassett’s choice of the word ‘reach’, as it also appears, in a rather different context, in the literature  of  phenomenological  geography  (Buttimer,  1980;  and  see Silverstone,  1994, pp. 27–8, for a brief but insightful consideration of Buttimer’s concept of reach in relation to television and other media of communication).

Like Bassett, Thrift (2004a, 2007) looks to develop de Certeau’s ideas  about ‘ordinary practitioners of the city’  (de Certeau,  1984, p. 93) by  taking account of technology. More specifically, he wants to ‘take into  account the rise of automobility’ and explore ‘the practice of driving’

36     Media, Place and Mobility

(Thrift,  2007,  p.  75),  which,  given  the  significance  of  the  car  as  an element of ‘our  “technological unconscious” ’ in contemporary urban living,  is  strangely  absent  from  de  Certeau’s  analysis.  Perhaps  it  is because  de  Certeau  takes  ‘the practice  of walking  …  as  a  sign  of the human’  (ibid.) that he neglects the practice of driving, regarding this activity, which is itself a sort of technologically mediated mobility, as somehow  less   embodied   and  therefore  less  human  than  walking. However,  in  Thrift’s  view,  driving,  and  ‘passengering’  too,  are  ‘both profoundly embodied and sensuous experiences’ (ibid., p. 80). In fact, one of the key features of his broader theoretical perspective, which I will be outlining shortly, is that humansought not tobe approached‘as separate from the thing world’, since the human is a ‘tool-being’ (ibid., p. 10). For Thrift, then, the boundaries between bodies and technologies are blurred and unclear. In the case of car driving, there is the emer- gence  of  a  hybrid  ‘person-thing’  (of  what  Katz,  1999,  p.  33,  calls  a ‘humanized car’ or an ‘automobilized person’).

Drawing  on  research  findings  reported  by  sociologist  Jack  Katz (1999), who, with his students, had carried out an investigation of driv- ing behaviour in the city of Los Angeles, Thrift (2007, p. 81) asserts that ‘drivers  experience  cars  as  extensions  of their bodies’  (this  notion  of technologies as extensions of bodies and the senses clearly echoes the first-generation medium theory of McLuhan,  1994  [1964], outlined in the previous chapter), and he notes that ‘as a result of this  …  driving can … be a highly emotional experience’ (see also Sheller, 2008 [2004]). In  addition,  driving  practices  might  usefully  be  understood,  in  de Certeau’s terms, as creative or tactical in character, as long as this does not lead to an unrealistically romantic view of driving as a form of polit- ical resistance. Just as the pedestrian makes ‘shortcuts and detours’ (de Certeau,  1984, p.  98),  so the  experienced urban  driver is involved in going down ‘streets that …  carry little traffic …  using another car as a “screen” in order to merge onto a highway’ (Katz, 1999, p. 36) and so on. Similarly, just as walking helps to constitute places, so cars can be, in  two  linked  ways,  ‘a  means  of  habitation,  of  dwelling’  (Amin  and Thrift, 2002, p. 101; and yet itis vital to acknowledge that there may be frictions  between  the  place-making  activities  of  pedestrians  and  car drivers). First, cars ‘inhabit the road’, and, second, they‘are a habitation in  themselves’  (ibid.).  In  relation  to  the  latter  point,  cars  have  the potential to become routinely lived-in, ‘homely’ locations for drivers, and they now come equipped with ‘sound systems … in-car navigation systems  …  climate control  …  ergonomically designed interiors  …  and the like’ (Thrift, 2007, pp. 84–5).

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     37

Working in the field of media studies, Michael Bull (2001) has inves- tigated in greater detail how ‘sound systems’ are employed in cars. He focuses on the‘auditory’aspects of‘automobile habitation’ (Bull, 2001, p. 187; see also Bull, 2007, pp. 87–107), and his empirical research mate- rial on the car as a ‘sound environment’ therefore serves as a valuable supplement to Thrift’s analysis of‘automobility’. Consider, for example, the following account from one of Bull’s research participants:

When Igetin my car andI turn on my radio, I’mat home. I haven’t got a journey to make before Igethome. I’m already home. … I wind the window down so I can hear what’s going on and sometimes as the sun’s setting …  I’m in town and I think … what a beautiful city … I’mliving in.

(Bull, 2001, p. 185)

There are three brief points that I want to make about this quote. First, the driver’s at-homeness in the car is evident here because itis expressed verbally (although, as I noted in my earlier discussion of Tuan’s work, such environmental experience is not always translatable into words), and that experience of being-at-home is evidently bound up with the car’s sound environment. It is realised by the routine act of switching on the radio. Second, itis necessary to add that the driver’s sound envi- ronment is by no means limited to what is heard on the radio. When the driver says ‘I wind the window down so I can hear what’s going on’, it is clear that there is a doubling of the audible as the familiar sounds of the radio and the city intermingle. Third, it is also necessary to add that the driver’s experience is a multi-sensual one. For instance, as well as hearing the sounds of the radio andthe city, there isthe sight of the setting sun andthe shifting urban visual scene. Then there isthe sense of touch involved in switching on the radio, along with the touch and bodily coordination that would obviously be involved in holding and turning the steering wheel, moving the gearstick, operating the various foot pedalsand so on.

Non-representational Theory

In this section and the one following it, I offer short commentaries on two  approaches  in  the  contemporary  social  sciences  and  humanities that are closely related. Indeed, my first commentary will merge into the  second.  Getting  to  grips  with  these  approaches  is  not  easy.  It

38     Media, Place and Mobility

requires   an   engagement  with   what   are   sometimes   quite   difficult conceptsand issues, which are likely tobe unfamiliar to many students in the field of media studies. Even so, I want to propose that therewards of engaging with this material outweigh any difficulties encountered in the process, because the approaches in question have the potential to challenge  certain  established  modes  of media  (and  cultural)  analysis, and to open up or, putting it more modestly, to widen alternative lines of inquiry.

When  Cresswell  (2008,  p.  55)  points  to  the  connections  between  Tuan’s experiential perspective and  ‘much of the most exciting work’ that is going on today, he is thinking, at least partly, about the ways in  which the phenomenological geography of the 1970s foreshadowed the  emergence of non-representational theory within contemporary human  geography  in  the  UK.  Non-representational  theory  is  a  term  that  appears  consistently in Thrift’s writings from the mid-1990s  onwards  (for example, Thrift, 1996, 1999, 2004b, 2007), and my outline of that  approach here will be based chiefly on a consideration of his arguments,  developing what I have already written in the previous section about his  analysis of automobility. However, it should be remembered that many  others, including several academics who were once doctoral students in  Thrift’s department during the 1990s, are working in the same area (for  example, see Anderson and Harrison, 2010a, for a recent collection of  essays by geographers on ‘non-representational theories’). It should be  remembered,  too,  that,  although  I  am  citing  non-representational  theory as an instance of contemporary work, and while Thrift employs  the term as a label for his own writings, he also uses it to name, retro-  spectively, a tradition of analysis in philosophy and social theory that is  both  long  and broad.  Like  the phenomenological  geographers before  him,  he  is  influenced  by  the  philosophy  of  Martin  Heidegger  and  Maurice  Merleau-Ponty,  claiming  them  as  non-representational  theo-  rists (see the diagram that he presents in Thrift, 1999, p. 303). Further  influences include the ‘micro-sociology’ (Thrift, 2004b, p. 99) of Erving  Goffman,   Harold   Garfinkel   and   others,  which  was   of  interest   to  Meyrowitz (1985) and Scannell (1996), in addition to the social theory  of  de  Certeau  and  his  compatriot  Pierre  Bourdieu,  whose  work  will  feature at a later stage in the chapter.

Ben Anderson (2009, p. 503), whois partof a younger generation of non-representational theorists in the discipline of geography, helpfully characterises the approach as an attempt to explore‘the taking-place of practices’, and he emphasises the point that‘non-representational theo- ries are theories of practice’. This means that they focus primarily on

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     39

what people, as well as ‘non-human … actants’ (ibid., p. 504), are doing. Indeed, when Thrift (1996, p.  1) initially sets out his agenda for non- representational theory, he admits to an academic  ‘obsession  …  with the sensuousness of practice’.

Within the general project of investigating practices or ‘doings’, the  ‘main tenets’ of non-representational theory include a concern to ‘pay  more  attention  to  the  pre-cognitive’  (Thrift,  2007,  p.  7)  in  everyday  living, and also a linked concern with ‘stressing affect’ (ibid., p. 12), as  Tuan had started todo years earlier with his assertions about place and  attachment (but see Thrift, 1999, p. 319, for a brief, mixed assessment  of previous  ‘phenomenological work  on  place’).  In  addition,  there  is  Thrift’s  overlapping  interest  in  ‘the  way  in  which  the  human  body  interacts with …  things’ (Thrift, 2007, p. 10), on which I have already  commented with specific reference to ‘cars as extensions of …  bodies’ (ibid.,  p.  81;  and  see  Thrift,  1996,  pp.  40–1,  who  acknowledges  the  ‘extension of bodily capacities made possible through … various media  of telecommunications’).

For the purposes of this outline of non-representational theory, let me lookin a little more detail at what Thrift has to say about the signif- icance of‘the pre-cognitive’ (elsewhere, Thrift, 2004b, p. 85, prefers the word  ‘non-cognitive’),  because  that  theme  has  not  been  addressed explicitly thus far in my chapter and it is one to which I will be return- ing in due course (for example, with reference to Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962]). Thrift (2004b, p. 90) insists that‘only the smallest part of think- ing is explicitly cognitive’, following up his statement with a question (with an answer and some further explanation, too):

Where, then, does … the other thinking lie? It lies in the body. … It lies in … all the senses. … Notice … that … none of this is meant to suggest that cognition is not important. Rather, it is  …  to radically extend what thinking might be.

That  attempt  ‘to  radically  extend  what  thinking  might  be’  involves  attending to  ‘thought-in-action’  (Thrift,  1996, p.  7)  or, better  still, to  ‘practical knowing’  (Thrift, 2007, p.  121) and ‘embodied dispositions’ (ibid., p. 58) in everyday environments.

Another reason for considering the importance of the pre- or non- cognitive here is that it helps to explain Thrift’s selection of the word ‘non-representational’. To some extent, his vocabulary choice was bound up with a frustration over the way in which many human geographers in the  1980s and beyond, and particularly those based in the area of

40     Media, Place and Mobility

cultural geography, had been focusing their attention on the structures  of‘symbolic representations’atthe expense of attending to‘actions and  interactions’ (Thrift, 1996, p. 6; and see Wylie, 2007, who discusses, for  instance,   the   notion   of   ‘landscape-as-text’   in   cultural   geography,  contrasting it with contemporary ‘landscape phenomenologies’). At the  same time, though, Thrift writes of the non-representational in a way  that links up with philosophical debates about subjectivity and percep-  tion. In line with the phenomenological philosophy of Heidegger and  Merleau-Ponty, he contests conceptions of human being that are asso-  ciated with‘rationalism’and‘cognitivism’, and which have now filtered  into  common  sense  (Thrift,  1996,  pp.  9–14;  see  also  Taylor,  2006;  Carman, 2008). Putting it as  straightforwardly as I can,  such concep-  tions or models have tended to assume a separation of ‘inner’ subject  and‘outer’world (of mind and body too), in which that external world  is perceived by means of mental ‘representations’ (and the body is an  object directed by rational thought or ‘cognition’). The main problem  with these models is that, when starting outwith this sort of separation,  it is hard to appreciate ‘how meanings  …  emerge from practices  …  in  the  world’  (Anderson  and  Harrison,  2010b,  p.  6).  In  contrast,  ‘non-  representational models’ (Thrift, 1996, p. 6) reject the dualisms of self/  world and mind/body, emphasising the ‘engaged …  embodied agency’ (Taylor,  2006,  pp.  210–11)  of  ‘being-in-the-world’  (Heidegger,  1962;  Dreyfus, 1991).

Philosopher Charles Taylor (2006, p. 212) provides a clear explana- tion of what such an engaged, embodied agency involves:

Being this kind of agent means one has an implicit understanding, what Heidegger at one point calls a ‘pre-understanding’, of what it is to act, to get around in the world, the way we do. But this isnot a matter of representations. The rationalist epistemology induces us to jump to this conclusion because it construes all our under- standing  as made up  of representational bits  …  this is not  at  all what pre-understanding is like.  …  To know one’s way about is to be  really  moving  around,  handling  things.  …  This  background sense of reality is nonrepresentational, because it is something we possess  in  …  our  actual  dealings  with  things  …  it  is  a  kind  of ‘knowing how’.

This is exactly what Thrift (2004b, p. 90) is getting at when he argues  that  there  is  much  thinking  which  ‘lies  in  the  body  …  the  senses’ (indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that all ‘thinking’, even

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    41

‘the  smallest part’ that  ‘is  explicitly  cognitive’,  still has  a  connection with bodily experiencesofthe world, since thereis no separable, disen- gaged and disembodied‘mind’). In the course of everyday living within familiar material environments, there is a pre-cognitive understanding or  ‘bodily understanding’  (Carman,  2008, p.  99), which is intimately connected to ‘our actual dealings with things’ (Taylor, 2006, p. 212). It is  a  practical  knowing,  a  knowing  how  ‘to  act,  to  get  around  in  the world’.  Walking  and  driving  in  the  city,  as  well  as  passing  through ‘virtual doorways’ (Bassett, 2003, p. 345) and‘moving around’in media settings, would serve as good examples of routine activities that incor- porate  this  type  of  know-how.  I  will  come  to  more  examples  soon, including several that literally involve ‘handling things’.

The Dwelling Perspective

Itis not justin human geography but in social anthropology, too, that phenomenology has been influential  (for instance, see Jackson,  1996, for a collection of essays in ‘phenomenological anthropology’; see also Howes, 2003; Pink, 2009, on a ‘sensual turn’ in anthropology, and in contemporary  ethnographic  research  more  broadly,  which  has  been inspired at least partly by phenomenological insights). In the present section, I consider some aspects of the work of a social anthropologist called Tim Ingold  (2000, 2007, 2008; Lee and Ingold, 2006). I will be focusing here on what he names, making direct reference to Heidegger (1993 [1971]), ‘a “dwelling perspective” ’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 154).

As   with  Thrift’s   non-representational   theory,   Ingold’s   dwelling  perspective  rejects  the  ‘rationalist’ view  of  a  ‘separation between  the  perceiver and the world, such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the  world, in the mind, prior to any meaningful engagement with it’ (ibid.,  p.  178).  Ingold  (ibid., p.  172)  contends that in his  own  discipline  of  anthropology a version of this view has been ‘fairly conventional’, and  so, as a consequence, people are often seen to live out their relation-  ships to the world cognitively, through‘a framework of symbolic mean-  ings …  which gives shape to …  experience and direction to …  action’ (ibid.,  p.  160).  He  cites  the  example  of  Clifford  Geertz’s  well-known  anthropological work (see especially Geertz,  1973). There, social life is  understood as a sort of ‘text’ and people are thought tobe ‘suspended’ in its ‘webs of significance’ (ibid., p. 5).

I want to suggest that a similar kind of view can be found in those strands of media studies which have, in one way or another, privileged

42     Media, Place and Mobility

‘representation’  or  ‘textuality’  (my  suggestion  applies  equally  to  the neighbouring field of cultural studies, although see, for example, Willis, 2000, p. 20, for a critique of‘the language paradigm’ in cultural studies and for an accompanying focus on ‘the sensuousness of cultural prac- tices, including the sensuous use of objects’, which serves to align his approach with non-representational theories). Therefore, I suspect that Ingold,  and  Thrift  too,  would  have  problems  with  certain  aspects  of media theory and research, especially where there has been a longstand- ing concern with the structural analysis of‘media representations’ (what used  to  be  called  ‘message  content’,  see  Meyrowitz,  1985),  and  even where the emphasis has been on investigating people’s cognitive inter- pretations of these representations or ‘texts’, including technologies-as- texts (some of my own early writings can be seen to have that emphasis, most notably Moores, 1993a). Having made that point, though, I should add that Thrift (1996, p. 8) does not seek to deny‘the reality of represen- tations’. Instead, non-representational theorists approach language and symbolic representation ‘as performative … as doings’ (rather than, say, simply ‘as … ideologies … as a code’, see Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 438). Pursuing this line of argument, it is my contention that media uses are best approached as doings or as embodied practices  (see also Couldry, 2010, pp. 37–40, on ‘practice as an emerging theme in media research’). This is because there is more to media use than ‘encodings’ or ‘decod- ings’ (see Hall, 1980; Morley, 1980, for founding statementsofthis kind of  social  semiotics  in  media  studies),  and  considerably  more  than psychological ‘gratifications’ (Blumler and Katz, 1974).

From  the  dwelling  perspective,  as  in  non-representational  theory, there is an emphasis on what Ingold (2000, p. 173) calls ‘the agent-in- its-environment’,  or  being-in-the-world,  and  on  what  Thrift  (1999, p. 308) calls ‘the primacy of practices’. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy  (as  well  as  on  the  ‘ecological  approach’  of  Gibson,  1986 [1979]), Ingold (2000, p. 153) associates dwelling with‘immersion … in an  environment  or  lifeworld’.  However,  in  associating  dwelling  with ‘immersion’, he is quite clear that there is ‘more to dwelling than the mere fact of occupation’  (ibid., p.  185).  For him, then,  ‘it is through being inhabited … that the world becomes … meaningful … for people’, as  they  ‘make  themselves  at  home  in  the  world’  (ibid.,  pp.  172–3) through their routine practices. As he explains in more detail:

Meanings are not attached by the mind to objects in the world  … rather these objects take on their significance  …  by virtue of their incorporation into a  …  pattern of day-to-day activities. In short  …

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    43

meaning is … in the relational contexts of people’s practical engage- ment with their lived-in environments.

(ibid., p. 168)

Challenging  further  rationalism’s  assumed  ‘separation  between  the perceiver  and  the world’,  he  continues:  ‘self and world  merge  in  the activity of dwelling,  so that one cannot  say where one ends and the other begins’ (ibid., p. 169).

In   Ingold’s   book,   The  Perception   of  the  Environment:  Essays   in Livelihood,  Dwelling  and  Skill,   he  proceeds  to   discuss  his   dwelling perspective  in  relation  to  the  skills  of wayfinding.  Dealing  with  this particular  aspect  of his  approach will take me back,  once  again, to  a theme  of Tuan’s  (Tuan,  1977).  It will  also  enable  me  to  make  a  link forward, though, with Ingold’s more recent work on place and move- ment, which  includes  his  involvement  in  collaborative  ethnographic research (for instance, see Lee and Ingold, 2006).

Consider  what  Ingold  (2000,  p.  219)  has  to  say  in  the  following lengthy extract  (his main purpose here is to provide a critique of the psychological concept of‘cognitive maps’):

Everyone has probably had the experience, at some time or other, of feeling lost, or of not knowing in which way to turnin order to reach a desired destination. Yet formost of the time we know where we are, and how to get to where we want to go. Ordinary life would be well- nigh impossible if we did not. It remains a challenge, however, to account for everyday skills of orientation and wayfinding. … For the map-using stranger  …  in unfamiliar country, ‘being here’ or ‘going there’  generally   entails  the   ability  to   identify   one’s   current   or intended future position with a certain spatial … location, defined by the intersection of particular coordinates on the map. But a person who has grown up in a country … knows quite well … in what direc- tion  to   go,  without   having   to   consult   an   artefactual  map.   …  According to a view that has found wide support … thereis no differ- ence in principle between them. Both are map-users. … The difference is  just  that  the  native  inhabitant’s  map  is  held  …  in  the  head, preserved not on paper but in memory, in the form of a comprehen- sive spatial representation … or ‘cognitive’ map. … I … argue, to the contrary, that thereis no such map.

In marked opposition to this idea of the ‘ “cognitive”map’, he explains ‘what it means to know one’s whereabouts’  (ibid.) via the concept of

44     Media, Place and Mobility

‘ambulatory knowing’, which points to how‘people’s knowledge of the  environment’is formed ‘in the very course of their moving about init’ (ibid., p. 230). ‘I would prefer to say’, writesIngold (ibid., p. 229), ‘that  we know as we go.’ Itis not that people carry with them in their minds  a mental representation of space that they access to guide their bodily  movements,  but  rather  that  their  knowledge  and  experience  is,  to  borrow Thrift’s phrase from a different context, ‘profoundly embodied  and sensuous’ (Thrift, 2007, p. 80). In other words, this knowledge of  the  environment  is  pre-cognitive  or  non-representational.  As  Ingold  (2007, p. 89) puts it a few years later, ‘the ways of knowing of inhabi-  tants go along … inhabitant knowledge … is alongly integrated’.

Like  de  Certeau  (1984),  Ingold  is  interested  in  walking  practices, although not just in urban settings. With fellow anthropologist Jo Lee, he has been involved in an ethnographic research project on walking in northeastern Scotland (in rural areas as well as in the city of Aberdeen; see also Gray, 2003 [1999], for a report of earlier anthropological field- work on the walking and motorbiking practices of sheep farmers who made themselves at home in the hills of the Scottish Borders). With an eye to Ingold’s previous criticism of Geertz (1973), the‘phenomenolog- ically inspired fieldwork’ (Lee and Ingold, 2006, p. 83) that they carried out led them to argue that ‘ “webs of significance” …  are comprised of trails that are trodden on the ground, not spun in the symbolic ether, as people make their way about’. Furthermore, Lee and Ingold  (ibid., p. 76) argue that: ‘Places … are actually constituted by … movements to, from and around.’ With regard to ‘movements … around’, they refer to the  fact  that:  ‘There  are  many  examples  in  our  research  of  …  oft- repeated walks … and circuits … that … in their repetition … might be seen as  “thick lines” of  …  meaningful place-making’  (ibid., pp.  77–8; and note that it is possible to hear echoes of Tuan,  1977, p.  182, who reflected on how, through habitual use, ‘the path …  acquires a density of meaning’, so that the path ‘and the pauses along it constitute a  …  place’). Meanwhile, with regard to movements ‘to’ and ‘from’, Ingold (2007, p. 2) has posed the vital question: ‘how could there be places …  if people did not come and go?’

Ingold’s emphasis on defining place in relation to ‘trails’ or ‘lines’of movement has recently caused him to‘somewhat regret’his centring of ‘the concept of dwelling’, which can have, in his words,‘a heavy conno- tation  of  snug,  well-wrapped  localism’  (Ingold,  2008,  p.  1808).  ‘The concept of habitation isnot so loaded’, concludesIngold (ibid.). Such a ‘snug, well-wrapped localism’ may occasionally be found in discussions of dwelling. For instance, it is undoubtedly there for me when I read

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    45

Heidegger’s nostalgic account of ‘a farmhouse in the Black Forest …  on the wind-sheltered mountain slope … among the meadows closetothe spring’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1971], pp. 361–2). Perhaps itis also there, to a lesser degree, in Tuan’s reference to  ‘a favorite armchair’  (Tuan,  1977, p. 149), which I cited earlier in the chapter, because his example evokes for  me  a  cosy,  enclosed  scene  of  fireside  warmth.  However,  I  do  not believe that identifying particular instances like these in the phenome- nological  literature  requires  the  concept  of  dwelling  to  be  dropped. Rather, matters of dwelling or habitation always need tobe theorised in relation to mobility of different sorts at different levels. There are the localised movements‘around’that Lee and Ingold (2006) report on, but they also acknowledge that place is constituted, in part, by the comings- and-goingsinandoutof locations. Of course, such comings-and-goings are not only on foot, as they are often technologically mediated in vari- ous ways  (on this important theme, Massey,  1994, pp.  146–56, writes helpfully  of ‘a global  sense  of place’  in  contemporary  living,  and  her ideas are tobe considered at length in the following chapter of my book; see also Tuan, 1996b, p. 183, on ‘the concept of“cosmopolitan hearth”’).

Practical Engagement with Lived-in Environments

At what is roughly the halfway point in a lengthy chapter, let me briefly summarise  the  material  that  I  have  covered  so  far.  With  the  aim  of extending my discussion of media and situational geography from the previous chapter, I began this one by turning to Tuan’s phenomenolog- ical geography (especially Tuan, 1977, 2004) for a definition of place as an experiential accomplishment that binds people and environments (including media environments). I then went on to link Tuan’s pioneer- ing work on place-constituting activities with de Certeau’s pragmatics of everyday   living,  Thrift’s   non-representational   theory   and   Ingold’s dwelling  perspective.  The   common  thread  running  through  these approaches  is  a  concern  with  how  ‘meaning  is  …  in  the  relational contexts of people’s practical engagement with their lived-in environ- ments’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 168). Both in Ingold’s arguments for a dwelling perspective within social anthropology and in the closely related area of non-representational  theory within  contemporary  human  geography, such a concern is compared favourably with views that are focused on the cognitive and representational dimensions of social life. As Thrift (2004b, p. 90) concedes, it would clearly be a mistake ‘to suggest that cognition is not important’  (or to deny the reality of representations,

46     Media, Place and Mobility

see Thrift, 1996, p. 8), yet any investigation of the sensuousness of prac-  tices  or  doings  involves  attending  to  pre-cognitive  or  bodily  under-  standings of everyday environments: ‘the myriad ways subjects inhabit  the world before they represent that world to themselves and others’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010b, p. 10).

All of this has serious implications for considering the ways in which media studies are (and might be) carried out. It raises questions about the limitations of those forms of media analysis that have been focused rather too tightly on the symbolic andthe interpretative. It calls for an appreciation  of  media  uses  as  place-constituting  activities,  among  a range  of other  such  activities  in  everyday  living.  It  calls  for  a  linked appreciation of the environmental experiences of media users, and their ‘inhabitant  knowledge’  (Ingold,  2007,  p.  89)  of  physical  and  media environments, which is, in Ingold’s terms, ‘alongly integrated’. It also calls for an appreciation of everyday practices, including routine prac- ticesof media use, as embodied. As Tony Bennett (2005, p. 93) indicates, most previous approaches to the relationships between media and their users have tended tobe concerned with‘the content of media messages …  and  …  with  audience  …  interpretation’,  and  while  there  is  ‘no discounting the importance of these concerns … they do suggest a view of audiences as essentially disembodied, as if …  relations to the media take  place  without   …   eyes,  ears   …   and  fingers  being  particularly involved’  (for  a  similar  assessment in the field  of literary  studies,  see Littau, 2006, p. 10, who contends that‘the reader’is too often theorised there as ‘a disembodied mind rather than a physiological being sitting atthe edge of his or her seat, tearswelling up … spine tingling’).

In the next section, my emphasis is precisely on issues of embodi- ment.  Bodies have been important for most  of the  academic  authors cited in the present chapter, butI turn now to Merleau-Ponty’s phenom- enological philosophy and especially to his Phenomenology ofPerception (2002 [1962]), which was a key reference point for later work on embod- ied  practices.  Whereas  Ingold  (2004),  via  his  interest  in  practices  of walking,  writes  of  ‘the  world  perceived  through  the  feet’,  I  want  to concentrate  on  what  Merleau-Ponty   (2002   [1962],  p.   166),  in  his account of the acquisition of habit, calls ‘knowledge in the hands’.

Knowledge in the Hands

Contemporary philosopher Taylor Carman (2008, p. 19) explains that, for  Merleau-Ponty:  ‘Perception  is  not  mental  representation  …  but

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    47

skillful bodily orientation … in given circumstances.’ Indeed, in a short explanatory   commentary   on   his   own  work,   Merleau-Ponty   (2004 [1964], pp. 34–7) confirms that he has sought ‘to re-establish the roots of  the  mind  in  its  body  and  in  its  world’,  writing  of  an  ‘incarnate subject’:

In my … Phenomenology of Perception … the body is no longer merely an object in the world, under the purview of a separated spirit. It is on the side of the subject  …  it inhabits  …  space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. … We grasp … space through our bodily situation. A ‘corporeal … schema’gives us … a … practical … notion of the relation between  …  body and things, of our hold on them.

What I find particularly interesting in this passage, along with Merleau- Ponty’s critique of the mind/body dualism (he insists that one’s body is not simply‘an object for an “I think”’, see Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962], p.  177;  also  Romdenh-Romluc,  2011,  p.  62,  on  Merleau-Ponty  and ‘bodily subjectivity’), is his use of the terms ‘grasp’ and ‘hold’, and his reference to the way in which bodies inhabit space by applying them- selves to it ‘like a hand to an instrument’. In this case, the terms are being employed metaphorically in order tomake a general point about the  incarnate  subject  and what  he  names  its  ‘corporeal  schema’, but elsewhere,   in   a   fascinating   section   of  Phenomenology   of  Perception (Merleau-Ponty,  2002  [1962]),  pp.  164–70),  he  supplies  some  specific examples of ‘the relation between … body and things’ (things that are ‘ready-to-hand’,  see  Heidegger,  1962,  pp.  98–9,  on  the  hammer  as  a tool), which include more literal references to the habitual and skilful movements of human hands.

Perhaps the best known of Merleau-Ponty’s examples thereis that of  the  ‘blind  man’s  stick’  (Merleau-Ponty,  2002  [1962],  p.  165).  Once  a  person gets‘used to’the stick and has it‘wellin hand’ (ibid., pp. 165–6),  its point  ‘has become an area of sensitivity, extending the  scope and  active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight’. Merleau-Ponty  (ibid., pp. 175–6) goes on to say later that‘the stick has become a famil-  iar instrument  …  a bodily auxiliary  …  the world of feelable things  …  now begins …  not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the  stick’.  Through  habitual  and  skilful  manipulation,  such  sticks  may  become extensions of bodies and the senses, as they are ‘incorporated’ by  their  users  and  consequently  recede  or  ‘withdraw’  as  objects  (see  Ihde, 1990, pp. 31–41, who cites Merleau-Ponty’s example of the stick,

48     Media, Place and Mobility

as well as Heidegger’s example of the hammer, in opening up a discus- sion of technology and embodiment relations). A further example that Merleau-Ponty offers isthatof a musical instrument, the organ (see also Sudnow, 1993 [1979], on learning to play the piano). In discussing the practices of an experienced player, he makes a valuable point about the transposable character of the bodily habits and skills that are involved. Learning to play the organ (an activity that does typically require formal instruction)  is  about  gradually  developing  a  durable  set  of embodied dispositions, but it is important to note that there is the development, too, of a degree of flexibility and adaptability. It is not just a matter of fixed movements that are learnt in order tobe repeated over and over in a mechanistic fashion. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the acquisition of habit is more subtle than this. He observes how a highly experienced organist is still able to play proficiently on an organ with a layout that is  not  exactly  the  same  as  the  instrument  with  which  that  player  is familiar. During the rehearsal period, then, the organist‘incorporates …  the relevant directions and dimensions,  settles into the organ as one settles  into  a  house’  (Merleau-Ponty,  2002  [1962],  p.  168).  What  is evident  in  such  cases  is  a  particular  sensual  and  emotional  ‘feel’  for playing, which, after a while spent atthe keyboard, allows the organist to be at home with the slightly different layout of the new instrument and, as a result, to become immersed in the sounds of the music. As Ingold (2000, p. 414) puts it in a related discussion of skilled musical performance, ‘the boundaries between the player, the instrument and the acoustic environment appear to dissolve’.

The last example of Merleau-Ponty’s that I want to deal with here is one involving other kinds of key, namely those situated on a typewriter (it   is   worth   noting   that   when   the   original   French   edition   of Phenomenology of Perception was published in the mid-1940s, the type- writer was not the old, outmoded technology itis today). He states that:

It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. … The subject knows where the letters are on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is, through a knowledge bred of familiarity. … Itis knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming …  when bodily effort is made.

(Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962], p. 166)

His crucial point about the knowledge in the hands of the skilled typist, which is a ‘knowledge bred of familiarity’, is broadened out when he

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    49

asserts that  ‘it is the body which  “understands” in the acquisition of habit’  (ibid., p.  167). Merleau-Ponty  (ibid.) is well aware that, from a rationalist viewpoint, this‘way of putting it will appear absurd’, and yet, he argues, ‘the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of “understand” and our notion of the body’. The acquisi- tion  of  habit  has  to  do  with  ‘a  rearrangement  …  of  the  corporeal schema’ (ibid., p. 164), which is bound up with the constitution of‘our precognitive familiarity with  …  the world’ (Carman, 2008, p.  106). In the case of typewriter use, ‘the banks of keys’ come to feel thoroughly familiar over time, and ‘the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank  space  into   …   bodily  space’  (Merleau-Ponty,  2002   [1962], p. 167).

An updated example is proffered by sociologist Nick Crossley (2001, p. 122), who, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach, writes  in  some  detail  about  his  own  experience  of using  a  computer keyboard:

I can type and to that extent‘I know’where the various letters are on the keyboard. I do not have to find the letters one by one.  …  My fingers just move in the direction of the correct keys … however … I could not give a reflective, discursive account of the keyboard layout. I do not ‘know’where the keys are in a reflective sense and to make any  half-decent  attempt  at  guessing  I  have  to  imagine  that  I  am typing and watch where my fingers head for. … The type of knowl- edge I have of the keyboard is a practical, embodied knowledge  … distinct from discursive knowledge.

What Crossley (ibid., pp. 122–3) tries to get at in his description is an  ‘embodied form of“knowing without knowing” ’ or ‘bodily know-how’,  which he has real difficulty in accessing ifheis away from the technol-  ogy and not actually engaged in the activity. Indeed, in such circum-  stances,  ‘any  half-decent  attempt  at  guessing  …  where  the  keys  are’ requires  that   ‘bodily   effort  is  made’   (Merleau-Ponty,   2002   [1962],  p. 166). Itis interesting that he employs the term ‘pre-reflective’where  others tend to refer to the pre-cognitive, as a way of distinguishing his  ‘knowing  without  knowing’  from  the  sort  of  reflective  or  ‘discursive  knowledge’that is more conventionally considered tobe knowledge: ‘I  have a pre-reflective … grasp on my environment, relative to my body,  as is evidenced by my capacity to move around in and utilise that space  without first having to think how todo so’ (Crossley, 2001, p. 122). Of  course, that ‘capacity to move around … without first having to think’,

50     Media, Place and Mobility

at least‘in a reflective sense’, isnot only evident when the fingers move around a keyboard. As suggested at various stages in this chapter, it is a quite fundamental feature of dwelling or habitation.

Before returning to wider matters of dwelling, though, I want to  stay a while longer with that particular element of the pre-reflective  grasp on everyday environments that Merleau-Ponty calls knowledge  in the hands. In my view, one of the most significant contributions  to  media  analysis  (and  to  social  theories  of  mobility)  over  recent  years is John Tomlinson’s book,  The  Culture of Speed:  The  Coming of Immediacy  (2007) .  I  value  his  book  because,  rather  like  sociologist  John Urry (2000, 2007), whose work on ‘mobilities’will be discussed  in the following chapter, Tomlinson  (2007) combines an interest in  the applications of media and communications technology, which he  associates with  ‘the  coming  of immediacy’, with  an  interest  in  the  historical development of transport technologies and other kinds of  ‘machine  speed’.  He  therefore  looks  to  understand  what  he  names  ‘the  telemediatization  of culture’  (ibid.,  p.  94)  partly  in  relation  to  experiences of physical travel, which I regard as a welcome move for  non-media-centric media studies (see also Morley, 2009, p. 116, who  argues for an analysis of ‘the articulation of …  communications and  physical transport’; and for an extension of his argument, see Morley,  forthcoming) . At this point in my book, in the context of my notes  on  Merleau-Ponty,  embodied  practices  and  body–thing  relations,  there is a specific section of The Culture of Speed that can helpfully be  highlighted  (Tomlinson,  2007,  pp.   107–11) .  It  is  a  short  section  (Tomlinson actually refers to it as  ‘a  slight digression’ or  ‘an excur-  sus’) on ‘keyboards’.

Tomlinson (ibid., p. 108) announces that he wants‘to draw attention to …  our habitual way of accessing and communicating via keyboards and keypads, practices which do obviously involve the body, particu- larly the hands and the sense of touch’. Although these practices have ‘generally  been  ignored’  (ibid.)  in  the  field  of  media  studies,  they deserve attention because:

Keyboards – or  …  the scaled down version, keypads – now saturate our environment. Increasingly, we must use them not justin … inter- actions  with  media   and   communications   systems  –   on  mobile phones, TV … remote controls, computers, games consoles – but also to draw money from our banks, to cook food in microwave ovens, to open doors, to activate air conditioning, to  …  wash  …  our cars, to access commentaries in art galleries and museums and so on.

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     51

Using keyboards and keypads in these various circumstances of every-  day   living   requires   a   set   of   ‘acquired   habits   and   sensory-bodily  rhythms’   (ibid.,   p.   109).   For   instance,  Tomlinson   (ibid.,   p.   108)  comments (from the outsider perspective of a middle-aged academic!)  on what he sees as ‘the remarkable dexterities that young people seem  to possess in text messaging’. This sort of dexterity, ‘bred of familiarity’ with the keys on a mobile phone, might perhaps be called knowledge  in the thumbs (and see Richardson, 2008, for empirical research find-  ings  on  the  ‘bodily  incorporation’  of  mobile  phones).  Tomlinson  (2007, p. 108) considers, too, the rhythmic patterns of physical move-  ment involved in remembering those‘codes we have to use … but must  not  write  down’,   suggesting  that  there  is   ‘an  embodied  form  of  memory’ at work. Interestingly, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s exam-  ple of typewriter use, he also goes on to compare ‘the typical deftness  of manipulations of keypads’with the more ‘muscular, energetic oper-  ations  performed  on  mechanical  objects’,  proposing  that  ‘modern  computer keyboards have only the faintest family resemblance to type-  writers’ (ibid., pp. 109–10).

Running with Tomlinson’s point about the importance of ‘acquired habits’of the hand in the uses of electronic media and other technolo- gies today, itis possible to identify a further, typically taken-for-granted manual  activity that is  associated with the  ‘modern  computer’. Mark Nunes (2006, p. 41), with reference to what he terms ‘the operational disposition’of a computer user, draws attention to the seemingly unre- markable  matter  of  ‘knowing  the  proper  speed  to  “double  click”  a mouse’. Indeed, he sees this practical, embodied knowledge as partof a broader  range  of routine  ‘point-and-click’  (ibid.,  p.  39)  competences, involving the deft manoeuvring of a mouse device, which usually sits on a mat beside the keyboard, while simultaneously finding ways about in the online environments that are displayed on screen.

Nunes’s observations on the human–computer ‘interface’ are partic-  ularly helpful for my purposes,  since they  serve to  support the more  general argument that I am making for a joint consideration of physical  and media environments as lived spaces. In the case of computers (but  also in the case of the point-and-press television ‘remote controls’ that  Tomlinson, 2007, p.  108, mentions in passing), the knowledge in the  hands of users is intimately caught up with technologically mediated  mobility or travel, and these interconnected movements can constitute  places.  For  example,  both  the  familiar  material  environments  of  the  desks on which home computers are located andthe familiar spaces of  internet  ‘home  pages’,  or  else  the  familiar  settings  of  ‘spine-tingling’

52     Media, Place and Mobility

video games, accessed and navigated by way of pointing and clicking, or  pressing  the  buttons  on  a  console,  would  be  places  according  to Tuan’s definition of place as an experiential accomplishment. In addi- tion,  this  direct  link  between  bodily  know-how  and  technologically mediated mobility leads me to doubt any grand claims about the disem- bodied character of online existence, and to insist that issues of embod- iment should be much more central to media theory and research than they currently are (see also Dreyfus, 2001; Ihde, 2002; Hansen, 2006, for three  related but  rather  different  phenomenological  takes  on bodies, technologies and electronic media of communication).

Everyday Environmental Experience

As I noted near the beginning of this chapter, Tuan (1977, p. v) employs  the   term   ‘environmental   experience’   in   dealing  with   matters   of  dwelling or habitation, but itis to David Seamon’s book, A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter (1979), that I come now for  further  consideration  of such  experience. Although  he  is  many years  younger than Tuan, Seamon was a fellow pioneer of phenomenological  geography  back  in  the  1970s,  when  he  was  doing  his  postgraduate  research (encouraged and overseen by Anne Buttimer), which focused  on   the    topic    of    ‘everyday    environmental    experience’    (ibid.,  p.  15).  Crucially,  as well  as  drawing  on the philosophical writings  of  Heidegger,  Bachelard  and  especially  Merleau-Ponty,  Seamon’s  project  had  a  strong  empirical  element.  In  the  American  city  where  he  was  studying, he set up a number of what he called ‘environmental experi-  ence groups’ (see ibid., pp. 21–8, for his justification of the ‘process of  group inquiry …  in which people can come to moments of discovery’ through shared exploration, and for lists of the group participants and  the themes that they discussed, such as ‘the significance of habit and  routine’,   ‘everyday  movement  patterns’   and   ‘emotions  relating   to  place’). Discussions recorded in those groups provided a basis for the  analysis set out in Seamon’s book, which he characterises as a study of  ‘people’s  experiential  involvement  with  their  everyday  geographical  world’ (ibid., p. 17).

I will be referring shortly to some examples of the interesting empir- ical data that emerged from Seamon’s research project, but before that I want to do two things. First, I think it is important to emphasise the ground-breaking  nature  of  his  work  in  A  Geography  of the  Lifeworld (although I should add that, later in the chapter, I will also be critical of

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     53

specific aspects of the approach). Second, I want to point to a few of the key  terms  in  his  conceptual  vocabulary,  which  feature  alongside  the concept of everyday environmental experience and which I regard as helpful for investigations of media, place and mobility.

Long before Ingold (2000) advocated a dwelling perspective in social anthropology  and  developed  his  critique  of  the  notion  of  cognitive maps,  Seamon  (1979,  pp.  33–5)  had  already  been  highly  critical  of ‘cognitive  …  theories of movement’, in which ‘the cognitive map is a key unit of spatial behavior’:‘I argue that cognition plays only a partial role in everyday spatial behavior; that a sizeable portion of our everyday movements at all varieties of environmental scale is pre-cognitive and involves  a  prereflective  knowledge  of  the  body’  (compare  this  with Thrift’s assertion, quoted earlier, that‘only the smallest part of thinking is  explicitly  cognitive  …  the  other  thinking  …  lies  in  the body’,  see Thrift,  2004b, p.  90).  In  addition, long before  Lee  and  Ingold  (2006) carried out their phenomenologically inspired fieldwork on practices of walking and formations of place, Seamon had already provided valuable empirical findings on the significance of‘everyday movements’, includ- ing walking and driving, for place-making. Most importantly, though, within the discipline of geography, it must be admitted that Seamon was ahead of non-representational theory in drawing attention to the pre-cognitive, practical knowing and embodied dispositions. However, Thrift’s main writings on non-representational theories (notably Thrift, 1996, 1999, 2004b, 2007) contain no references to Seamon, and when other non-representational geographersciteA Geography of the Lifeworld, it tends to be discussed only briefly, in passing,  as  an instance of an outmoded‘humanist’perspective (for example, see Wylie, 2007, p. 180; Anderson and Harrison, 2010b, p. 9). I would therefore suggest that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of Seamon’s work, as Cresswell  (2006, p.  31)  acknowledges when he  states that  Seamon’s book, particularly with its insights into ‘bodily mobility’, ‘was an important precursor to … nonrepresentational theory’.

One of the main concepts employed by Seamon (1979, p. 41) in his  analysis  of  ‘lifeworld’  involvements  is  that  of  ‘body-subject’  (see  also  Seamon, 1980; he is, of course, building on Merleau-Ponty’s argument  that  ‘the body  …  is  on the  side  of the  subject’, Merleau-Ponty,  2004  [1964], pp. 35–6). In referring to the notion of body-subject, Seamon  (1979, p. 40) is interested in the‘habitual nature of movement’ (that is,  in  movements  that  ‘occur without  or before  any  conscious  interven-  tion’). He proceeds to discuss the ways in which these habitual, every-  day   movements   are   integrated   into  wider   ‘time-space   routines’

54     Media, Place and Mobility

(Seamon,  1979,  p.  54;  there  are  connections  here with  Hägerstrand’s ‘time-geography’,  see  especially  Pred,   1996   [1977],  and  it  is  worth noting that Hägerstrand wrote the ‘foreword’to Buttimer and Seamon, 1980). As  a  twin  concept  to body-subject,  Seamon  (1979, p.  76)  also employs  the  term   ‘feeling-subject’,   in   his   attempt  to   explain  the emotional  or  affective  aspects  of contact with  environments,  and  he asserts that ‘forces of body and emotion … intertwined’ can give rise to a condition of at-homeness: ‘the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable in and familiar with the everyday world in which one lives’ (ibid., pp. 70–1).

This vocabulary of body-subject, time-space routines, feeling-subject  and at-homeness is designed to deal precisely with issues of habit, affect  and  attachment to  environment in  everyday living. There is  another  key  term  for  Seamon,  though,  and  it  is  an  important  one because  it  points  to  the  public,  collaborative  dimension  of  place-constituting  activities.  He writes  of  ‘place  choreographies’  or  ‘place ballets’  (ibid.,  pp. 54–6; see also Seamon,  1980), defining them as ‘an interaction of  many  time-space  routines’:  ‘The  place  ballet  can  occur  in  …  streets,  neighbourhoods,   market    places,    transportation    depots,    cafes. ’ According to Seamon (1979, p. 56), then, these creative, intricate and  interactive ‘dances’ consist of rhythmic patterns of ‘continual human  activity’  in  a  range  of social  settings,  and  they  have  the potential  to  foster‘a strong … sense of place’. Once again, this is an idea ofSeamon’s  that is clearly echoed in the recent work of Thrift  (2009, p. 92), who  describes  the  body  ‘as  a  link  in  a  larger  spatial  dance  with  other  …  bodies and things’, and notes that place is bound up with‘the way that  people,  through  following  daily  rhythms  of  being,  just  continue  to  expect the world to keep on turning up’ (although his reference thereis  to the more fashionable‘rhythmanalysis’of Lefebvre, 2004, rather than  to Seamon’s ground-breaking book).

In  the  data  that  Seamon  presents  in A  Geography  of the Lifeworld, there  are  numerous  illustrative  examples  of how  ‘forces  of body  and emotion’  serve to facilitate at-homeness  (and not only in the private space  of  ‘the  home’),  including  several  that  emphasise  time-space routinesand place choreographies. For instance, he offers the following detailed   account   of  the   ‘morning   routine’   of  an   environmental- experience-group participant:

Waking at  7.30, making the bed, bathing, dressing, walking out of the  house  at  eight  –  so  one  group  member  described  a  morning routine  that  he  followed  every  day  but  Sunday.  From  home  he

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     55

walked to a nearby cafe, picked up a newspaper (which had tobe the New  York  Times),  ordered  his  usual  fare  (one  scrambled  egg  and coffee), and stayed there until nine when he walked to his office. … ‘I like this routine and I’ve noticed how I’m bothered a bit when a part of itis upset – if the Times is sold out, or if the booths are taken and Ihaveto sit at a counter.’

(Seamon, 1979, pp. 55–6)

What Seamon describes in this passage, which includes a direct quote  from a recorded group discussion, is a regular ‘round’ of activities that  involved  the  group  member  in  bodily  mobility,  both  within  and  between  thoroughly  familiar  spaces.  Those  practices  were  habitual,  everyday movements of repetition and return (see Tuan, 1977), and as  the group member went on to conclude: ‘It’s not that I figure out this  schedule each day – it simply unfolds’ (Seamon, 1979, p. 171). In other  words, he just continued ‘to expect the world to keep on turning up’ (Thrift, 2009, p. 92).

The same participant spoke of the ‘atmosphere’ of the cafe that he frequented  each  working-day  morning   ‘between  eight  o’clock  and nine’:

Several ‘regulars’ come in during that period … the telephone repair- man and several elderly people, including one woman named Claire, whom Iknowand say ‘Good morning’to each day. … Many of these people know eachother. The owner … knows every one of the regu- lars and what they will usually order. The situation of … recognising faces … somehow makes the place warmer.

(Seamon, 1979, p. 171)

This was a particular, local instance of what Seamon terms  ‘place ballet’. As with de Certeau’s pragmatics of everyday living (de Certeau, 1984), there is a danger that the ordinary activities here are being seen in an overly romanticised light. In Seamon’s case, of course, there is no suggestion that the activities in question were practices of political resistance, but his dance metaphor does nevertheless imply a rather romantic view of ‘life as art’ (see Willis, 2000). Still, the participant’s words give an indication of the sort of affective attachments that may be  formed  as  ‘many  time-space  routines’  (Seamon,  1979,  p.  56)  are meshed  together  on  a  regular basis. The  social  relations  of the  cafe environment appear to have been relations of acquaintanceship rather than  of  close  friendship,  yet  the  again-and-again  character  of  the

56     Media, Place and Mobility

interactions, and, consequently, the ‘situation of …  recognising faces’, served to create a mood of warmth.

There are two further points that I want to make at this stage about Seamon’s example of the cafe, although it is an example that I will be referring to once more in the following section of my chapter. First, what helped this group member, and fellow participants in the environmental- experience  groups,  to  reflect  on  ordered  patterns  of  movement  were those rare occasions when part of routine was disrupted. So when ‘basic contact’  with  familiar,  taken-for-granted  everyday  environments  got disturbed, even in seemingly minor ways, it gave rise to a ‘noticing’ of what is typically unnoticed: ‘A change in the world as known brings itself to attention’ (ibid., p. 117). Such changes were experienced by the cafe- goer in the example as a source of mild irritation, of feeling ‘bothered a bit’. Second, from my perspective, itis important to note that one of the mild irritations mentioned by the participant had to do with the occa- sional absence of a familiar media environment, when the daily paper he was used to had ‘sold out’ (ibid., p. 56). Reading that paper (much like making the bed, walking  out  of the house  or  drinking  coffee) was  an utterly normal feature of his morning routine, and an integral part of his experiential involvement with an everyday geographical world. Here, I am reminded of Hermann Bausinger’s observation that the newspaper can have a ritual function as ‘a mark of confirmation’ (Bausinger, 1984, p. 344), and so ‘reading it proves that the breakfast-time world is still in order’  (see also Peterson, 2010, on the daily paper and habit). Indeed, Bausinger  (1984) comments on how regular readers experience disrup- tion when, for one reason or another, the paper that they usually regard ‘as “no big deal”’ (Scannell, 1996, p. 177) is unavailable.

While  Seamon’s  data  contain  surprisingly  few  references  to  media use, given the location of his study in a US city, scattered fragments of his empirical research material point to media as elementsof a lifeworld (and see Seamon, 2006). For instance, in the context of an early-evening routine, the brother of one of the group members is reported to have regularly eaten his meal ‘in front of the seven o’clock news on televi- sion’ (Seamon, 1979, p. 56). Elsewhere, someone reported on the ritual of reading a bookin a favourite chair before going to bed each night (see ibid., p. 178). A rather different example involves the telephone: ‘A few times  when  using  the  phone,  I’ve  found  myself  dialling  my  home number rather than the one I want … I guess because that number isthe one I call the most often’ (ibid., pp.  164–5). The connection with my earlier discussion of Merleau-Ponty, the acquisition of habit and knowl- edge in the hands is clear in this last example.

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     57

Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub

Now compare Seamon’s example of the cafe and its place ballet (ibid., p. 171) with the following ethnographic description:

The  Falcon  is  a  small,  out-of-the-way  place,  known  mainly  to  its regulars.  …  As usual around lunchtime, the bar is crowded. A few peoplesit singly at tables, but most sit in small groups, often milling around from table to table to chat with others. As in many such local bars  and pubs,  most  of the  regulars  here  are  male. Many  of them work  for  a  handful  of computer  companies  in  a  nearby  high-tech industry enclave. The atmosphere is loud, casual, and clubby, even raucous. Everybody knows eachother.

(Kendall, 2002, pp. 1–2)

As the author of the account goes on to explain, ‘The Falcon’ was not to be found ‘in a back street in Berkeley’ (ibid., p. 3), because this is a description of ‘a hangout on an online forum’. In fact, it is a passage from near the start of a book that I cited towards the end of the previous chapter, Lori Kendall’s Hanging Out in the  Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. The virtual pub that she writes about, much like the cafe discussed by Seamon’s group member, had its own mood of warmth, at least for those who were familiar with its layout and comfortable with the social conventions of its ‘chat’. It was a public space inhabited by several ‘regulars’ who were recognisable to each other, many of whose time-space   routines   were   meshed   together   (hence   their   shared ‘lunchtime’period on ‘Pacific standard time’, see ibid., p. 23). Its atmos- phere was louder and the social positions of its customers were rather different, but there seems tobe, once more, a creative dance of human activity and a collaborative process of place-making. Kendall (ibid., p. 6) argues, then, that such a ‘synchronous’ media setting, which allows for ‘near-instantaneous response … can provide a particularly vivid sense of “place” … of gathering together with other people’.

Of course, the idea of a ‘virtual place’ is not exclusive to Kendall’s work.  Other  internet  researchers  had  the  idea  well  before  her.  For instance, William Mitchell (1995, p. 22), who is both an architectural and  a  media  theorist,  writes  of  ‘virtual  places’  that  ‘serve  as  shared access,   multiuser   locations’   (and   outside   academia,   too,   spatial metaphors  such  as  ‘site’  and  ‘room’  feature  widely  in  ordinary  talk about internet communications). The revealing word in the quote from Mitchell, though, is ‘locations’, because, like Meyrowitz and Scannell,

58     Media, Place and Mobility

he conceptualises place primarily as a location, rather than as a practi-  caland emotional accomplishment. To some extent, Kendall’s work has  the same definitional limitations, since she tends to use the term‘place’ interchangeably with‘space’. However, she moves a little closer to Tuan  and  Seamon  in  her  understanding  of  place  when  she  stresses  the  routinely lived-in quality of the ‘pub’ that figures in her ethnography,  along with the emotional or affective aspects of action and interaction  in this online environment.

I have chosen to put Kendall’s example of the virtual pub alongside Seamon’s example of the cafe because it helps to strengthen my case that there can be at-homeness in a media setting as well as in a physi- cal  setting, but  this  is  not  my  only  reason  for  returning  to  Kendall’s book at this stage. I want not just to note the similarities between their examples,  but   also   to   highlight   a   distinguishing   characteristic   of Kendall’s perspective on what Seamon calls at-homeness. As a critical sociologist, Kendall has important things to say about social difference and  power,  which  need  to  be  taken  on  board  when  thinking  about place-constituting activities.

In Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub, Kendall (2002) has an interest in the ongoing  performance  of  gendered  identities  and  relationships.  She comments atthe outset on how‘most of the regulars … are male’ (ibid., p. 2) and her concern with gender is mainly one with how certain sorts of masculinity are ‘done’, both online and offline. This doing involved specific forms of sociable talk-in-interaction: ‘Patterns of speech, persist- ent topics, and a particular style of references to women’ (ibid., p. 72). As noted in my previous chapter, the topics of‘insider’conversation in the  virtual  pub  often  revolved  around  technical  issues  to  do  with computing, and more generally, as Kendall  (ibid., p.  100) puts it, the atmosphere in that bar ‘casts women as outsiders unless and until they prove themselves able to perform masculinities’. As a female researcher entering into this ‘gendered environment’, she found that she had ‘to become one of the boys’ (ibid., p. 98) in order to maintain access. This suggests to me a broader point. While places are indeed constituted in part by comings and goings,  ‘geographies of exclusion’  (Sibley,  1995) still have tobe addressed.

To Sociologise Phenomenological Analysis

Upto now, apart from a few minor quibbles, my take on the phenome- nological perspectives reviewed in this chapter has been a positive one.

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar     59

I am highly sympathetic to these perspectives because of what they can offer to the  study of media uses, and, more broadly, because of their valuable insights into the incarnate subject, the acquisition of habit and the  agent-in-its-environment.  However,  the  last  three  sections  of the chapter, beginning with the present one, will be rather more critical in tone. In the penultimate and concluding sections that are to follow, I will be concerned, once again, to contest claims about increasing place- lessness   in   contemporary   society,   looking   first   at   Edward   Relph’s phenomenological  geography  of Place  and Placelessness  (2008  [1976]) andthenat Marc Augé’s later anthropology of Non-places (2009 [1995]). For now, though, leading on from Kendall’s points about social differ- ence and power (Kendall, 2002), I want to look at Bourdieu’s contention that it is vital ‘to sociologize  …  phenomenological analysis’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 73; and remember here that Bourdieu is among those social theorists identified by Thrift, 1999, p. 303, as an influence on his non-representational theory).

Interestingly,   one   of   Bourdieu’s   academic   collaborators,   Loïc  Wacquant  (Bourdieu  and  Wacquant,  1992,  p.  20),  describes  him  as  Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sociological heir’, remarking that Bourdieu ‘builds in  particular on … Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the intrinsic corporeality of …  contact between subject and world’. Bourdieu’s social theory, according  to Wacquant (ibid., p. 19), ‘seeks to capture …  the knowledge without  cognitive intent … that agents acquire of their social world by way of …  immersion  within  it’.  The  links  with  Merleau-Ponty’s  writings  on  ‘precognitive  familiarity’  (Carman,  2008,  p.  106)  are  perhaps  most  evident   in   Bourdieu’s   closely   related   concepts   of   ‘practical   sense’ (‘involvement in the world which presupposes no representation’, see  Bourdieu, 1990, p. 66) and ‘habitus’ (defined by Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72,  as  a  set  of  ‘durable,  transposable  dispositions’  that  are  embodied).  Indeed, in a discussion of‘bodily knowledge’ (‘knowledge that provides  a  practical  comprehension  of  the  world  quite  different  from  the  …  decoding  …  normally  designated by  the  idea  of comprehension’,  see  Bourdieu,  2000,  p.  135),  he  is  quite  explicit  about  the  connections  between his own work and that of Merleau-Ponty:

The agent engaged in practice knows the world but  …  as Merleau- Ponty showed …  knows it … without objectifying distance, takes it for granted … is caught up init, bound up with it … inhabitsit like … a familiar habitat … feels at home.

(ibid., pp. 142–3)

60     Media, Place and Mobility

Elsewhere in the same discussion, Bourdieu (ibid., p.  152) proceeds to state that: ‘The body isin the social world but the social world isin the body’ (echoing Merleau-Ponty’s assertions regarding the inseparability of inner subject and outer world).

So, given these direct parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and  Bourdieu’s  social theory, what  does  Bourdieu  see  as the problem with  phenomenological  analysis  that  requires  it  to  be  sociologised? Furthermore, what might be involved in this sociologising of phenom- enology?

Bourdieu’s view is that itis necessary to sociologise phenomenologi- cal analysis because, while its account of a ‘relationship of familiarity with the familiar environment’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 25) is, as he puts it, ‘indispensable’  (Bourdieu,  2000,  p.  146),  phenomenology  has  tended not  to  deal  with  the  historically  and  culturally  specific  conditions, including  the  social  divisions,  within  which  such  relationships  of ‘familiarity’ are formed. It has therefore come with a large measure of ‘universalism’. This is the case not only in phenomenological philoso- phy but also in elements of phenomenological geography. For example, at one moment Seamon (1980, p. 148) defines the purpose of his geog- raphy  as  that  of attending  ‘to  the  essential  nature  of  …  dwelling  on earth’, and in thereport of his empirical research on everyday environ- mental experience he claims that the descriptions provided by group members,  who  were  of  course  living  in  historically  and  culturally specific conditions,‘reflect human experience in its typicality’ (Seamon, 1979, p. 23). Still, it is by no means inevitable that phenomenological perspectives must operate at this universalistic level. On the contrary, thereis no reason why phenomenology cannot pay greater attention to issues of social difference, so as to explore with greater specificity the diversity  of human  experiences.  It  is better,  for  instance,  to  speak  of socially differentiated ‘lifeworlds’, in the plural, rather than to start out with the assumption that there can be any singular, universally shared realm of familiarity or sociability.

For  Bourdieu,  sociologising  phenomenology  involves  identifying different types of habitus (different sets of embodied dispositions) that are related to different positions in society. From this starting point, then, ‘implicit understanding’ (Taylor, 2006, p. 212) and at-homeness (Seamon, 1979) are regarded as a particular‘coincidence between habi- tus and habitat’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 147). For instance, Bourdieu (1977, pp. 81–2) is interested in forms of ‘class habitus’, referring to ‘disposi- tions which  are  …  marks  of  social  position’,  and which  are  also,  of course, marks of social inequality  (see especially Bourdieu,  1984, for

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    61

his critical sociology of ‘taste’). It is important to realise, though, that when he writes about embodied dispositions as ‘marks of social posi- tion’, this is not simply a theory of the determination of action by an external  social  structure.  Bourdieu’s  focus  on  practices  leads  him  to reject this sort of ‘social physics’, just as he wants to move beyond ‘an unreconstructed  phenomenology’   (Bourdieu   and  Wacquant,   1992, pp. 7–9).

Simon Charlesworth’s remarkable book, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (2000), which presents findings from his phenomeno- logically inspired fieldwork, carried out during the 1990s in a northern English  town  called  Rotherham,  serves  to  illustrate  Bourdieu’s  point about a fit between‘habitus and habitat’. Charlesworth’s study was very much informed by Bourdieu’s social theory of practice, and it provides a helpful example of what it may mean to sociologise phenomenologi- cal analysis. Charlesworth  (ibid., p. 23) insists ‘that bodily experience cannot be studied apart from the cultures in which we become … agents endowed  with  a  form  of  corporeal  generative  knowing  beyond  the merely   cognitive’.   ‘Understanding   Rotherham’,   he   argues,   ‘means understanding the habituated manner of comportment through which the place exists … the sense that life has for Rotherham people … their being-in-the-world’  (ibid.,  pp.  92–3).  His  ethnography  highlights  the material  conditions  of  ‘economic  necessity  and  dispossession’  (ibid., p.  11)  within  which  that  being-in-the-world  took  shape,  and,  while such  conditions  of  working-class  living  are  obviously  not  confined solely to Rotherham in the 1990s, the account that he gives has a strong local-historical  dimension.  What  I  find  useful  about  Charlesworth’s book is that its concern is with those matters of dwelling or habitation (of  sense  of  place)  which  have  been  central  to  this  chapter,  yet  he approaches them in a way that is firmly committed to their historical and cultural grounding.

It is not just in sociology but also in philosophy that some of the limitations   to   Merleau-Ponty’s  work   on   embodiment   have  been acknowledged.  In  a  recent  commentary  on  Merleau-Ponty’s  writings that   is   generally   supportive   of  his   overall   philosophical   project, Lawrence Hass (2008, pp. 93–4) sees that:

For Merleau-Ponty … the body … is our ‘potentiality’ … in a field of possibilities. … But … thereis another dimension which it would be folly to forget: the experiential field is also political. It is a site of force relations … Merleau-Ponty … is missing a ‘body politics’ – and this is a serious omission.

62     Media, Place and Mobility

In making this criticism, Hass is drawing especially on feminist engage- ments with phenomenological philosophy, such as those found in the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and in Iris Young’s clas- sic essay on a phenomenology of ‘feminine bodily existence’  (Young, 2005 [1980], p. 30).

Grosz  (1994, p.  19) contends that ‘there is no body as such  …  only bodies’, preferring to speak in the plural rather than accepting the kind of universalistic references to‘the body’that are made by Merleau-Ponty. She points to ‘his avoidance of the question of sexual difference and speci- ficity’ (ibid., p. 103), and goes so far as to suggest that‘his apparent gener- alizations regarding subjectivity … infact tend to take men’s experiences for human ones’. Young’s critique does concede that ‘at the most basic descriptive level, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation of the lived body to its world … applies to any human existence in a general way’ (Young, 2005  [1980], pp. 31–2), but, crucially, she continues: ‘At a more specific level … there is a particular style of … feminine bodily comportment …  feminine being-in-the-world’ (she is careful to qualify this reference to ‘feminine being-in-the-world’ with a reminder that her essay is restricted to a consideration of the experiences of many women in ‘contemporary … industrial, urban, and commercial society’, and so it ‘may not apply to the  situation of women in other  societies and other epochs’,  see ibid., p. 30). Her point of departure for discussing ‘feminine bodily comport- ment’and bodily movement is an observation of the difference‘between the way boys and girls throw’ (ibid., p. 32), and she proceeds to explore ‘the most simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand, and walk’. Young (ibid., pp. 43–4) concludes that:

The  young  girl  acquires  many  subtle  habits  of  …  comportment  – walking like a girl …  standing and sitting like a girl, gesturing like a girl, and so on. … The more a girl assumes her status as feminine … the  more  she  …  enacts  her  own  body  inhibition.  …  While  very young children show virtually no differences in motor skills, move- ment, spatial perception, etc., differences seem to appear  …  in the process of growing up.

What this indicates is precisely the importance of a feminist‘body poli- tics’ (Hass, 2008, p. 94), despite what Meyrowitz (1985, p. 225) writes about electronic media and ‘situational androgyny’ (and see Bourdieu, 2000, p. 141, who also reflects on how‘the learning of masculinity and femininity  tends  to  inscribe  the  difference  …  in  …  ways  of walking, talking, standing, looking, sitting, etc.’).

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    63

Finally here, in the light of these debates about gender and embodi- ment,  it  might  be  interesting  to  return  to  a  topic  discussed  earlier, namely the uses (but also the non-uses) of media technologies infamil- iar material environments. In so doing, I want to recall some empirical research that was carried out back in the  1980s. Ann  Gray’s  study of women’s  relationships  to  the  video  recorder  (Gray,  1987,  1992)  was concerned with the gendered meanings of what was then a new media technology in everyday living. Employing an inventive strategy in her interviews with thirty women (who happen to have lived in a part of the UK that is close to where Charlesworth’s fieldwork was conducted), Gray (1987, p. 43) asked them‘to imagine pieces of equipment’in their households ‘as coloured either pink or blue’, with the aim of highlight- ing the ‘gender specificity … of domestic technology’:

This produces almost uniformly pink irons and blue electric drills, with many interesting mixtures along the spectrum. … VCRs and … all home entertainment technology would seem to be a potentially lilac area, but my research has shown that we must break down the VCR  into  its  different  modes  in  our  colour-coding.  The  ‘record’, ‘rewind’ and ‘play’ modes are usually lilac, but the timer switch is nearly always blue. … The blueness of the timeris exceeded only by the deep indigo of the remote control … which in all cases is held by the man.

That ‘colour-coding’strategy can be seen to have illustrated the cultural significances     of    technologies-as-texts     in     household     contexts (Silverstone, 1990, p. 189, refers to‘the texts of … hardware’). However, Iprefer to regard Gray’s research as having been about, at least in part, the embodied practicesand dispositions of media users, and about‘how meanings  …  emerge  from  practices’  (Anderson  and  Harrison,  2010b, p. 6). She paid careful attention, then, to the gendered practical compe- tences, and also to a lack of technical know-how, involved in the uses or non-uses of‘technology in the domestic environment’ (see especially Gray,  1992, pp.  164–90). For example, Gray  (ibid., p.  179) notes ‘that the video recorder timer switch seemed to present … difficulties forthe women’, with male partners typically operating that device, yet ‘many of their cookers  …  had a time-setting function’ that the women used ‘without difficulty’, and which‘very few of the men could operate’. This aspect of her work could clearly be linked to phenomenological analy- sis  and  the  call  to  sociologise  it  (indeed,  Gray  does  briefly  consider Bourdieu’s perspective on taste, see ibid., pp. 23–5).

64     Media, Place and Mobility

Place and Placelessness

Alongside Tuan, Buttimer and Seamon, Relph (2008  [1976]) is another of  those  pioneers  of  phenomenological  geography  who  developed  a distinctive experiential perspective on formations of place in everyday living. One of his key contributions to the understanding of place as a practical and emotional accomplishment is the concept of ‘existential insideness’ (ibid., p. 55), which he defines as ‘place … experienced with- out deliberate and selfconscious reflection yet … full with significances …  the insideness that most people experience when they are at home and in their own town or region’. Given his words ‘when they are at home’, itis worth noting that Seamon (1979, p. 90) makes the connec- tion with his  own notion  of at-homeness,  suggesting that  existential insideness can be thought of as the ‘most profound’ form of at-home- ness,  where  ‘life  holds  continuity  and  regularity’  and  ‘its  mundane aspects … are … rarely reflected upon’. Interestingly, though, in detail- ing  different  modes  of  experiential  involvement  with  environments, Relph (2008 [1976], p. 51) also proposed an opposing term, ‘existential outsideness’, arguing that this typeof outsideness is marked by‘a sense of  …  alienation  …  of not belonging’. It may be felt, for example, ‘by newcomers  …  or by people who, having been away  …  return to feel strangers’ (Seamon and Sowers, 2008, pp. 45–6).

I find Relph’s concept of existential outsideness to be a potentially  fruitful one. Indeed, it will be used later in the book to help account for  the  initial  experiences  of  some  transnational  migrants  on  arrival  as  ‘newcomers’ in a new country, interacting in and with a range of new  settings  (I  am  referring  here  to  an  empirical  research  project  on  the  experiences of young people who moved from Eastern Europe to the UK  in  the  mid-2000s,  to  be  discussed  at  the  close  of  the  next  chapter).  However,  I  also  find  Relph’s  application  of  the  concept  to  be  partly  problematic, because ofthe way in which he positions it within a much  wider  argument  concerning the  emergence  of ‘a placeless geography’ (Relph, 2008 [1976], p. 117). Itis to this wider argument that I turn now,  and it means going back to the theme of placelessness which was intro-  ducedin the previous chapter via my critique of Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985).

According to Relph (2008 [1976], p. 143), the growth of placelessness in contemporary living has involved a proliferation of‘anonymous spaces and exchangeable environments’ that serve to undermine the constitu- tion of ‘significant places’, and, more  specifically, he believes that this ‘undermining’  is  the  result  of particular  developments  in  architecture,

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    65

planning and technology. The main targets of his criticism of the built  environment, then, are modernist‘International Style’urban structures  made from concrete, steel and glass, along with locations that ‘declare  themselves  unequivocally  to  be  “Vacationland”  or  “Consumerland” ’ (ibid., pp. 92–3) and suburban residential estates with their seemingly  ‘endless  subdivisions  of  identical  houses’  (ibid.,  p.  105).  Above  all,  though, Relph (ibid., p. 90) sees the emergence of a placeless geography  as the result of developmentsin ‘mass communications’. His definition  of  mass  communications  includes,  in  addition  to  print  media  and  broadcasting, a range of transportation sites and systems: ‘Roads, rail-  ways, airports, cutting across or imposed on the landscape rather than  developing with it, are not only features of placelessness in their own  right, but  …  have encouraged the spread of placelessness well beyond  …  immediate  impacts’  (ibid.). Tellingly,  in  relation  to physical  trans-  port, Relph (ibid., p. 83) sees technologically mediated mobility as the  enemy of senses of place, contending that the ‘meaning of“home”has  been weakened  …  through  increased  mobility’.  Indeed,  at  one  point  Seamon (1979, p. 91) somewhat surprisingly adopts Relph’s general line  of argument on growing placelessness, declaring that: ‘Today, in an era  of mobility and mass communications … technology and mass culture  destroy the uniqueness of places and promote global homogenization.’ Within this way of thinking, existential outsideness comes tobe under-  stood, at least in part, as the experience of ‘not belonging’ in ‘anony-  mous spaces’.

The problem, from my perspective, is that the argument is flawed,  and I believe itis possible to identify certain contradictionsin theposi-  tions that are taken by Relph (2008 [1976]) and Seamon (1979). While  the form and design of an environment do obviously have a bearing on  its use, both RelphandSeamon, in their statements about placelessness,  end up giving too much importance to architecture, planning and tech-  nology as determining forces (I would go so far as to suggest that they  occasionally offer versions of environmental and technological deter-  minism). The  skyscraper,  the  holiday  complex  or  shopping  mall,  the  housing estate andthe spaces of media or transportation are all regarded  as somehow innately placeless and anonymous. Yet this goes against the  grain of phenomenological geography’s most significant insight, which  is that the inhabitants of an environment can ultimately constitute it as  a place by making themselves at home there through their repetitive,  habitual practices. As Relph (2008  [1976], p.  123) himself puts it else-  where in Place and Placelessness, it is ‘the intentionality of experience’ that gives environments a lived-in quality. In other words, to repeat a

66     Media, Place and Mobility

point made near the start of this chapter with reference to Tuan’s work, places  are  locations  made  familiar,  concrete  and  meaningful through practice. Furthermore, Seamon’s own empirical research material, gath- ered  in  an  American  industrial  city,  includes  a  number  of  examples where  media   and  transport  technologies  were  being   employed   as resources  in  place-making  activities.  In  those  cases,  technologically mediated mobility was not the enemy of senses of place. Rather, along with other habitual, everyday movements, it actually helped to facili- tate at-homeness.

Non-places

Many of the same claims about increasing placelessness in contempo- rary  society  are  repeated  in  the work  of Augé  (2009  [1995]).  Indeed, much the same theoretical problem can be found there too (although, to be fair, he does make a helpful reference to de Certeau’s pragmatics of everyday living, see ibid., p. 64). In general terms, Augé (ibid., p. 63) paints a bleak picture of‘a world … surrendered to … the fleeting … the ephemeral  …  where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating’. As heindi- cates with the title of his book, his main concept is that of‘non-places’:

Non-places are thereal measure of our time; one that could be quan- tified … by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the  airports  and  railway  stations,  hotel  chains,  leisure  parks,  large retail  outlets,  and  finally  the  complex  skein  of  cable  and  wireless networks … forthe purposes of … communication.

(ibid.)

‘The  space  of  non-place’,  he  summarises,  is  something  that  is  only ‘there tobe passed through’ (ibid., p. 83).

In  addition,  Augé  (ibid.,  pp.  xi–xii)  echoes  Seamon’s  sentiments regarding the destruction of ‘the uniqueness of places’ and the promo- tion of‘global homogenization’:

The  spaces  of  circulation,  consumption  and  communication  are multiplying across the globe … the same hotel chains, the same tele- vision networks are cinched tightly round the globe, so that we feel constrained by uniformity … sameness … and to cross international

When Space Feels Thoroughly Familiar    67

borders brings no more profound variety than … walking between … rides at Disneyland.

Once again, I am proposing that the argument is flawed. There are strong hints hereof the environmental and technological determinism found in parts of Relph (2008  [1976]) and Seamon (1979). Augé has a tendency to make assumptions about how ‘we feel’ in these so-called non-places,  without  having  investigated  people’s  (socially  differenti- ated)  environmental  experiences  of,   say,   ‘hotel  chains’,   ‘television networks’  or  ‘airports’.  Since  the  airport  might  justifiably  be  seen  as Augé’s main example of a non-place (the story of a trip to an airport to catch an international flight features in his prologue to Non-places, see Augé, 2009 [1995], pp. 1–5), I want to look more closely at this example with the help of Tomlinson (1999) and Cresswell (2006).

While Tomlinson (1999, p. 111) acknowledges that Augé has identi-  fied  ‘genuinely  new  …  cultural-spatial  phenomena’ with  reference  to  international air terminals and other contemporary sites of‘transit’, he  also emphasises the point that‘the sort of locales Augé describes do not  …   map   the   totality   of   modern   …   experience’.   So,   for   instance,  Tomlinson (ibid., p. 6) insists that: ‘To decide whether the homogeniza-  tion thesis really obtains you have to venture outside …  the terminal.’ Later  in  my book, when  I  discuss  empirical  research  findings  on  the  environmental   experiences   of  trans-European   migrants,   it  will   be  evident that crossing international borders can bring considerably‘more  profound variety than … walking between … rides at Disneyland’ (Augé,  2009  [1995],  p.  xii).  Moreover,  Tomlinson  (1999,  pp.  111–12)  argues  convincingly that experiences of airports are likely tobe highly varied,  and that Augé ‘does not account for … the … experience of … the check-  in clerks, baggage handlers, cleaners, caterers, security staff and so forth’,  for whom ‘the terminal is clearly a … place – their workplace’.

Cresswell   (2006,  pp.  219–58)  goes  further  still  in  developing  a  critique of Augé’s book, and his critical engagement with the concept of non-places is based on a case study of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.  Whereas Augé’s account of air travel presents a singular image of the  passenger, Cresswell (ibid., p. 223) writes ofthe ‘differentiated traveler’ (of distinctions between groups of passengers, from the ‘global kinetic  elite’  to  ‘budget  airline  flyers  …  refugees,  and  asylum  seekers’).  Like  Tomlinson, he also realises that an airport is a ‘workplace’for some, list-  ing‘flight attendants’and‘mechanics’ as well as ‘check-in workers, jani-  tors’  (ibid.)  and  ‘taxi  drivers’  (ibid.,  pp.  252–4).  Concluding  his  case  study, Cresswell (ibid., p. 257) observes that:

68     Media, Place and Mobility

It does not do justice to the many-layered complexity of … Schiphol … to call it a non-place. … Schiphol is a … space on which an intri- cate‘place-ballet’of multiple movements takes place on a daily basis. …  Schiphol may be a node in a global space of flows, but it is still uniquely Schiphol.

The brief mention in this quote of a ‘space of flows’ serves to signal the way  forward  to  my  next  chapter, where  that  concept  resurfaces  in  a discussion of Manuel Castells’s theory of‘the network society’ (Castells, 1996). However, forthe purposes of the present chapter, Cresswell’s key reference isto Seamon’s notion of place choreographies, and his view is that  even  at  a  transit  point  like  Schiphol  Airport  there  remains  the potential for a certain uniqueness of place tobe formed.