engleski

Domesticating the screen-scenography: situational uses of technologies and texts in the London underground

Proposing a grounded approach to study of media audiences in public space, I present my ethnographic research on the London Underground, which investigated people’s encounters with a range of screens, including conventional poster advertising as well as newer LED screens showing moving images. Dominated by tunnels, the architectural design encourages passengers to move forward, but the surfaces, covered almost entirely with advertising screens, invite passengers to look around. As I aim to demonstrate, passengers nonetheless routinely compensate for their lack of control over advertising screens by employing ethnomethods of appropriating the screens for their own situational ends, contrary to the advertisers’ conception of passengers as “captive audiences.” Passengers develop what I will call “situational uses of urban screens” (passengers make use of screens as representations of more pleasant looking elsewheres, as points of concentration to avoid the gaze of others, and to focus their own thoughts, or as providers of potentially useful information). Perfecting these skills of appropriation to a level of taken-for-granted habit allows passengers to move routinely through the changing screen-scenography and to domesticate it as their everyday travel space. Such negotiations of the mediated travel space take the form of incidental media consumption (episodic encounters with screens), which itself is contingent upon the particular micro-social situations of passing through (crowds, movement, waiting). I conclude that commuters experience the changes of screen images and technologies as spatial changes, which make their habituation of the Underground laborious, requiring continuous domestication. Moving through spaces constrained by pre-arranged changeability, commuters must keep glancing at new images and technologies (while looking where they are going) in order to maintain familiarity with the space of their everyday travel.

media, audiences, city, public space, screens, everyday life

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