An instant brightening of the day

Have you ever seen a person who's just walking along, or (in today's case) biking along and just has the biggest smile on their face? That makes me happy.

I dropped by Union Station a couple weeks ago to do some fieldwork, doing some analysis of spaces of waiting. Union Station's an interesting spot. You can only sit and relax if you bought a ticket. You wait in comfort at an economic investment.

No plugs though. Or, rather, none that I could see in the sitting areas. And no one was plugged in. This indicates a couple possible of things to me. First of all it may be that the architecture of the place does not assume that people will need to use tech devices, and by assuming that, the place also indirectly assumes that the people who will be waiting there are not people who need to use tech devices - in other words, people who either cannot afford it, or whose time is not valuable enough to have to use technology to be productive. A stretch of the imagination? Maybe. Intentional? Maybe not. Perhaps this is the problem with interpretive analysis of spaces - we don't know for sure. But what I do know is, for the most part, trains in LA are not something people of a wide range of social classes take regularly. After all, a car gives one better control over one's time, and a plane is faster - both indicating higher temporal capital for those who choose (and can afford) to take these types of transportation. And while airports are scrambling to install more plugs, we shall see if the new renovations that Union Station is doing will take passengers' needs to be constantly connected into account.

Uses of Temporal Capital: Domestic Workers and Scheduling

Let me reiterate that temporal capital is the amount of time one has under one's control. It is not the amount of time one ostensibly has in any given amount of time, or the rate at which time passes in an objective and absolute fashion (24 hours per day). That being said, the concept of temporal capital to help us understand our experience of time can be used in a broad number of ways.

Indeed, the correlation between socioeconomic class and temporal capital is not straightforward at all. Other scholars the likes of David Harvey (1989), Robert Levine (1997), Ida Sabelis (2007), Pierre Bourdieu (1984), and Edward Hall (in the Silent Language) allude to the idea time is variable between individuals based on how much power they have, their position within the social stratum, their occupation, or their culture. While control over time correlated with class holds true some of the time, consider the following anecdote. A family friend whose elderly father is in the hospital told me that they hired two domestic workers to take care of her father. The domestic workers do not have to do much in the way of active care, as the father is bed-bound and the hospital takes care of most of his needs. The domestic workers spend a lot of their shift watching movies or messaging friends on the iPad that the family has purchased. In this case, these domestic workers experience rather high levels of temporal capital in a micro-level, as their time and physical location is controlled by the conditions of their employment, yet they are free to do what they wish on the mobile device.

Amy Jordan (1992) found that higher SES families tend to me monochronistic, meaning they have a set schedule - do homework from 5-6pm, watch TV from 8-9pm, go to bed at 9:30pm, whereas lower SES families tend to be polychronistic - there is more multitasking, and not everything has its own temporal spot or allocation. Families of lower SES, Jordan found, are more concerned with completing the task at hand, no matter how long it took. For example, they will finish a movie rather than cutting off the movie at a certain time in order to do the next thing. Jordan's main argument is that the value of time is perceived and felt differently given a family's SES, and is passed down and cultivated within the children. Temporal capital can be used to think about scheduling of time as well. There is a certain privilege attached to be able to control one's future, that is tied to a monochronistic way of scheduling. For example, if I am able to schedule my life next week, it means I retain control over my time as projected into the future - I am allowed temporal capital on a larger scale - one that spans days and weeks, as opposed to just minutes and hours. Ironically, if I choose to follow that schedule, my micro temporal capital disappears - I MUST be at a meeting for an hour next Tuesday, and then I must be at my computer finishing an article. Yet, within a broader perspective of temporal capital, I took control over my life by allowing myself to schedule in times to be productive and keeping to that schedule. In contrast, if I had less control over my own future, I may not be as concerned with scheduling far into the future, as I may not know if I will have next Tuesday from 3-4pm free to do as I please. So the "temporal orientation," as Jordan calls it, of monochronicity is not inculcated within me, and my value of time is not tied directly to productivity. Indeed, I may not be as concerned with making sure my temporal investment yields some form of productivity - I may write a paper for however long it takes me, taking YouTube breaks as often as I like. In this way, during that process of paper writing, I have more temporal capital, as I am free to do what I please.

License Plate Frames

For a society obsessed with projecting a self-image, I'm surprised by the number of people who don't have a license plate frame that portrays some sort of affiliation. I drive around LA, and most of the license plate frames that I see are the generic frames one gets with a new car - usually the name of the car company or the dealership.

Short one today. Yesterday, I spent some time on the MTR here in HK listing out people on the train, and whether they are using their mobile phone. I don't know if I'll be able to use any of this for my dissertation, but it was a fun exercise. If I were to use it for my dissertation, I would say, for sampling, something along the lines of, it was a random sample of a random part of the train. Perhaps that will work.

Waiting is such an interesting moment. Or series of moments. It's frustrating too, because by definition, waiting is when the person who waits is waiting for something... and he or she is at the lowest point of control over his or her time. After all, one cannot absolutely predict when the waiting time will be over, unless, of course, the waiting is scheduled. And even then, one is at the mercy of the ticking of the clock to determine when the waiting is over. There is an element of expectation here too - the more one can expect, and trust that expectation, the less frustrating the waiting is? This will be interesting to test...

A platform to practice writing

In an attempt to try and write a bit more, and coherently (as much of my ramblings in private spaces don't translate well to anyone other than me understanding it), I'm going to try and blog a bit more. Francesca and I were talking about how, after quals, it's hard to have a constant writing schedule (since one is presumably also not in class anymore at this point), and it's easy to get caught up in a plethora of other projects, as I have, that don't necessarily require constant writing.

There are actually a few sites that I use to help me get into a writing groove. One that I have used pretty extensively to brain vomit is 750words.com, a site inspired by a program (?) or process called The Artist's Way (which I have actually undertaken years ago, when I was writing a lot of music). In The Artist's Way, one of the activities that you do every day is what is called "Morning Papers," in which you write stream of consciousness 3 pages handwritten, just to get any "gunk" out of your system before you do actual writing. Hence the brain vomit.

Whenever I need a quick fix, I will head over the writtenkitten.net, where the site gives you a picture of a kitten every 100 words you write. It's quite the motivator. You just have to remember to cut and paste everything you write back into a word document, or you'll lose it.

Winmar has told me about a program called Write or Die which sounds seriously ominous. I haven't personally used this, but apparently you have to keep writing, or it will start (egads) DELETING what you write! If that's not a motivation to keep writing, I don't know what is.

So there you go. Happy writing!