Abstract

This essay is a response to Shaun Moores’ commentary on the author’s A Geography of the Lifeworld, an examination of the significance of the everyday spaces, places, and environment in peoples’ daily lives (Seamon 1979). The author discusses a number of Moores’ concerns, including the role of media in supporting or undermining physical places; the value of phenomenological method for media and communication studies; and the charge that phenomenology is hindered by an essentialist approach that presupposes the presence and significance of invariant existential structures.

 

Keywords: architecture; digital media; everyday life; experience; media use; phenomenology; physical environment; place; space

 

Introduction

I am flattered and encouraged that media and communications scholar Shaun Moores finds value in A Geography of the Lifeworld, a book I wrote almost thirty years ago to explore the importance of the material and spatial environment in peoples’ daily lives (Seamon 1979; hereafter Lifeworld).

In his commentary, Moores highlights what he sees as both negative and positive aspects of my book—that, on one hand, I unfairly criticize media as a threat to firsthand human contact and place-based communities; that, on the other hand, my phenomenological perspective and method might provide a valuable means to explore what Moores describes as “those apparently automatic uses of media in the habitual movements of the daily round” (Moores 2006). I want to respond to these two comments as well as to other issues that Moores raises in his commentary. First, however, let me briefly explain who I am and what Lifeworld is about, since my academic background and interests may at first glance seem far removed from the realm of media and communications.

 

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology

I am a geographer and an environment-behavior researcher in a department of architecture. My main teaching and scholarly focus relates to the nature of environmental behavior and experience, especially in relation to the built environment. I am interested in why places are important for people and how architecture and environmental design can be a vehicle for place making, especially in cities. Most often, I call my area of interest “phenomenological geography,” “phenomenological ecology,” or “environmental and architectural phenomenology” (Seamon 1993, 2000, 2004, 2007; Seamon and Mugerauer 1985; Seamon and Zajonc 1998).[1]

I became interested in this topic when I was working on my doctorate in behavioral geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s (Seamon 1987; Seamon and Buttimer 1980). My dissertation, revised and published in 1979 as Lifeworld, focused on a wide-ranging phenomenon that I called everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with their everyday places, spaces, and environments. My source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups—small groups of volunteer participants (mostly but not all students) who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience relating to focused themes such as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of some 1,500 personal observations provided by these environmental experience groups, I eventually arrived at three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appeared to mark the essential lived core of everyday environmental experience. The section on movement examined the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argued, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explored people’s attachment to place and gave particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s third section on encounter considered the multifaceted ways in which people make or do not make attentive contact with their surroundings and explored such modes of awareness as obliviousness, noticing, watching, and more intense encounter types. In the book’s concluding section, I examined the lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argued that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

 

Habitual Embodiment and Place Choreographies

In his commentary, Moores devotes considerable discussion to my explication of movement, thus I want to elaborate findings on this theme so I can then respond to Moores’ comments. As indicated above, one central theme arising from the environmental experience groups was the importance of habitual movement in everyday life. Group observations suggested that, regardless of the particular environmental scale at which they happen, many movements are conducted by some preconscious impulse that guides behaviors without the person’s need to be consciously aware of their happening.

“Body-subject” is the term that Merleau-Ponty used in his Phenomenology of Perception to describe the intentional but taken-for-granted intelligence of the body. “Consciousness,” he wrote (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 138-39) “is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call. 

Though Merleau-Ponty said very little about larger-scale actions of body-subject in Phenomenology of Perception and in his other works (see Seamon 2007, note 4), observations from the environmental experience groups pointed to its versatility as expressed in more complex movements and actions extending over time and space. One such behavior is what I then called body ballet  and have more recently (Seamon 2007) called body routine—a set of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, preparing a meal, driving a car, doing home repair, and so forth. Also identified was what I labeled a  time-space routine—a set of more or less habitual bodily actions that extends through a considerable portion of time, for example, a getting-up routine or a weekday going-to-lunch routine.

Most important for the topic of place making, group observations suggested that, in a supportive physical environment, individual time-space routines and body routines may commingle in a larger whole, contributing to an environmental dynamic that I called, after earlier observations of urban critic Jane Jacobs (1961: 50), a  place ballet—an interaction of time-space routines and body routines rooted in space, which becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchanges, actions, and meanings.

Group observations suggested that place ballet may occur at all manner of environmental scales—inside, outside, at the level of neighborhood, street, public space, building interior, and so forth. Place ballet should not be envisioned as a regimented ensemble of robot-like participants moving about in mindless precision but, rather, as a fluid environmental dynamic that allows for temporal give and take as participants are present more or less regularly, at more or less the same times. Newcomers, outsiders and infrequent participants may contribute to place ballet, but its foundation is some degree of environmental and temporal regularity founded in body-subject (Seamon and Nordin 1980). Place ballet is often the lived foundation of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1989; Rosenbaum 2006) calls a third place—a public or semi-public establishment, other than home or work, where people informally gather and socialize, for example, a popular café, pub, or eatery.

 

Routines, Media, and Place

In his commentary on my book, Moores gives considerable attention to the habitual nature of everyday movement because he sees the theme as an important lived structure that can establish a taken-for-granted regularity of media and communications use. He is struck, for example, by one group member’s account of a weekday morning routine that includes walking to a nearby café, ordering scrambled eggs and coffee, and reading a newspaper, which “had to be the New York Times.”

Here, the necessity of a particular newspaper is as integral to the group member’s routine as the place or food order, and Moores points to researchers in media and communication studies (e.g., Bausinger 1984, Scannell 1995, 1996) who emphasize that media become most significant and successful when they become an integral part of taken-for-granted daily life, or the lifeworld, as phenomenologists call it. As Paddy Scannell makes the point in regard to radio and television, these two broadcasting technologies “are part of both the background and foreground of our everyday dealings with each other in a common world. They are so by virtue of the ways in which they disclose the everyday historicality of the world every day” (Scannell 1996: 5).

One thing that puzzles Moores about my book is the few times group members mention media as a regular event in their “world every day.” As he points out, one other group member highlighted nightly television news as an invariant portion of daily routine but, beyond that, it is true that media of any sort were not mentioned in group observations.

Mostly obviously, this lack of inclusion can be explained by my topical area of study—i.e., the group members’ daily involvement with the realm of places, spaces, and environments that were part of their everyday world, or geographical lifeworld as I called it. Never at any point directly did I ask group members to examine the role of media in their lives, and such observations only arose as media had some role in transforming an environment into a place through regular, “habitual” use—as with the group member’s insistence that only the New York Times could make his café breakfast routine just right.

I entirely agree with Moores’ suggestion that interested volunteers exploring their media and communications experience in group context might provide useful insights and hope, as Moores concludes, that Lifeworld provides one valuable guide for such a future research venture. Though establishing and conducting such shared group investigation takes persistence, commitment, and deep interest in the subject matter, the results can be gratifying and valuable because different people see things from different angles, thus one obtains a much fuller picture than if he or she is looking and trying to see alone (Seamon 2000).

 

A Suspicion of Media and Communications?

I don’t think that Lifeworld’s lack of examples of “media experience,” however, justifies Moores’ conclusion that I am “suspicious of developments in ‘mass communications.” Strongly influenced by geographer Edward Relph’s then-recently-published Place and Placelessness (Relph 1976), I did suggest in Lifeworld that “technology and mass culture destroy the uniqueness of places and promote global homogenization” (Seamon 1979: 91). My larger point, however, was that rapid societal and technological changes—increasing ever faster today (see Zimmerman and Horan 2004)—allow people to become free of the habitual embodiment to place that, before developments in modern transportation and communication, had always been an integral part of human life everywhere (Horan 2000, Rae 2004).

Relph’s argument in Place and Placelessness was not so much that technology and mass culture necessarily destroy the uniqueness of place but that, in some ways, they can undermine that uniqueness. Throughout his writings, Relph emphasizes that, if we can understand how mass culture, including media and communications, changes place experience, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, then perhaps we can find ways to maintain or recreate robust places, including situations of place ballet (Relph 1981, 1993, 1996).

On the other hand, if we continue to ignore the disintegration of robust places—whether street neighborhoods, urban districts, cities as a whole, rural towns, cultural regions, and all the rest—then there will encroach more and more of what Relph called placelessness—“the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place” (Relph 1976, Preface).[2]

Much of my own research and writings is motivated by the existential fact that, in the past, place making generally occurred automatically and unself-consciouly because human beings had to make do with their own bodily devices—i.e., walking, horseback riding, building by using local construction materials and traditional building techniques, and so forth. A crucial question is whether today we can understand self-consciously the workings of place and thereby create and remake places intentionally through policy, design, and planning, in spite of the fact that, in ways not imagined even fifteen years ago, digital and other new technologies allow many human needs and activities to transpire more or less anywhere at any time.

Moores’ understanding of the relationship between physical place and place-as-fashioned-by-media is considerably different from mine. He emphasizes Scannell’s concept of “doubling of place” (Scannell 1996)—that, through media like television, cyberspace and mobile telephones, there are opportunities “for relating instantaneously to a wide range of spatially remote others, as well as to any proximate others in the physical settings of media use” (Moores 2004, p. 23). At times, no doubt, this virtual extension of communications can benefit physical place as, for example, in a situation where that place faces an external threat and local and non-local defenders, working through list serves and other electronic media, are able to find each other and work to protect the place.[3]

As sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz points out, however, there is also the possibility that physical places become marginalized because electronic media change the “‘situational geography’ of social life” (Meyrowitz 1985:6). In many ways, digital communications eliminate or reshape the regular face-to-face interactions and other informal and formal social structures that were a taken-for-granted part of traditional space-bound places (Relph 1993: 27-31). As Meyrowitz (1985: 308) explains, “Electronic media have combined previously distinct social settings, moved the dividing line between private and public behavior toward the private, and weakened the relationship between social situations and physical places.”

 

Human Life and the Physical World

In short, the relationship among place, people, and electronic media is complicated, and one key question is how cyberspace and digital communications work both to sustain and to stymie physical places and human communities. On one hand, there are thinkers like architect William Mitchell, who, in some of his work, seems to suppose that sooner or later digital media and virtual environments will allow human beings to entirely dispense with physical embodiment, spatial constraints, and geographical emplacement (e.g., Mitchell 2003; but see Mitchell 1994, 1999). On the other hand, there are thinkers like architect Malcolm McCullough (2004) and organizational psychologist Thomas Horan (2000; Zimmerman and Horan 2004), who assume that place making and the physical environment will continue to play an integral role in human life. I especially like Horan’s concept of what he calls recombinant design—i.e., asking how digital technologies can be “spliced into the recomposition of our homes, offices, communities, and cities to achieve optimal forms of space and place” (Horan 2000: 12)

Here is where I have some disagreement with Moores: His questioning of the relative importance of the physical world in human life. He claims I give this topic too much attention, but I would respond that he gives it too little. I would argue that this physically-lived level of human experience must “be in place” so that less embodied-dependent dimensions of human experience—e.g., media experience—can occur satisfactorily and effectively.[4]

Of how much significance can the world of media be if one’s day-to-day physically-present world is in disarray? There are levels of lived importance, and I would argue that a secure, organized physical world is primary, thus my interest in ways through policy and design to make robust places happen (Seamon 2004). I like Horan’s take on this matter: “The need for human interaction is neither created nor destroyed, but merely and significantly altered by digital technologies. Rather, digital places are new leverage points for creating new experiences and relationships that will profoundly redefine our experience of physical space” (Horan 2000: 23).

In short, let us not jettison physical place making or face-to-face interactions of people in physical place. Rather, let us ask how digital technologies, cyber-communications, and environmental design might be drawn together to strengthen physical place making, including the possibility of place ballet.[5]

 

Encounter, Communication, and Media

Though Moores says little about it, I would argue that the most valuable part of Lifeworld for studies in media and communications is the section on encounter, by which I meant “any situation of attentive contact between the person and world at hand” (Seamon 1979: 99). Group observations indicated that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

One need is thorough phenomenologies of the kinds of encounter that various media and digital communications involve. Clearly, different media, all other things being equal, change the kind and intensity of encounter that the listener, watcher, or user has with the “real” world in which the listening, watching, or use takes place.

For example, listening to the radio allows one a fair amount of flexibility and awareness in regard to the “real” world in which the listening takes place, since vision and bodily activity can be directed elsewhere as hearing attends to the broadcast. In contrast, television typically allows for less awareness to that same world, since vision as well as hearing is involved in the encounter. With the experience of cyberspace—say, surfing the Web—one’s strand of presence in the “real” world is reduced considerably further, as physical embodiment largely slips out of awareness for long stretches of time, and one’s attention becomes focused in some small “point” far inside the head. Cyberspace can be deeply “inward” and generate an experience that is entirely apart from the user’s actual world. We need thorough phenomenologies of the varying kinds and intensities of encounter enabled by different modes of broadcasting and digital communication and media.[6]

Many thinkers and commentators have written recently about how, in some ways, digital technologies appear to be reducing the range and quality of human experience, including encounter. In a Sunday New York Times article (February 20, 2005), for example, columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan noted that New York City’s lively streets have lost some of their animation, partly because of the “iPod people,” who “walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble.” The result, Sullivan says, is that we Americans are “narrowcasting our own lives…. Technology has given us finally a universe entirely for ourselves—where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, or hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves…are all effectively banished…. Society without the social. Others who are chosen—not met at random.”

 

A Phenomenology of Encounter and Media

To suggest how phenomenology might explore a particular medium’s impact on encounter and place experience, I want to highlight psychologist Rainer Schönhammer's phenomenological study that examines the experience of regular users of Walkman headsets (Schönhammer 1988, 1989). Drawing his evidence largely from interviews with Walkman users, Schönhammer emphasizes that, from a phenomenological perspective, headset experience must be understood from both outside and inside—in other words, in terms of the impression that the headset user makes on others nearby (the outside); and the experiential sense the surrounding world presents to the headset user (the inside).

Headset users often irritate people nearby, says Schönhammer, because the users seem to violate an unspoken claim of “interpersonal reciprocity”—i.e., “the certainty of common sensual presence in shared situations” (Schönhammer 1989: 130). Particularly important is the lived fact that listening and hearing are typically unavoidable for experiencers all within the same immediate space. In other words, one cannot usually “shut her ears” not to hear as one can “shut her eyes” not to see. One result is that a person reading a newspaper in the subway does not usually annoy others in the way a person may who uses earphones to close off his or her surroundings (ibid., p. 133).

If, outside, headset users are regularly experienced by others as strangers because they are severed from the ordinarily matter-of-fact and shared world of sound, then, inside, headset users lose their usual taken-for-granted sense of the surroundings, which are often reported to be “like a movie” (ibid., p. 136). Normally, we are always aware at some level of our world but do not see or experience it as a picture somehow apart from self but, rather, as a taken-for-granted field of which our actions are an integral but tacit part. On one hand, the headset user experiences a sense of separation and distance from the world, which becomes a kind of silent, shifting, cinematic screen. On the other hand, he or she pays attention to the music, with which movements in the world outside seem to be in sync. In one lived sense, the headset user becomes experientially separated from the world as it normally is in typical experience; in another lived sense, if he or she does give attention to the world, it appears as a kind of visual accompaniment to the music, which becomes an end in itself. In short, there has been a significant shift in the headset user’s being-in-the-world, including the nature of encounter.

Schönhammer’s study involves only headset users listening to music. Clearly, the headset listener’s lived relationship with his or her world would be in some ways different if he or she were instead listening to a “book on tape.” Similarly, different listening media—for example, using a mobile telephone—would change this lived relationship in various ways as would the particular activity in which the user is involved as he or she is listening—for example, walking versus driving versus sitting amidst others nearby. What is needed is a thorough phenomenology of particular communication and media devices’ modes and range of lived-encounter-with-surrounding-“real”-world. Schönhammer’s work offers one instructive example as to how such phenomenological efforts might proceed conceptually and methodologically.

 

A Charge of Essentialism

I end this commentary by responding to Moores’ charge that Lifeworld is essentialist—i.e., that it presupposes and claims an invariant and universal human condition that will be revealed only when all “non-essentials,” including historical, cultural, and personal qualities, are stripped away, leaving behind some inescapable core of human experience. He suggests that, in focusing on the phenomenon of everyday environmental experience as a foundational existential structure, I ignore the specific temporal, social, and individual circumstances that shape particular individuals and groups’ situations.

In making this criticism, Moores seems unaware of the basic phenomenological recognition that there are different dimensions of human experience and existence that all must be incorporated in a thorough understanding of human and societal phenomena. These dimensions include: (a) one’s unique personal situation—e.g., one’s gender, physical and intellectual endowments, degree of ableness, personal likes and dislikes; (b) one’s unique historical, social, and cultural situation—e.g., the era and geographical locale in which one lives, his or her economic and political circumstances, his or her educational, religious, and societal background; the technological, communications, and media infrastructure that contribute to the person’s or group’s particular lifeworld; and (c) one’s situation as a typical human being immersed in a typical human world—e.g., the integrated, threefold structure of movement, rest, and encounter as presented by Lifeworld’s phenomenology of everyday environmental experience.

Moores is correct when he says that my focus in Lifeworld is general—i.e., lived qualities that contribute to what and who we are as human beings who live in a world that is partly physical, spatial, and geographical. At this broadest level, the participants in the environmental experience groups (as limited as their experiences might have been in terms of life experience and cultural/social context) are representative human beings, and their experiences speak to the typicality of human experience.

I agree with Moores that, if we move to the level of cultural, social or personal experience, then the specific everyday environmental experiences for the group or person will vary greatly, and any phenomenological investigation must describe and interpret these variations and differences as they relate to the particular cultural and social patterns and processes. But I would also argue that the threefold lived structure of movement, rest, and encounter might provide a useful conceptual means around which to examine and perhaps understand those specific environmental experiences, thus providing a way to circumvent neo-Marxist and social-constructivist conceptions that too often forcefit the phenomenon into some set of predefined social, economic, or cultural filters.[7]

My broader point is that there is no conceptual right or wrong here—rather, Moores and my differences in emphasis can be recast in terms of the different dimensions of phenomenological investigation—(a) typically human or “essential;” (b) cultural and social; or (c) individual and personal. Each of these three lived dimensions will lead to different phenomenological topics and results, though in all there will no doubt be some common threads as, for example, the significance of physical embodiment or the lived nature of encounter with things and situations in the world. In short, each of these three dimensions of lifeworld is a legitimate arena for phenomenological investigation, and one does not displace or supersede the other (as Moores seems to suggest in taking a social-constructivist position).

It would be more accurate to say that Moores appears more interested in phenomenological explication of the social and cultural dimensions of communications and media, whereas Edward Relph in Place and Placelessness and I in Lifeworld are more interested in environmental and place experience as they are in their inescapable, invariant, universal, essential typicality. Ultimately, both dimensions need phenomenological interpretation, and discoveries regarding one should offer understandings regarding the other.[8]

 

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Biographical note