Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground

Proposing a grounded approach to everyday interactions with urban screens, in this chapter I present findings of my ethnographic research conducted 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 ethnomethods1 of appropriating the screens for their own situational ends, contrary to the advertisers’ conception of passengers as “captive audiences.” Silently progressing through what the respondents termed “scruffy,” “narrow” and “crowded” space (a price many must pay in order to move through their city efficiently), 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-scenography2 and to “domesticate” it (see Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992; Berker et al., 2006) as their everyday travel space.