Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The Week-end Book first appeared in a period associated with the advent of ‘mass consumption’. Since then, a striking number of time-intensive activities have survived the onslaught of cheap, ready-made goods: hobbies and handicraft, sports, gardening, dog walking, music making and participation in cultural life. To be fair, some of these have undergone a relative decline. The number of Americans doing needlework, for example, fell from a third to a quarter in the course of the 1980s.62 Still, this leaves a proud 5 million who, unfazed by economic models, regularly display their handiwork in public today. And for every story of decline, it is easy to cite one of rise, resilience or renewal. Amateur cultural practices especially have blossomed. In France, women today are three times as likely to play an instrument or sing in a choir than they were in 1973. Every third person is engaged in painting, dancing, writing a novel or pursuing some other amateur art for pleasure, double the number a generation ago.63 In New Zealand, 71 per cent regularly read for pleasure, 50 per cent potter about in the garden, and 12 per cent sing or tell stories; to put this in perspective, computer games are played by 28 per cent. In the United States, the boom in spectator sport since the 1960s has been paralleled by a no less impressive rise in visits to theatres, opera and non-profit cultural venues. In affluent societies today, many more people play sport and go to a museum than at the time Linder was writing, not fewer.64

  There are plenty of reasons why the ‘kid in the candy store’ model does not capture the full reality of consumption in the rich world. One mistake was to imagine a simple trade-off between leisure and work, as if no time was devoted to domestic work, social life or education. Time might be scarce, but contemporaries have scraped it off cooking and cleaning to have more time for gardening and assembling scrapbooks. Sport, museum-going and other time-intensive activities have also benefited from the helping hand of the state; there is a reason cultural participation is strong in Belgium and Germany but has decreased in Eastern Europe, where governments slashed subsidies after the collapse of communism; in Poland, theatres and music halls lost almost half their audiences in the 1990s.65 Perhaps the fundamental mistake, however, was to treat consumption as a short-lived encounter where a fairly passive consumer took quick satisfaction from one standardized good before moving on to the next. Anthropologists have shown how people take sustained pleasures even from mass-produced goods by making them their own, selecting them with care and integrating them with other possessions, creating their identity in the process.66 For many, their possessions are the project of a lifetime. Quick ‘commodity intensive’ distraction offers no short cut. If economists read more Henry James, they would have appreciated this.67 The consumer’s active role as a creator of novelty extends to innovation and skill. These have stimulated new leisure activities as well as perpetuating older ones. Gardening, sewing, home improvement and similar hobbies have an in-built tendency to lead people on to fresh tasks, by creating new skills and expectations in the process.68 Paradoxically, time-saving products such as hand-held power-drills and quick-fix plumbing have been catalysts of more time-intensive leisure.

  Innovation also helps explain why cheaper goods have not wiped out cultural activities. The ability to reproduce music has vastly extended its appeal and access. We have seen this for the radio in the early twentieth century.69 The tape recorder and the MP3 player take this story to the present. One important difference between the radio age and the present is that technology now is more modular, giving consumers the chance to be producers and create their own video or pop song, or touch up their digital pictures.70 The mobile phone and social networking sites have spread this process to socializing. The mobile phone is a good example of how users turned a device that was originally designed for business into a tool to stay in touch with friends and family. Instead of accelerating the pace of leisure, it may well have eased time pressure by giving people unprecedented flexibility to coordinate their schedules, use ‘down time’ and to stagger commitments. An Australian study, which compared phone logs, diaries and survey questionnaires in 2007, found that frequent mobile-phone users did not report a greater feeling of being rushed. Nor, contrary to popular wisdom, was there any significant spill-over of work into leisure time. A mobile call about work interrupted leisure or domestic activities for only 1 per cent of people. Most calls on mobiles (74 per cent) and texting (88 per cent) were to friends and family.71

  Since then, smartphones have multiplied the channels and types of communication between work and leisure. By 2011, roughly every third American and European had a smartphone. Measuring what precisely people use their smartphones for is enormously difficult. Still, the best available data gives some idea about the core functions. In the United States in 2010, smart phones were most commonly used for sending text messages (68 per cent), taking pictures (52 per cent), accessing news (40 per cent), accessing social networks (25 per cent) and playing games (23 per cent). Only 31 per cent used them to send emails. In Europe, a large 2009 survey found that usage varied considerable between countries. In Italy, only 8 per cent used their mobile phone for emails, while it was 20 per cent and 26 per cent in France and the United Kingdom respectively. In France, 41 per cent used theirs to play music; in Spain and Britain, it was barely 20 per cent.72 These figures suggest smartphones are primarily used for leisure and personal communication. True, the boundary between work and leisure has become more porous with smart technologies, but, arguably, it is leisure and private life which are increasingly invading work. Employees with children or other care responsibilities at home use their personal mobile phones at the workplace to be readily available. Information and communication technologies have created a growing expectation that people should be accessible to their friends at all times, including work hours – multiple email accounts and texting are ways to manage this invasion.73 Thanks to online browser-based software, games can be played on the office computer at any time.74 How many employees refrain from checking their Facebook page at work?

  In addition to using up time, then, consumption has created new uses of time with the aid of more sophisticated products and technologies. It needs a computer and software to manipulate digital photos as well as a digital camera or phone. Thanks to the mobile phone, making a personal film has never been easier. In France, the number of people shooting a film or video doubled between 1997 and 2008.75 By 2012, iPhones were more widely used than digital cameras. The taking and sharing of photos has skyrocketed with the spread of social networking sites and microblogging platforms which enable users to post and share multimedia. In 2012, according to one estimate, Facebook had 10,000 times more photos than the US Library of Congress. One billion videos are watched every single day on YouTube, the bulk shot with mobile phones. In Germany alone, 14.5 million smartphones were sold in 2011; in the same year, another 7.5 million compact cameras and 1 million digital SLR cameras were purchased. Across the world, digital camera sales that year reached 140 million.76 And with the new digital technologies have come new types of uses and products. Photos are no longer just printed – but they are processed and manipulated and turned into personalized canvases, calendars, neckties, even bed linen. In sum: instead of swamping leisure with a deluge of cheap stuff, innovative commodities and new time-intensive activities have grown in tandem. The remarkable story of leisure in the late twentieth century is one of symbiosis, not extinction.

  We saw earlier how the young and old have snatched the biggest share of free time. Types of leisure, too, are unevenly distributed, especially by education and class. The better educated, the more active people are. That this should be so contains a final clue as to why time-intensive cultural activities have not vanished. Learning to play the piano takes time. A pianola solves that problem: it plays by itself. And yet, the homes of the cultured and upwardly mobile tend to have a piano, not a pianola. In Germany, ten- to eighteen-year-olds spend an impressive hour a day on music-making or creative arts.77 Why torture innocent ears if it is possible to satisfy the chil
dren with cheap, easy downloads of the newest tune? The short answer is: ‘It’s sociology, stupid.’ In addition to any intrinsic pleasure from the sound of music, the time set aside to learn an instrument teaches discipline, how to gain competence and overcome challenges and, above all, cultivates the taste of a ‘superior’ person. An appreciation of Bach and Berg is a form of cultural capital. Listening to the ‘Well-tempered Clavier’, going to the opera and visiting metropolitan art galleries are all leisure activities that require time, education and investment and are consequently a mark of high status. Economic capital does not directly translate into cultural capital. Education is decisive. Being cultivated matters to professionals working in media and the arts, whereas for managers and engineers with the same salary it is a minor badge of distinction at best. In France in 2008, a member of the liberal professions was twice as likely to attend a classical concert as a businessman. Such status distinctions are mirrored in who plays an instrument, notwithstanding the growing popularity of music-making overall. A French professor is twice as likely to play an instrument as a skilled worker or an entrepreneur.78

  Private tastes have public consequences. One explosive issue is whether the best educated also reap the greatest benefits from support for the arts. Are ordinary tax-payers funding the cultural capital of their superiors and their own subordination to boot? The evidence is not clear cut. An investigation in 1973 found that during the weekend, upper-class Germans were seven times as likely to go to the theatre, a concert or a lecture as their fellow lower-class citizens.79 By contrast, a study in New Zealand three decades later found broadly similar levels of participation across society. Class mattered for the cultural genre preferred, not whether people enjoyed it actively or passively. The poor were not all couch potatoes. They simply preferred singing and folk music to ballet and opera.80

  New Zealanders, though, are an unusually active bunch. Where education does leave a mark is on the range and frequency of activities, and here New Zealand shares in an international pattern. University graduates go to rock concerts and restaurants and to the museum, the theatre, the movies and the gym.81 And they do so more often than workers. They are also more active in clubs and associations. They personify leisure in action. Contrary to a conventional preoccupation with ‘stress’ and ‘burn-out’, some evidence suggests that these typically better-educated, high-status groups enjoy their fast-paced, complex types of leisure, and more so than those with simpler lifestyles.82 These hyper-active individuals are also the same people, French data shows, who possess the most audio-visual equipment and portable devices and own the greatest number of CDs, tapes and long-play records, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between time-intensive and goods-intensive leisure patterns; tellingly, the educational gulf was narrowest for 45rpm pop singles.83

  ‘Work hard, play hard’ was already a motto in the United States in the 1950s. The cult of busyness in professional and corporate life since has energized leisure further, in the United States but in parts of Europe, too. There is evidence that it has significantly widened the leisure gap between the classes. For all its bad reputation, TV was a radical democratizing force in the early years. By 1970, most households in developed capitalist and socialist societies owned a set and spent around the same time in front of it watching more or less the same programmes. In France in 1974, viewers with a university degree or diploma watched fifty-four minutes a day on average, just twenty minutes less than early school-leavers. Twenty-five years on, the latter watched over two hours a day while graduates watched just half as much.84 That widening gulf speaks volumes about the polarization of leisure. For the educated, less time in front of the box meant more time in the theatre, museum and the gym, as well as more games on the computer.85 Not every doctor or author is active, of course. We must be careful not to imagine an absolute divide between active professionals and passive workers. Even in France, half the professional elite has never set foot in an opera house, a symphony hall or been to a pop concert, although most have been to the theatre. We are dealing with active elements, but in some classes these are bigger than in others. Only a tiny minority of skilled workers ever found their way to any of these venues, and in the case of classical concerts it has been steadily shrinking; they could just as well be farmers.86

  The polarization of work and leisure in affluent societies in the late twentieth century, then, involves two divides that cut across each other. One is about quantity and the allocation of time between work and leisure. Highly educated professionals are the new working class – with longer hours in the office and less leisure outside it; ordinary workers the new leisure class. Running across this is a second, equally important divide over the quality of leisure time. Educated professionals may have less free time but they squeeze the most out of it, juggling a far larger number of frequently changing activities than those without qualifications.87 Their leisure pattern mimics their work life. As the masses gained leisure and holidays in the sun, idle conspicuous consumption lost some of its charm for the elite. The privileged few now raised their game, seeking refuge and distinction in more demanding activity holidays, cultural tours and personal-fitness regimes. Climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro replaced lazy days on the Riviera. Since their hyper-activism consists of especially time-intensive activities that involve going out, extra mobility and coordination, it is, perhaps, only fair that these are also the very groups that feel most rushed. Fitting it all into twenty-four hours is not easy.

  In the final analysis, ‘time poverty’ is about the quality of leisure, not its quantity. Active practices can be fulfilling but require being in the right place at the right time. The greater their frequency, the greater the challenge of synchronizing them all. Leisure is not much fun if it is constantly interrupted. Women suffer from this problem every day. Men, it has been estimated, enjoy three more hours of pure, undiluted leisure than women, who have to combine theirs with childcare and housework.88 ‘Turbulence of everyday life is evidently female,’ the German statistical office put it bluntly in 2004.89

  The sense of stress also reflects changing expectations about the purpose of free time. A sociologist who interviewed French mothers found that university-educated women experienced leisure in a radically different way to their working-class sisters. For the latter, a ‘totally free day’ ideally meant spending it with their children. Leisure was family leisure, a reprieve from work and having to earn a living. Looking after the children was not so bad. To the graduates, by contrast, childcare was a task, not leisure. It appeared like a burden. Individual leisure to them did not appear as liberation from paid work but as its equivalent. Tellingly, graduate mothers treated family leisure as part of their ‘housework’.90

  In many ways, these two groups stand for the alternative ideals of leisure that have traded places in the twentieth century, one dominant at its beginning, the other at its end. In 1900, leisure was primarily about restoration after work – time to rest, recover and refuel. The key word was ‘recreation’. Cultural activities were an add-on, to pull workers away from drink, gambling and other temptations. By 2000, leisure had undergone an active makeover. Free time was no longer primarily about freedom from work but about the freedom to accomplish things, to acquire and demonstrate one’s competence in a range of activities. The latter were simply unpaid. The surge of extreme sports, creative-writing courses, amateur cooking and drama groups is merely the tip of the iceberg of intensified leisure. For many, leisure is serious business. It is no coincidence that professional busyness, active leisure and ‘quality time’ have arisen together in the late twentieth century, a period when affluent Western societies began the transition from industrial to knowledge-based societies. After centuries of trying to break free from the world of work, leisure today is close to mimicking its rhythm. It is too early to tell whether in post-industrial society leisure and work will once again fuse into an organic whole; the use of social media points in that direction. If they do, it is unlikely to involve the conte
mplative, disinterested qualities cherished by the ancients.

  Slow Food, Cittaslow and similar movements hope to stop the acceleration of life. In the light of the above, their chances of success are slim. The intensification of leisure is the crest of a wave of social, technological and cultural changes. Frequenting slow-food restaurants may help local farmers but it is far too specific an intervention to slow down the overall tempo of life. The 150,000 who visit the annual ‘Salon of Taste’ do not arrive in Turin by foot or donkey. If the pace of life resulted primarily from consuming products faster, there might be room for hope. It stems, however, primarily from doing more and the pressure to coordinate a greater number of activities. Cultivating a taste for local food can be interpreted as another attempt to build cultural capital and demonstrate aesthetic expertise. It is not clear that it has any impact on the number of other activities, their frequency or the increasingly complex sequencing between them. It may just add to these. A manifesto for a slow lifestyle announces ‘we believe multitasking is a moral weakness.’91 Mobile phones, email and other communication devices give their users greater flexibility to arrange the sequence of tasks. It is unlikely most people will switch off their Facebook sites or stop following Twitter while socializing or working, if movements like Slow Food cannot do without them either. Voluntary simplicity, similarly, faces the challenge that, however much we might want to, it is extremely difficult as an individual to simplify one’s lifestyle if the world around us continues to tick to a different rhythm. Voluntary simplifiers find themselves in a position akin to shift-workers whose schedule is out of synch with everyone else’s.92

  Collective changes to everyday rhythms have greater promise. Car-free Sundays appeared during the oil crisis in 1973 and were selectively rediscovered in 2010 by Hamburg, Bern and in Paris along a stretch of the Seine. The French thirty-five-hour week, introduced in 2000, freed up Saturdays for family time and sport. Yet it also increased the number taking weekend breaks.93 Even collective interventions face their limits in an age of personalized scheduling and the simultaneity of ‘timeless time’ offered by email and wireless technologies.94 Faster physical and virtual communication have created the ‘long weekend’. The French train network shows greater numbers leaving on Thursday and returning on Tuesdays. No law can stop such a change in rhythm. It would require the collapse of the TGV, budget flights and mobile networks to reverse the move towards ‘bi-residence’ and holiday homes.