Are We Sitting Comfortably? Domestic Imaginaries, Laptop Practices, and Energy Use

Abstract

Are we sitting comfortably? Domestic imaginaries, laptop computing practices, and energy use.Word Count: 8,910 (excluding references) AbstractThe considerable literature on domestic consumption practices has tended to focus on either the (re)production and contestation of normative imaginaries, or the links between escalating standards and energy use. Far less has been written which links these related areas together. Accordingly this paper is positioned at the intersection of debates on domestic consumption, energy use and home cultures. Through a qualitative study of laptop use in the home, we illustrate how energy intensive practices such as multi-tasking and alwayson-ness, and changing computer ecologies are intimately bound up with the reproduction of particular domestic imaginaries of family and home. A key insight in this paper is that a purely physiological conception of comfort would fail to fully explain why practices such as multi-tasking and always-on-ness emerge, and thus we theorise comfort as an accomplishment comprised of inseparable temporal, bodily, spatial and material elements. Ultimately we argue here that comfort needs to be understood as a multi-valent imaginary that is itself bound up in broader idealised notions of family and home in order to understand shifting practices, computing ecologies and energy consumption.

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