reading

First North Western service to Manchester and Midland Mainline service to St Pancras 2 June 2004 (early morning)

traveller "...

A man in a tie… gets on. He has taken out a load of paper to study. Removes the bulldog clips and begins to read the highlighted and heavily annotated pages. His green highlighter pen comes out from his pocket. [notebook: First North Western service to Manchester 2 June 2004 7am]

Across [from me] a man sits with his PDA on his table, [along with his] glasses and paper. He is engrossed in a Dickens novel... A woman walks past with a buffet bag and a mobile going off with a distinctive melody. The man... sighs in irritation. [notebook: Midlands Mainline service to St. Pancras 2 June 2004 9am]

system "...

No information.

ethnographic guide

Whether a novel or documentation, reading creates another world for a traveller to inhabit. The events, actions, and movements ongoing in the reading material create a structure of time and space through which the journey is experienced. The journey is made, then, through the reading (which, of course, has an effect on how the both the journey and the arrival is experienced). Other actors, such as mobile phones, may interact with this world, however.