A Local Non-Place: B10 Ingraham

So, I needed to find a local non-place and I went to a place that I thought would be just that. I went to do this assignment in B10 Ingraham, a major lecture hall on campus, as I’m sure many of you know. I did not actually have a class, I just figured I would go there and do this assignment in the back while an intro Econ lecture occurred.

As I was sitting there in the back, I sat in the middle of a row without anyone sitting next to me on either side. The single words that anyone spoke to me were when a guy went to sit on the other side of me, and asked if he could get through. I said, “sure” and did the half get-up to let him through. That was the sole word I spoke between entering the class and leaving. When looking around the room before class started, I would say roughly 80% of the people were not talking to anyone. Many had iPods that they were simply listening to as they sat there, or set up their notebooks. Also, many people were reading the two campus newspapers while waiting for class to start. I even saw two people talking on cell phones a mere 1 minute prior to lecture starting. The other 20% of the people were in fact talking to each other, sometimes in small little groups. The professor arrived 5 minutes prior to the start of lecture, and spent 4 of those minutes setting up the document cam and lecture notes. She spent the last minute scanning the room and just looking at the students.

During the lecture, nearly everybody was taking notes while looking and listening to the lecture being given. Some people were still reading papers or clearly doing something other than pay attention, which I simply cannot understand why them came in the first place. Nobody talked to anyone else during lecture, except the professor occasionally asked the class something and then one person would answer. Of course you couldn’t even hear that person’s answer from the back of the room, so the professor repeated the answer. When the lecture was 2 minutes from being over, slowly everyone started to pack up. Some just closed their notebook, other zipped up their backpacks, and some basically were out of their seats already. The professor then ended a minute early, partially because everyone forced the issue, and everyone got up at once. There was definitely chatter among people, although I would still say a large majority got packed and walked out on their own without talking to anyone.

In terms of Auge’s non-places and the discussion we had in class on Tuesday, I think my observations clearly come to one conclusion. That conclusion is that a place is never solely a place or a non-place. It is determined by how you are using the space, and what perspective you have when you are in the space. From my perspective, I was definitely in a non-place, one which was a temporary space to be in and where even though I was next to hundreds of people, I was essentially in solitude. On top of it, there is no history in the room that I know of or matters as far as I am concerned, and relationships were not made at all. Yet, for those people that are in groups and chatted quite often while in the class, it may be a place for them. They have relationships in the lecture hall, and are not in solitude. It also may be a place for the professor, who very well could have been teaching classes in that lecture hall for 10 years or more, creating a history for her. So, I think lecture halls provide a good viewing space to see how non-places and places are the same spaces, for different people.