an imaginary husband she called Fang.

“Google established itself as a fact

For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across disparate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example, mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academia from high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student recruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge, policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation of high-carbon practices.

Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).

For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across dis-parate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example,mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academiafrom high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student re-cruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge,policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation ofhigh-carbon practices.

For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social sig-nificance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobil-ity (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumptionhave led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patternsof domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoortemperature control (163).

The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process--by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

just as he had imagined

Iamluckyasimaginaryfriendsgo.Ihavebeenaliveforalotlongerthanmost.IonceknewanimaginaryfriendnamedPhilippe.HewastheimaginaryfriendofoneofMax’sclassmatesinpreschool.Helastedlessthanaweek.Onedayhepoppedintotheworld,lookingprettyhumanexceptforhislackofears(lotsofimaginaryfriendslackears),andthenafewdayslater,hewasgone.I’malsoluckythatMaxhasagreatimagination.IonceknewanimaginaryfriendnamedChompwhowasjustaspotonthewall.Justafuzzy,blackblobwithoutanyrealshapeatall.Chompcouldtalkandsortofslideupanddownthewall,buthewastwo-dimensionallikeapieceofpaper,sohecouldneverpryhimselfoff.Hedidn’thavearmsandlegslikeme.Hedidn’tevenhaveaface.Imaginaryfriendsgettheirappearancefromtheirhumanfriend’simagination.Maxisaverycreativeboy,andsoIhavetwoarms,twolegs,andaface.I’mnotmissingasinglebodypartandthatmakesmeararityintheworldofimaginaryfriends.Mostimaginaryfriendsaremissingsomethingorotherandsomedon’tevenlookhumanatall.LikeChomp.Toomuchimaginationcanbebad,though.IoncemetanimaginaryfriendnamedPterodactylwhoseeyeswerestuckontheendsofthesetwogangly,greenantennas.Hishumanfriendprobablythoughttheylookedcool,butpoorPterodactylcouldn’tfocusonanythingtosavehislife.Hetoldmethatheconstantlyfeltsicktohisstomachandwasalwaystrippingoverhisownfeet,whichwerejustfuzzyshadowsattachedtohislegs.HishumanfriendwassoobsessedwithPterodactyl’sheadandthoseeyesthathehadneverbotheredtothinkaboutanythingbelowPterodactyl’swaist.Thisisnotunusual

There are important differences between social imaginaryand social theory. I adopt the term imaginary (i) because myfocus is on the way ordinary people ‘‘imagine’’ their socialsurroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoreticalterms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. It is alsothe case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small mi-nority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary isthat it is shared by large groups of people, if not the wholesociety.Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imagi-nary is that common understanding that makes possible com-mon practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.

My distant close friends are my fellow explorers in these new spaces of humanity.

What does this say about our desire to connect, to search for meaning?

I am beginning to extend my circles of empathy, I am beginning to see that I am part of a much wider world.

That comes as a bit of shock. There are suggested readings, links, that comes as a bit of a shock. This is a course, I had forgotten what a course was. I make a mental note. Please try harder to remember that this is a Course.

A light lit up on the Spaceship's dashboard. It was Susan. Could she connect too? I have no means of picturing Susan's space at the moment she asked that. I scrolled through Susans desperately seeking Susan.

Meanwhile back at the picnic spot, Terry and Keith had turned up. It was six and seven o'clock in the morning for them and they had dropped everything to spend a little time at a picnic to chat with friends.

Marcin and I's relationship has no doubt been enriched by visiting each other's homes and countries this year, a dream for many people who have extended online personal networks and the ties which bind us I feel are profound - perhaps because of the distance.  There is a part of Poland in me now.

to Keith in Florida who had turned up in the picnic.

I was in the room with him from my learning space in Clermont Ferrand. I could hear the bad acoustics of the room in which he was/we were?. We were sharing the slides on the screen in Krakow inside the slide share of our hangout on air.

I continued the day with a picnic, a #clavpicnic at for me lunch-time. When I arrived at the picnic spot (a hangout) nobody had turned up.

It is a shape-shifting space.

This is clearly not Second Life or the World of Warcraft but a space much more liminal, much more fluid, much more powerful.

My only way of assimilating what was going on was to imagine a fictional environment in which these characters met, interacted, and played.

Yesterday, I started the day with a blog post entitled 'In the Tribble Valley' inspired by a series of tweets between people who I had never met

concoct his own version