Ethnologists can make an inventory of newspapers, little individual flags unfurled without too much ostentation that allow them, if they direct their attention to the page the paper is opened to, to speculate about each reader’s preoccupations, depending on whether they see the person absorbed by news items, sports, or the political fortunes of which they themselves retain some echo from listening to the morning radio or reading the same newspaper. (Auge 2002:34)

Marc Auge(2002), In The Metro , suggests a closer inspection of newspapers left on public transport can provide hints as to the nature of the reader, their lives and interests. What newspaper is it, does it have any writing or marks on it, is it folded to a particular page or is the crossword complete? How many other readers have shared it? How old is it? What physical traces are left on it's surface?

Fewer people read on buses than the tube. Heads turn towards the window marking space between stops, cars, people, cyclists and the blur of the city. Above ground travel doesn't deny the space between the bus stops, like the tube. What is the effect of visual stimulation on mental thought? How could the same experience be expressed as a pleasurable daydream or a dangerous pursuit, so visually stimulating as to cause physical harm, like the 1859 article in The London Illustrated News.

Georges Perec talks about the idea of how the outer world penetrates the inner world of readers on public transport.

What becomes of the text? What happens to it? How is the novel perceived when it extends between two stops, Montgallet and Jacques Bonsergent? How is it that the text is chopped up the way it it, this concatenation interrupted by the body, by others, by time, by the daily rumble of collective life?’ (Perec, cited in Auge 2002: 34)