196 Practice
merised, not talking with one another except for laconic exchanges during the numer-
ous commercial breaks, each person silently absorbed into the images dancing on
(their) retina.We now realize that television viewing is even less a shared
encounter, being more a solo experience with ‘laconic exchanges’
taking place between the viewer and the TV set. Although slightly
humorous in connotation, this situation also touches bathos, the
point being that the ‘programming collective’ behind the screen
is capturing the mass mores and influencing the mass preferences
of viewers electronically, dispassionately, and at fractional cost,
with low-brow televised soaps interspersed with excellently
scripted commercials for products which induce dietitians and
sociologists to cringe! The cartel of companies selling properties,
automobiles, gasoline, and consumer durables are all reaching captive audience
consumers. With media-directed consumerism and mail-shot advertising, the
retail industry is able to boost shortfalls in the flow of profits and manipulate con-
sumer spending responses, all neatly separated out, zoned into, and defined by
car-plot-house conformity.
In pre-automobile times family needs had to be met locally,
mostly from within the household and the local community.
Hence home entertainment, kitchen gardens, soap- and sauce-
making and all the other trappings of family nostalgia. Now the
postal service, courier van and household automobile enables
suburban dwellers to obtain their goods effortlessly. Producers
have used advertising to narrow the band of ‘desirable’ options
and make consumer selection ‘easier’. In this way manufacturers
and suppliers arrange the mass production of a range of osten-
sibly different, yet essentially similar, consumer lines. These
goods are always conveniently to hand in well-placed outlets,
open seven days a week. And as the advertising volume can be
turned up on command, the overall result is the conformity
pattern and consumption culture outlined previously. All this, for
an automobile-dependent, television-fixated, population – within
which, an ultimate irony, settler societies put pride of emphasis
on individuality and inventiveness.^11
A characteristic of all that is conventionally suburban is con-
formity. Indeed monotony toned up as conformity is structurally
laced and patterned into ‘grey’ suburbs displaying a repetitive
permutation of streets, houses, berms, yards and lawns – all dif-
ferent, yet in reality very much the same. Always the questions
asked are site differentials – ‘what size of plot?’, ‘what width of
street?’, ‘what yard dimensions?’, ‘what floor area?’, ‘what price?’
Seldom asked are the questions ‘why urban living in the plot-
house-car replica pattern?’ Why each house different (notably in
Australia and New Zealand), yet all three-bedroomed stereo-For an interesting insight
into the decline of social
engagement and
interpersonal
connections largely as a
consequence of
electronic home
entertainment, consult
Robert Putnam’s Bowling
Alone, 2000‘Are we, I wondered,
increasingly a nation of
overworked, lonely
people?...fleeing
disorderly and tense
home lives for the
“reliable orderliness” of
work (for) in the 1980s
and 1990s the American
worker’s work year
increased by a month.’
Robert Kaplan, 1998‘Maintaining a fleet of
cars to navigate among
the housing tracts,
commercial strips and
office complexes of the
American landscape now
takes eighteen percent of
the average family
budget’ [and all the
while] ‘California’s
population increased
forty percent [during the
period 1970–1990] and
the total vehicle miles
doubled.’
‘Paved Paradise’,
Newsweek, 15 May 1995.