Television and Everyday Life

THE SUBURBS AND COMMUNICATION
Clearly the suburb is a product of technological changes, particularly in transport
and communications. Williams however, in his characterisation of the mobile
privatisation inscribed within the recent generation of communication
technologies, points to a powerful tension that lies at the heart of suburban life:
a tension between mobility and stasis; individuality and collectivity; private
and public life. If the early transport technologies: the omnibus, the tram, the
light and underground railways, and the motor car provided both a mechanism
for the dispersal and reconsolidation of populations, the second generation of
communication technologies provided, in their parochial and global space-time
distanciation, a reinforcement of the way of life already well developed in the
suburb. To anticipate somewhat, it can be seen that the space for television had
been created by a social and cultural fabric already prepared; a fabric—of natural
and man-made fibres—which, in its fundamental hybridisation, provided an
environment for the more or less determined acceptance of all the compromises
and contradictions offered by the new medium.
Margaret Morse, in an extremely stimulating analysis, characterises this
hybridisation in terms of 
nonspace:
a nonspace of both experience and representation, an elsewhere which
inhabits the everyday. Nonspace is not mysterious or strange to us, but rather
the very haunt for creatures of habit. Practices and skills that can be
performed semi-automatically in a distracted state—such as driving,
shopping, or television watching—are the barely acknowledged ground of
everyday experience. This ground is without locus, a partially derealized
realm from which a new quotidian fiction emanates.
(Morse, 1990, 195–6)
Television viewing, in Morse’s discussion, has its analogies in the acts of driving
and shopping, and in the other, particular, symbolic and material manifestations
of suburban life: the freeway and the shopping mall. This is important, I believe,
and in essence correct, though the notion of nonspace suggests a kind of cultural
vacuum which I would wish to deny. Television viewing, driving and shopping,
analogically and mutually, define, rather, a potential space, a hybrid space,
within which individuals, families and neighbourhoods can create in different
ways something of their own culture and their own identities: spaces for
dreaming as well as spaces for action. Those spaces are the product of
technological and social changes, but they are also continuously reconstructed

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
63
in the daily activities of those who attend to them—distracted maybe, but
nevertheless committed participants in the ongoing struggles of everyday life.
Yet suburbs are both consequence and cause of changes in the means of
communication. The early growth of the London suburbs is significantly a history
of the improved system of public transport which allowed commuting to take
its place as the suburb’s 
sine qua non
. The first omnibus was introduced in 1829.
By 1834 there were over a hundred omnibus services to South London alone.
The first suburban railway line in London (between London and Greenwich)
opened in 1836, the Metropolitan Railway in 1863 and the first underground in
1890. Cheap fares were offered to encourage working men to leave the inner
city. The tram was electrified in 1901, the omnibus motorised in 1909. It has
been estimated that there were 250,000 daily rail commuters in the London area
by 1900. During the twentieth century suburban railways expanded and suburban
roads were built, to link suburb and centre and also suburb to suburb. The motor
car had arrived. Clearly other factors were relevant to the growth of suburbs
(Thorns, 1972, 35ff.). But equally clearly, and not just in London, the increasing
mobility of an urban population provided the crucial catalyst for suburban
development, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world.
In Los Angeles, that supremely suburban city, the story is similar, though of
course also very different both in its timing and its character. As David Brodsly
suggests, Los Angeles was almost entirely the product of railway and freeway
development, a suburban city held together by a lattice of concrete mediations,
an urban sprawl, an urban scrawl:
The power of the freeway system to shape a metropolitan sensibility cannot
be understated [sic]. The freeways have almost single-handedly expanded
the realm of the accessible, and thus they have enlarged what most people
recognize as their metropolitan environment…As a result of new freeway
construction and of highway improvements, the area of land within a thirty
minute drive from the civic centre rose from 261 square miles in 1953 to 705
square miles by 1962, an increase of 175 per cent…
In the metropolis distance becomes a function of time.
(Brodsly, 1981, 32–3)
Los Angeles is a suburban metropolis. It is, he suggests, ‘a living polemic
against both the large industrial metropolis and the provincial small town… a
society integrated by rubber tyres’ (ibid., 33, 37). The freeway connects a set
of points, spaces not places, and the metropolis that it has created has become
only a context for dwelling, a space of passage. Journeys are measured in
terms of time, the time taken, the time spent, in the impenetrable privacy, at
once domestic and suburban, of the car.
But the car, in particular, and its extension in the road network that has been
designed to accommodate it, is not just a material artifact, a technological
object. It lies at the centre of a socio-economic and symbolic system (Lefebvre,

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64
Television and Everyday Life
1984, 100). Above all it can be seen to be embedded in almost every aspect of
the suburban way of life, mutually reinforcing and being reinforced by, the
symbiosis of nature and culture, the public and private, which define the
suburb’s specificity.
James L.Flink (1988) talks of the automobile-refrigerator complex. The
car, together with the range of domestic technologies that had the
refrigerator at its head, transformed shopping and food preparation. The
consequences were profound both for the retail trade (the supermarket
replaced the local store) and for domestic life (though how far the
‘housewife’ was liberated by such a development is moot (Cowan, 1989;
Gershuny, 1982)). The kitchen, suggests Flink, began to lose its status as the
centre of the household. More people ate out, and ate fast. The consequences
were also profound for domestic architecture and domestic life, particularly
in the United States, where the automobile encouraged leisure time away
from the home. The front porch and the parlor were eliminated. Rooms
became less specialised and the garage moved to the front, and then became
an integral part, of the house. ‘[The] prominence of the driveway and direct
entry into the kitchen from the garage turned the suburban home into an
extension of the street’ (Flink, 1988, 167).
The suburban house may have become an extension of the street, but the
car became an extension of the suburban house. Boundaries between public
and private spaces had become less distinct, more permeable, transparent even.
Indeed the new suburban houses had large picture windows from behind which
the equally large picture windows of the neighbours could be seen, and from
within which the objects by which the household most wanted to express its
own status and identity could be revealed for all to see.
2
If the dispersion into the suburb can be laid at the door of the automobile
(and of earlier, public, forms of mass transportation), its consolidation can
be ascribed to the electronic communication technologies: the telephone, the
radio and the television, that followed. The suburb remains, of course. Still a
hybrid. A materialisation in space and time of the fusion that culture has
imposed on nature. The machine in the garden. Connection and separation.
Mobile privatisation. The radio and the telephone left people where they
were. No need to travel. Each household became the centre of a network: of
broadcasting in which nations and neighbourhoods shared a common culture
(Scannell, 1989); and of telecommunications in which households, through
the activity, principally of the ‘housewife’, were linked to other households,
both of kin and friendship (Moyal, 1989). Falls in the numbers of those
attending the cinema are symptoms of the withdrawal of entertainment into
the home. Increasing expenditure on do-it-yourself indicates another
dimension of at-homeness which the media enable and reinforce.
3
With
extraordinary prescience (though perhaps with a little bit of muddle) Lewis
Mumford in 1938 foresaw it all:

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
65
With the return of entertainment to the house, through the phonograph, the
radio and the motion picture [sic]—with the near prospect of television—
the modern house has gained in recreational facilities what it lost through
the disappearance of many of the earlier household industries. The radio
and the telephone, moreover, have made the house no less a center of
communication than was the old market place.
(Mumford, 1938, 467)
But it is not just the character of domestic space nor indeed the domestication
of public space which new technologies made possible and which the suburb
embodied. Perhaps even more signifcant was the change in the political
environment that accompanied these social and technological transformations,
a change, potentially of great significance, in the relationship between the private
and the public sphere and in what I shall call the suburbanisation of the public
sphere.