Television and Everyday Life

participation in a market. It is, rather, a matter of understanding how the
particular politics of modernity is constructed out of the mix of mass-mediated
public information (and public entertainment) and mass participation in the
consumption of images, objects and ideas, and the way they are appropriated
by individuals, households and groups in order to construct their identities and
the bases for both individual and collective social action. It is this particular
mix of the public and the private, of the individual and the collective, of the
democrat and the consumer, that is forged in the activities of everyday life,
and indeed has become the hall-mark of the hybridising life of the suburb (see
Whyte, 1956, 280). This hybridisation raises questions about the democratic
potential of the media in general and television in particular, for like so much
of what takes place in and through the suburb, the tension of creativity and
sterility, power and impotence which is expressed in suburban politics can
often be seen to be very unequal. It is, or can be, democratic in name only.
As Lewis Mumford notes:
In creating a better biological environment, however, the builders of the
suburb failed to take account of the need for a more adequate social
environment…[the suburb] started a de-politicizing process that has been
steadily spreading as the suburb itself has been spreading throughout our
civilisation.
(Mumford, 1938, 217)
A number of case studies provide some indication of how the politics of the
suburb has been played out. Suburban politics extends all the way from
organised action within or on behalf of the ‘community’ to membership of
clubs or organisations which may or may not have a declared political identity—
but can and often do exert political influence, for example Parent-Teachers
Associations. Suburban politics will also include, of course, in formally
democratic societies at least, the vote. But a consideration of suburban politics
also requires an acknowledgement of the absence of politics: or perhaps more
accurately an anti-politics of withdrawal from the public sphere—of conformity,
self-interest and exclusion.
At the heart of much of the politics, indeed of the life, of a suburb is the
desire to avoid conflict. Baumgartner’s study of an American suburb (1988)
draws attention to what he calls ‘moral minimalism’, whose source is this very
desire to avoid conflict. The suburb, as he characterises it, is an environment
which combines transiency with homogeneity, and autonomy and independence
with a relative absence of strangers. Avoidance is the main strategy that
suburbanites adopt to deal with threats, conflicts or disturbances. Baumgartner

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Television and Everyday Life
paints a picture of a neighbourhood environment in which every aspect of
social life—above all those dimensions of social life which create a sense of
community—are missing. In a high status suburb, even the stranger—the most
potent of threats—is dealt with in an insipid and disengaged manner: ‘only
when they can be assured that someone else will bear the full burden of moral
authority, allowing them to remain completely anonymous and uninvolved, do
suburbanites approve the exercise of social control’ (Baumgartner, 1988, 127).
He points to yet a further sociological paradox of suburban life: the mutual
juxtaposition of a kind of basic fragmentation and individualisation within
social life with a high degree of order: ‘The most apparently disintegrative
tendencies of modern life actually breed a harmonious social order all of their
own’ (ibid., 134).
Baumgartner’s view of suburban politics is, perhaps, overdetermined because
of the blandness of the particular suburb which provides the basis of his
investigation, but also because he seems to construct his view of suburban
order principally in terms of its defensiveness in relation to threat. This is, of
course, an important dimension of suburban political life, as Richard Sennett
(1986, 301ff.) illustrates in his discussion of the defence of Forest Hills during
the early 1970s. However, as Sennett himself describes, such defensiveness
can also provide the basis for a coordinated and aggressive neighbourhood
politics, a politics of moral outrage, territoriality and ‘ghettoisation’, as when
this predominantly Jewish middle-class suburb was threatened by New York
City’s attempt to build working-class and potentially ethnically diverse housing
within its neighbourhood. This is neither unusual nor unfamiliar. And suburban
politics is only a democratic politics, often, within the narrow confines of the
suburb itself. Not in my backyard.
But equally a perception of politics as defence may lead to an under-
estimation of the significance of other dimensions of public life within the
suburb. It may also lead to an overestimation of the suburb as the key
determinant of aspects of the social structure of everyday life to be observed
within it. In this sense suburban politics is also a class politics: so too is the
politics within the suburb. For instance Thorns (1972) draws attention to the
level of participation in organisations (from religious organisations to
Parent—Teachers Associations to membership of local branches of national
political parties) observed in a number of studies of suburban life both in the
UK and the USA. Participation rates vary of course; but one striking factor is
their more or less consistent skewing towards the middle classes. Middle-
class suburbs reveal a higher degree of participation in ‘neighbourhood’ or
‘community’ activities than do working-class suburbs (Gans, 1967; Seeley 
et
al.,
1956); and within more heterogeneous suburbs, the middle classes
exhibit a higher degree of participation than those who are nominally
working class (Willmott and Young, 1960; Thorns, 1972). This is true both
for membership and intensity of participation. It is perhaps less true, or less

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
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clear, for those (increasingly informal) activities that shade off into