My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #34, April 10, 2000

YESTERDAY'S GONE

My son says I have no gift for observation, and maybe he's right. The other day I was walking downtown, looking at houses on the way, and it suddenly struck me that there were no TV antennas on the roofs. None. When did that happen? How did it happen?

Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book The Tipping Point, talks about how ideas and technologies spread like communicable disease until they reach a tipping point, after which the new has become the norm; cable TV, having passed that threshold, is now available in two-thirds of American households. Reporters certainly assume that everybody has cable -- their excuse for not bothering to report what political candidates say is that people who want to know that can watch C-SPAN.

The thing is, cable is a privatizing technology -- instead of broadcasting to a mass audience of mixed ages, genders, races, ethnic groups, and interests, networks and advertisers can focus on like-minded groups: children, Hispanics, religious people, sports nuts, movie buffs, or rap fans. Cable watchers need never inadvertently get exposed to other, broader ideas and interests.

That got me thinking about a lot of other things that have disappeared in my lifetime, or are dying fast, and I see the same kind of privatizing going on. General interest magazines like Life and Saturday Evening Post have also died, while magazines targeted to our narrower, specific interests have flourished.

Some place along the line, I realized, builders stopped putting front porches on houses, maybe in the sixties or seventies, when they started creating suburbs by the hundreds, putting up identical houses on much larger plots of land than were available in cities.

Front porches were where people sat to enjoy cool breezes and chat with passing neighbors while keeping an eye on the kids playing in the streets and front yards. But once houses had big yards, kids could play in back, with their own swing sets and wading pools. Now, front porches weren't a great solution for stultifyingly hot, humid summers -- cool breezes didn't do enough to relieve oppressive summer heat, and they didn't keep off the pesky bugs, so when air conditioners became affordable, a lot of us moved inside and shut out the outside world entirely.

We weren't even cutting ourselves off from passing neighbors when we did, because nobody was passing by anymore. The sidewalk is another thing that has disappeared in the suburbs because developers assumed we would go everyplace by car. Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy for you -- since they didn't create storefronts or parks or schools or restaurants within walking distance, they were right.

In the new, more spacious neighborhoods, I'm pretty sure it's no longer the case that everybody in the neighborhood helps raise the kids who live there. When I was a kid, if my brother was blasting his music, anybody could yell, "Gordon! Down or off!" and he'd turn it down; any adult who saw a kid committing mischief could be counted on to tell his parents about it. No parents were totally on their own to supervise and civilize their children, while at the same time, the kids were safer and freer to roam, because of all the extra adults paying attention to them.

I'm thinking, too, that as kids entertain themselves with TV and stereo and computers, alone in their own rooms, the idea of sitting around after dinner playing Monopoly and Clue and card games and charades and word games might have gone by the boards too -- the games are still for sale in the stores, but you don't hear about anybody actually playing them, like my family did when I was growing up, and like I did with my son years later -- I had him playing Madlibs with me when he was five, which I'm pretty sure made him the only five year old in the country who knew what nouns, adjectives and transitive verbs are.

That's kind of a pity, too, because it's a good way to get to know people really well. Nobody who never played cards with her would have known my kind sister-in-law had such a ruthless competitive streak; nobody who didn't watch me read outloud to kids, using different voices and accents for every character, would realize what a complete ham I am. The playfulness of the occasion brings out some of our best ideas and jokes.

The kinds of free and easy exploring we kids used to do, biking, or playing pickup ball games or going to the library or ice cream parlor can't be done when there's noplace kids can reach without being chauffeured, and no watchful adult eyes to make sure they're safe. If there's no park to go to, they can swim in the indoor pool, or watch movies on cable or video, or play computer games, in the privacy of their own rooms. When they play sports, it's not pickup games, or games they make up as they go along, but organized league sports. They don't wander around downtown; they go to the mall.

Our taste for privacy has grown, too, maybe in reaction to the constrictiveness of the old neighborhoods, where the houses were so close together that everybody knew each other's business. In neighborhoods that cozy, you had to put up with some people you didn't much like. The new houses are lots bigger, and so are the yards. You could go for days without even seeing any neighbors at all, as you flick the electronic opener for your attached garage and drive directly inside your home.

These are all changes that kind of snuck up on me when I wasn't noticing. It's not that anybody set out to make a new world; it's just that a lot of small changes, each with their own tipping points, started adding up to big changes, in attitudes and ways of life. And while there are many benefits from the new ways of doing things -- not the least being the way we can share information, ideas, and friendship on the net -- it seems to me that many of these changes are moving us away from any idea of a shared life, with obligations to and benefits from our community. If we have our own pool, why spend tax dollars on a public poll for everybody? If we can watch the ballgame at home, why bother to go out among crowds of people we don't know or wish to know to see the real thing?

Americans have always been torn by the conflict between our longing for freedom and individualism, and our longing for community. There are some signs that Americans are beginning to be dissatisfied with what our greater space and privacy has cost us, in time, family, and friendship. Perhaps I'll be looking back 20 years from now and wondering when it happened that corner stores and parks sprang up again in every neighborhood. This time, though, I'm going to be watching for those ideas to spread, and even doing my bit to help them along. If that particular tipping point comes, I think I'll notice it.