[PEN-L:11808] Re: Chico O'Farrell

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, August 16, 1997 Louis N Proyect writes:
>...
>It got me thinking about how much has been lost since the advent of
>television and suburbia. ...
>                      The hunger for a collective whole will satisfy
>itself sooner or later.

Bravo on a very nice bit of insightful commentary.  The quoted snip
above reminds me of another story I just read in Richard E. Sclove's
"Making Technology Democratic", published in the outstanding
collection _Resisting the Virtual Life_, ed. Brook and Boal.  It is
worth repeating here:

     During the early 1970s running water was  installed in the houses
     of Ibieca,  a  small village  in northeastern  Spain.  With pipes
     running directly to their homes,  Ibiecans no longer had to fetch
     water from the village fountain.  As families gradually purchased
     washing  machines, fewer women  gathered to scrub laundry by hand
     at  the  village    washbasin.    Arduous  tasks  were   rendered
     technologically superfluous, but village social life unexpectedly
     changed.  The  public   fountain and  washbasin,   once scenes of
     vigorous social  interaction, became nearly  deserted.  Men began
     losing their sense   of easy familiarity  with the   children and
     donkeys   that formerly  helped them haul   water.  Women stopped
     gathering at the washbasin to intermix scrubbing with politically
     empowering gossip about men and  village life.  In hindsight this
     emerges as a   crucial step in  a  broader process  through which
     Ibiecans came to relinquish  the strong bonds---with one another,
     animals, and  the land---that  had  knit them  into a  community.
     Painful  in  itself, such loss of    community carries a specific
     political risk as well: as social ties weaken, so does a people's
     capacity to mobilize for political action.

     Like Ibiecans, we   acquiesce in  seemingly  benign or  innocuous
     technological   changes.   Ibiecans    opted    for technological
     innovations  promising  convenience, productivity,   and economic
     growth.  But they didn't  reckon  on the hidden costs:  deepening
     inequality,  social  alienation,  and  community dissolution  and
     political disempowerment.

I live today in a neighborhood of about one square mile built in the
late 1960s on the former pastures of a dairy farm.  The sycamore trees
in my front yard lined one edge of the pasture.  There are no
sidewalks in this neighborhood and no parks, or public gathering spots
of any sort within walking distance.  Many of the families living here
are the originals of the late sixties.  Today, they are old and dying,
their houses selling to landlords who rent them out to families or
individuals who will stay only a short time.  There is no feeling of
community here for me, really, even though when I moved in the
families across the street all came over and said hello, giving me
names, phone numbers, a bit of history, and even a chocolate
cake---their hunger for a collective whole was then readily apparent.
Thereafter, though, it's only an occasional wave as I pass by on my
way to work, if I happen to see anyone at all in their yard, a rarity.
Perhaps its my fault, but I don't know how I can engage these people
aside from drawing them into my house for a party or other such
privately-held gathering, something I find "naturally" hard to do with
effective strangers many years my senior.  I would probably find
little in common with them, but it would sure be nice to have a public
spot in which we all could encounter one another and chitchat to
become acquainted.  I wish we had something like a washbasin here,
with sidewalks too, maybe even a park with a public pool, or a bike
path.  Anything by which our collective hunger for society could be
satisfied by something more than retreat to television, or e-mail,
within our modest, sidewalk-free suburban enclaves.


Bill