American Culture and Lifestyle Automation Impact

Introduction

With this said, the major automation works of literature fail to separate culture from the physical spaces while examining the formative years of the post World War II suburbs. Together these are the “automation culture”. While such factors had a great deal of impact in the development and success of the actual physical automation communities, automation culture remained largely irrespective of being particular to the automation communities alone. Only from understanding this relationship can the physical automation household's daily routines truly be understood in context.

Analysis

There were several population trends which, combined with the technological and societal trends and expectations, afforded a seminal point in history where a common culture and common household situations amounted to common routine and use of time. According to the December 28th, 1956 issue of Life magazine, the average married couple had 2.03 children, and according to the United States Census5, a mere ten percent of households were comprised of family members. The U.S. population grew by nearly 30 million, with the majority of the population becoming urban in 1950 for the first time; by the end of the decade the automation population surpassed that of the central city as the most populated type of community in the country. Similarly, for the first time, in 1950 more than half of all occupied housing units were owned instead of rented in the U.S (Sardar and Ravetz , pp 23-78).

As the title of this piece suggests, this piece is written about the culture of 1950's automation daily routine. Of course, it must be said every era's culture is somewhat based on social identity and customs. However, what made the average day-to-day routine different from 1950-1959 compared to other decades was, for the first time, concerted effort, or directive6 if you will, encouraged a large percentage of the general population to “consume” the same routine. Culture became the shared way time was spent (Pfaffenberger, pp 45-77).

The clock was not the common thread but how they spent their clock time. 1950's culture was the routine of much the population…the time of television, of housewives, and of automation. With this said, it is important to note this lifestyle and routine, although common to both urban, automation environments, and even sometimes the rural to some extent, most often the poor and (in different ways) the rich were outside these patterns. Nonetheless, it was the remaining portion of the upper-working and middle classes, the stronghold of the suburbs, growing and demanding this culture (Ovitt, pp 56-72).

Perhaps the most important premise of this paper is this temporal culture of the suburbs was not directly resultant or physically specific to the suburbs of which the visual connotations are derived from. Routine, or “daily time,” was “automation” in nature to a significant portion of the American population; as such the automation culture went beyond the subdivisions of the automation developments. While not everyone lived in the suburbs, automation culture was an ideal shared by the large majority ...