April 3, 2007
A quote from Michael Schluter and David Lee's The R Factor:
We wear privacy like a pressure suit. Given half the chance we’ll stuff the seat next to ours in a café with raincoats and umbrellas, stare unremittingly at posters about measles in a doctor’s waiting room… Anything but invite encounter; anything but get involved… (T)he home itself has grown lean and mean, wider families being broken up into nuclear and single-parent units where the individual’s desires and interests characteristically take precedence over those of the group. Unable to stop treading on each other’s toes in the mega-community, we have stepped into our separate houses and closed the door, and then stepped into our separate rooms and closed the door. The home becomes a multipurpose leisure centre where household members can live, as it were, separately side by side. Not just the gas industry but life in general has been privatised.
It's a bleak paragraph. But everyday life has become increasingly privatised in a shifting, drifting world where communal ties tear and break and common interests fade into the background. It is impossible to shake of the sense of gnawing loneliness. We sense a lack, an absence, an emptiness in our everyday lives.
For many it is back to the family. But the processes of privatisation reach deep into the heart of family life.
|