Something strange happened when I took Molly, our cat, to the vet.  I exchanged pleasantries with Dr. Whatsit and then, all of a sudden, Dr. Whatsit assumed control of both sides of the conversation.

Dr. W.: Do I think your cat should stay here another night?

Dr. W. (without pause): Yes, I do

Dr. W. (without pause): Do I think it would be a terrible idea  to take her home tonight?

Dr. W.: (without pause):  No, I do not.

In effect, I stood there and the vet interviewed himself. 

I couldn’t help feeling that the vet was sending me a message over and above his "message" about Molly.  He seemed to be to be saying, "Listen, clearly, you’re hopeless.  You are not soliciting the information you need.  So, here’s the deal.  I am going to ask the questions you should have asked.  And then I’ll answer them."  More exactly, there now seemed to a silent "you idiot" in front of everything he said.  (Maybe, I’m just being too sensitive.) 

Did people interview themselves like this, say, five years ago?  I don’t think so. 

I am just back from a week of ethnographies in Toronto. Very interesting. Without betraying the interests of the client, I can offer a little more detail on the “Great Room” on which I posted several weeks ago.

The great room is fast becoming the idee fixe of the middle class home. People are opening the kitchen into a kind of family room, sometimes colonizing the dining room and/or the living room in the process.

The actual formality of speech, dress, meal time, and interaction has been going down in Western societies since the Victorian high water mark. To be sure, there have been several rear guard actions, with Martha Stewart and others fighting the good fight. But, in most households, formal living and dining rooms are archeological remainders. (They are actually sometimes roped off and removed from service, as Joan Kron demonstrated.) This means that living and dining rooms have been consumed more space and budget than they deserved. In a sense, the great room was merely an idea who’s time had come. (And for those of us inclined to marvel at how fast and responsive we have become as a dynamic culture, and I am one of these, the lag time here is something to think upon.)

But the great room is also a way of contending with our growing time poverty. Every one in the family is working harder, out of the home and in the home. We had to steal time from somewhere and we took it from the family meal. (Many families regard the Sunday, or Friday, dinner as an event long since passed.) The meant that the family was now spending less time together. Meal time was, after all, the highest quality time spend together. (Most families are not clear whether watching TV together counts.)

The great room is useful here too. It’s a “big box” that allows everyone to pursue disparate activities int the same place at the same time. They may only be in shouting distance of one another, but they are still in some sense together.

The great room is driven both by a need to recapture space for family use, and to create a “commons” for a group of people that is otherwise heterogeneous and potentially dispersive.

Does anybody know anybody who would be prepared to do a “back of the envelope” calculation of how many construction and furnishing dollars this trend has set in train?

References

McCracken, Grant. 2004. On Great Rooms. Here.

After a decade during which marketing became raunchier and raunchier, the tide has now turned. There are signs that glamorous blond women and muscle-rippling playboys are no longer the answer to every marketing officer’s prayers.

Matthew Lynn reports that the U.K. retailer, French Connection Group Plc will drop its “FCUK” logo this summer. Abercrombie and Fitch have decided to cease publication of the catalogue that drew comment for its scantily clad models. Sex doesn’t sell the way it used to, apparently.

Lynn believes the change in advertising content is a matter of wear out. “Sexual imagery is now so ubiquitous in marketing campaigns, it has lost the power to shock us.”

In June, I commented on the fact that young women are adopting more modest clothing, that the bare midriff was now passé. I wondered whether this represented a deeper cultural trend than the “wear out” explanation acknowledges. Perhaps women in their teens and 20s are insisting on new terms of reference, that they are rewriting the rules of femaleness.

There are cultural definitions that have a certain primacy. Gender is foundational in this way. Make a change here, and a change ripples through the social order and the marketplace. If young women are reworking our notions of gender, we must look for a substantial change in their notions of family, community, and politics. Indeed, we may be looking here at one of the “feeder” trends that helps drive the “values” issue of the recent Presidential campaign.

But it would be wrong to think of this as a mere conservatism. It is something more than simple risk adversion, the search for a higher moral ground, or a return to conventional values. One way to track this trend might be to think of it as 4th wave feminism. And if this is the case, we may look forward to yet another reinvention of contemporary life.

References

Lynn, Matthew. 2004. Europe’s shoppers get weary of sex in advertising. Bloomberg News. here

McCracken, Grant. 2004. Anthropology and Economics of the Bare Midriff. June 11, 2004. here

McCracken, Grant. 2004. Fashion and Economics. Aug. 8, 2004. here