Calgary Journal Online

Illustration by Julie Milne

Close your eyes and picture yourself in a place. All you can hear is the crackling of the fire, no hum of the television set. The clinking of dishes as dinner is being prepared in the next room, no clicking of video game controllers. You are in a 1930’s living room.

Take a moment to think back to the simple life. No, not the television show but the days when television wasn’t even invented yet. A time when families would come together and enjoy each other’s company and conversation. Kids playing with toys, as parents would listen to the guy on the radio tell them the daily news.

Today life has gotten so complicated that when people come home to unwind at the end of a busy day it seems as if they wouldn’t have a clue what to do if technology didn’t exist. You can not only sit in a living room and watch a show being broadcast out of another country, you can Facebook your buddy the latest gossip, text your mom to set up a lunch date next week and input it into your electronic calendar while you place a bet on your online poker game.

From the radio days when technology first got its place in your living room, to the invention of television and the Internet, it’s as if technology has integrated itself into every aspect of our lives. It makes you ask if every bit of your life needs to be touched by the technology bug or if down time should be more about turning it all off. Where were we, where are we now and where the heck are we all heading?

The ‘30s were definitely not the beginning for families gathering in one place to spend some good quality time together, but the time when the radio was becoming a more common household item and a centre in the family area. Families would gather around and listen to the daily happenings of the world and then engage in conversation with one another.

The radio really was the first real piece of technology connecting our individual homes with the outside world. This is when families and neighbours really began to come together and stretch their conversation to a more national level, then growing to a global level.

A professor of art history at Mount Royal College talks about the ‘30s and ‘40s as a time “when you really begin seeing a radical departure, a re-thinking of the house as an instrument,” says Rob Surdu. Once the radio became more of an entertainment piece, used to listen to stories and music, the television set was invented and replaced the radio as a centerpiece in our living rooms.

So along comes the television set, a combination of audio and now visual. A new item that most families didn’t even have in their households, or weren’t very common until about the ‘50s.

Everyone can recall Martin Luther King and Malcolm X belting their powerful voices through the tiny speakers in living rooms across North America. Families discussing important issues like the civil rights movement and politics. This was also the birth of two new inventions that are related directly to the connection of watching television, eating dinner all while being able to spend quality time with your family. The classic TV tray and TV dinner nestled comfortably in your green shag carpet. Who could forget all this while watching Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in “I Love Lucy.” The sound of Ricky Ricardo screaming “Luuuucy” echoed in American living rooms throughout the ‘50s.

These are times when discussion in living rooms was at a peak. Families were close and all members knew what was going on in each others lives. Parents asking their children questions about what they learnt that day, valuable things that seem so vacant in our lives now.

In the ‘60s a new change occurred when both radio and television became a key source of entertainment. “There was a switch, then the form of conversation that would happen after or during began to disappear, and now it (TV) begins to grab our attentions in those rooms,” says Robert Platts an interior design instructor in Calgary.

“Those machines started to become invasive and people saw them as something they didn’t want now in that space because they couldn’t have their previous purpose of that, conversation. So they got delegated to other rooms in the house.” Now taking the “instrument of entertainment” and putting it into the rumpus room or family room downstairs in the basement.

Keeping a more formal environment near the entrance of your home, a living room or sitting room, a place where you accept people into your home, have formal conversations, and entertain guests. Now leaving the intimate family conversation and interaction to the family room, kitchen, or bedroom.

Moving this central piece to a new location still had no effect on families acknowledging important events in the world. They still caused gatherings in family rooms every where. Every baby boomer remembers gathering around their two tone tube TV sets with their families when President JFK was shot. Or when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show, heck, the crime rate in New York went down when they were on for the first time in 1964. Who could forget Elvis, the Supremes, music legends to us now.

These important events were topics of most living room conversations in the mid ‘60s. Again though, the television set was slowly squeezed out and into the secondary living room. Families laughing and enjoying each others company in front of the tube slowly became more evident than the sound of conversation. The transition and invention of the second living room also set families apart financially.

“It goes back to the 19th century,” Surdu said. “Space of appearance, it’s where you bring people in and direct them in to the formal space … where you show off the symbols of your wealth and stats in society.” The living roomw was one of the first things you saw when entering someone’s home. We could probably describe it now as the room that collected dust, reserved for special occasions. “For a while it worked, if you were in trouble as a kid and you had to get talked to you would be brought to the formal living room,” Platts said, “because there was no distraction there.”

Dull and boring, the formal living room was not a place that people would sit, relax and let go. This would be down in the basement in the family room or more commonly the entertainment room in the 70s and 80s. But through the days of American Bandstand, The Love Boat, 10,000 Dollar Pyramid and Sonny and Cher there was a disconnection. As before the most common show on was the news, now it had become more mindless shows. Not to show any disrespect to American Bandstand, but shows were made for sheer entertainment purposes. Other than commenting on how ridiculous Cher looked every episode families didn’t have too much to talk about. It was easy to zone into the tube and just chill out, even without the haze of cannabis. In the words of Walter Cronkite, “That’s the way it was, Monday, November 16th, 1970.”

People seemed to be in hibernation and now that technology has advanced to a new level where lighting doesn’t affect your new flat screen plasma or LCD, the television has been allowed back in the open and out of the segregated room in the basement. The sexy sleek sophisticated look helps a bit as well but television aside, we have to ask ourselves how have we changed, or have we at all?

It seems as if the living room is the prominent social gathering place for families but there is a magnetic drive toward the television and technology. Our houses have now been designed around technology. We have televisions in our living rooms, our kitchens and our bedrooms. The open design concept is spreading like wild fire. You can see your TV from your kitchen and dining room, different as before when all rooms seemed to be separated from one another each assigned their own specific purpose. The living room has grown to be the living house. Has all of this caused even more of a social disconnect from our families?

You would think that after spending hours in front of a computer at work, or hours text messaging and emailing to various people throughout your day on your Blackberry, you would want to come home and turn it all off and pick up a book. Instead you sign on to Facebook now to check the digital side of you personal life. Don’t forget catching the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and flipping during the commercial breaks to Dancing with the Stars. Where does it all end? Or do we need it to end? You could go on and on in circles over this but the question you need to ask yourself is, when was the last time you turned to the person sitting next to you on your couch and said, “How was your day?” and got a better answer than, “Good, and yours?”