Ithiel de Sola Pool (szerk.), The Social Impact of the Telephone

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

...

The German Social philosopher, Georg Simmel, once speculated what a calamity it would be if all the clocks of the nineteenth century metropolis suddenly stopped telling the time. We know that it would be even worse if the telephone system ceased to function. When the women of Iceland went on a one-day strike for International Women's Year on October 24, 1975, the biggest problem was communications - with telephone service at a virtual standstill.¹ And in March 1975 a switching center fire knocked out twelve exchanges in a 300-block area of New York City; some 100,000 residences and 8,500 business and professional offices were left without service...

...

Innumerable problems resulted not only for commerce, but also for the elderly, disabled, and those caught in emergencies. Without doubt, the telephone has become indispensable and modern life inconceivable without it.

Given the telephone's ubiquity and centrality, it is striking how ignorant we are about its impact on our lives; anecdotes abound, but there is little systematic study. Berelson and Steiner, in their massive compendium on human behavior, are silent regarding the telephone.² In fact, few of the machines that have transformed modern life - the elevator, the motor car - have been adequately studied for future record.

The telephone is a curious cultural artifact. On the one hand it is seen as a link to distant people and places, but on the other it is a symbol of loneliness. One is reminded of the famous 1920s song "All Alone by the Telephone" and of the last image of Marilyn Monroe, hand on the phone, reaching for life while withdrawing from it. "Why," asks Marshall McLuhan, "should we feel compelled to answer a ringing public phone when we know the call cannot concern us? Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension? His answer is that the telephone is a participant form of communication that demands a partner with all the "intensity of electric polarity."³

From these preliminary aperçus, it is clear that the telephone can break our contacts with the world just as it can create and sustain such contacts.

In this paper I will concentrate on the ways telecommunications have helped create links among people, and what these links imply about the nature of modern communities.
 

TECHNICAL AND HUMAN SYSTEMS OF COMMUNICATIONS

It seems hard to realize that once human communication depended largely on face-to-face contact. This had a number of important consequences; it reduced the radius of connections within and between settlements and fostered a dependency on physical continuity and proximity that survive in our fantasies as the earmarks of "true" communities.

In contrast to that era, we now have advanced techniques that extend us in space and time and enable us to transcend these communities of place. Despite our dazzling innovations, however, we are not yet free from our ancient dependencies on the local and physically near. One of the most interesting questions is the meaning of "near" - once human yardsticks are displaced by electronic ones.
 

COMMUNICATION CHANNELS IN HUMAN COMMUNITIES

Communication is not only necessary for the formation of human communities, it is also indispensable for sustaining them.

We know that a growth in the size and scale of communities is always, and perhaps necessarily, associated with a change in the number and kinds of communications channels. One difference between villages and cities concerns the typical configurations of networks in each. In villages, networks tend to be overlapping, comprehensive, and in that sense closed, whereas in cities they are nonoverlapping and open-ended. Such open-ended networks complement other tendencies of urban life toward variety, diversity of interests, and pluralistic standards and styles. Elizabeth Bott, in her study of British urbanites, found a clear-cut difference among her respondents regarding the type of friendship network they belonged to. More urbanized residents had friends throughout a large and diversified area; these friends of the respondents did not necessarily know one another or have any common interests beyond knowing the respondent. The less urbanized city dwellers, however, belonged to networks of kin and friends - all of whom were acquainted and had connections and shared interests beyond their knowledge of the respondent. Not surprisingly, the closed networks are also spatially confined and localized, whereas the more urban networks spread far afield and could surely not be sustained without the telephone or some equivalent medium.⁴

This supports the notion that we really must supplement the study of territorial communities with studies of telephone communities, especially since these are expected to proliferate in the future. Such studies would extend our understanding of a whole range of phenomena involving the interplay between technical and human systems of communication.

Our ignorance about the ways these two systems connect may account for the large gap that continues to exist between our technical capacities to transport people and goods and our incapacity to coordinate them with specific personal schedules and programs. Despite the pervasiveness of telephone contacts it would be difficult to describe, in detail, a typical urbanite's daily telephone commute. We have an intuitive awareness of the growing significance of telecommunications, but we still do not know much about the hows and wherefores of its uses.
 

ON POSSIBLE USES OF THE TELEPHONE

The various reasons for telephone use in daily life boil down to two: instrumental and intrinsic uses. Among the instrumental uses are the resort to telephones in times of household crises or emergencies such as illness, accidents, or unwanted intruders. Closely allied to this is the telephone as an aid to safety both in and outside the home. Thus the New York City Welfare Department now permits welfare recipients to have telephones. Mothers on welfare tend to live in dangerous neighborhoods, which makes telephone protection not a luxury but a necessity.

Another growing telephone use is for the purchase of goods ranging from daily groceries to Wall Street stocks. Wall Street business is conducted over the telephone and the modern Stock Exchange is inconceivable without it.

Finally, the telephone is the daily messenger; we use it to make appointments for dates and dinners, reservations for trips and outings, to transmit information and advice ranging from inquiries about the weather to counsel on intimate personal matters.

Requests for information are made by only a minority of telephone users - 90 percent of the calls for information are made by 30 percent of the people, and the most popular requests are for time, weather, and timetables. In New York, the ten most frequently requested numbers are for Penn Central, Eastern Airlines, American Airlines, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Pan Am, Macy's, the Port Authority, TWA, United Airlines, and Western Union.⁵ Here the telephone is clearly a means to geographic mobility.

Unlike television or radio, the presence of a telephone is a link to needed services and people; thus it helps to reassure shut-ins, newcomers, and individuals living alone. Americans can today call for a sermon, a pep talk, medical advice, astrological forecasts, and advice to the lovelorn.⁶ There are "telephone reassurance programs" consisting of daily calls to the elderly living alone to see whether they need something. If there is no answer, someone is sent to the house immediately. The greatest fear of these isolated older persons is of dying alone without anyone knowing about it. Unfortunately, many poor, elderly persons do not have telephones and lack the money needed for the initial deposit and upkeep.⁷

Medical advice is also frequently sought by phone. In Hungary, for example, "Dr. Telephone" gets some 20,000 calls a week for information and therapy.⁸ Hotlines ... have become a staple in many communities in this country, dispensing advice on marriage, drug, and drink problems to individuals who have no one else to turn to, who cannot relate well to people they know, or who wish to hide their problems from intimates. Requests for legal advice constitute another large number of calls. Confidentiality and anonymity appear for many to be the attractions of such telephone relationships.⁹

Among the intrinsic uses of the telephone are the social contacts it facilitates between friends, relatives, neighbors, and clients. While mobility and distances have greatly increased, speed of connections has been greatly improved. In this sense it is true that the telephone is "one of the basic instruments holding people together."¹⁰ The volume of such contacts has increased enormously over the last few decades. In 1969, Americans participated in 350 million telephone calls each day. Long-distance and overseas calls have greatly increased in the last twenty years and the number of telephones - 150 million in 1970 - has increased fourfold since 1950. These linkages connect not only individuals, but also entire communities; they thus help forge a common national and international culture. When the telephone first came into widespread use around the turn of the century, its role in erasing traditional barriers between town and country and in linking widely scattered communities was often remarked upon.¹¹

Such a proliferation of wanted contacts, however, also implies a proliferation of unwanted contacts. People protect themselves by having unlisted numbers, leaving phones off the hook, or interposing secretaries as shields and go-betweens. It would be interesting to know how large and diversified a community becomes before such devices are adopted. One wonders whether there now is a new breed of telephone hermits and how these might differ from the more traditional variety.

Such general descriptions of telephone usage obscure significant variations by region, season, and social class. There are homes where virtually every member has a telephone in his or her own room; this is the case in the planned community I am studying where 80 percent of the teenagers live in households with three or more phones. There are others where a single phone may be shared in a hallway by thirty tenants. Still others, even today, have no private phone available at all. Although more than 95 percent of all households have telephones now, one in twenty is still without one, and this group is disproportionately represented among older and poorer citizens.

Telephone usage also varies by season. In one study of Canadian housewives, telephone usage decreased between winter and summer as personal visits replaced telephone visits.¹² In other cases, telephone contacts proliferate along with personal contacts.
 

TYPES OF TELECOMMUNITIES

Since the primary interest here is in entire communities, let us try to specify how the telephone helps create communities.

1. The telephone as a creator of spontaneous communities. A study by Gaertner and Bickman dispelled the myth of the callous urbanite by charting the willingness of strangers to extend help requested by telephone. Callers would dial a random number and say they were stranded on a highway with a broken-down car and had used up their last dime to call the present number in the hope of reaching a garage for help. They then asked the listener if he would be kind enough to dial the correct number for them. Quite a few received help in this way.¹³ Another study compared people's readiness to permit strangers to enter their homes to make a telephone call. Compared to those from cities, small-town residents are inclined to be more trusting and helpful. Of interest is the extent to which such spontaneous communities can be created instantaneously by use of telecommunications. We may see a rise in such spontaneous and short-lived "telecommunities" in the future.

2. The telephone as a creator of therapeutic or altruistic communities. In a summary and codification of community responses to disasters, Alien Barton concluded that one of the crucial ingredients for the emergence of a communal helping hand was the existence of central communications nets without which, despite good intentions and available resources, rescue efforts and information monitoring were almost impossible. Poorly coordinated communications systems can greatly, perhaps irrevocably, set back the rallying and recovery of a community stricken by a disastrous fire or flood. Accessibility to existing equipment proves as crucial as the availability of such equipment. "For most organizations, the loss of telephone service is literally disorganizing."¹⁴ But such loss of accessibility is precisely what follows the panic that clogs highways or telephone connections in times of crisis.

Barton makes the "ability of modern societies to create an emergency social system" for responding to calamities like fires, earthquakes, or air raids, "uniquely dependent on long-range instant communications."¹⁵ In outlining a "model of the therapeutic community response," communications play the expected crucial role in activating "mutual help in situations of collective stress." Formal and informal channels of communication carry the stories of victims to those spared the catastrophic events, thereby helping to form a network of need and concern among them.

Despite Barton's general acknowledgment of the importance of communications in collective emergencies, he does not discuss the role of specific media or modes, presumably because the original studies on which his codification was based did not discuss them. But a common tendency is to overemphasize the significance of direct personal contact, and of physical proximity for communication. Barton observes, for example, that "the closer an individual is to the location of the impact (of the disaster), the more likely he is to have direct contact with the victims."¹⁶ With the availability of telecommunications, however, anyone would seem to be close to the impact, being virtually only moments away from reports, pictures, and eyewitness accounts of the disaster. Barton implies that the relevant proximity is territorial rather than electronic. In another example, he suggests that people "are more interested in nearby events than in remote ones." But what is remote and near in our global village? In an electronic era, nearness and distance connote quite different meanings.

Further proof of the importance of electronic accessibility versus physical proximity to events comes from studies of collective panic and crisis situations. When calamity strikes on planes, ships, or in nightclubs, access to communications media can be as crucial as access to exits. For one thing, an anxious crowd needs to be supplied with information and reassurance; without them they readily panic. But there is more to it than that. The number of channels is also crucial. When crisis strikes in an enclosed space, it is apparently better to have no exits at all than to have too few exits. One overloaded or inaccessible channel of contact or escape - be it a fire exit or a telephone line - may set off the very panic it was designed to prevent. Where there are no exits at all, then no hope for survival is generated. Where there are insufficient or inadequate channels, however, hope and desperation exist side by side; the simultaneous chance for escape and the terror of being trapped may make the single road to life paradoxically and tragically the path to death.

In view of this it would seem desirable to plan adequate communications systems in new communities to prepare them for eventual emergencies. It is not at all certain that we are building such safety factors into the communities now under way. We are still not truly convinced that we are entering an age of telecommunications where a clogged telephone channel can be as serious as a jammed highway or a blocked exit in a burning building.

In this connection, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has recently supported the setting up of a telephone system in thirty-two states and Puerto Rico as a means of summoning emergency care for the 700,000 victims of heart attacks - one-half of whom die before reaching a hospital - and for the 115,000 victims of accidents each year. Such an emergency program would include phoning in the necessary information to the hospital from the scene of the emergency, thus preparing the setting for the patient and saving valuable time.¹⁷

3. The telephone as the means to suburban sociability. In Park Forest, according to William H. Whyte, the telephone was clearly important in getting the community organized and mobilized for all kinds of projects. It was also instrumental in speeding up "suburbia's phenomenal grapevine" and useful in spreading scandal and bad news which travels more readily along telephone channels than from person to person.¹⁸

It has long been known that the siting and design of dwellings (where they face, where stairs are placed, and where common footpaths and exits intersect) play an important, if contingent, role in the formation of social relations and groups. The telephone's role has not been singled out for its possible contribution, but Whyte noted that morning visits among housewives - forerunners of later friendship cliques in the various courts - depended upon the telephone in important ways. "When wives go visiting," he observed, "they gravitate toward the houses within sight of their children and within hearing of the telephone, and these lines . . . crystallize into the court 'checkerboard movement.'"¹⁹

In time even here there was need for escape, as the hectic pace of the initial sociability began to take its toll and people did the unforgivable - "they don't answer the phone."²⁰
 

THE TELEPHONE IN NEW COMMUNITIES

Norbert Wiener once remarked that "society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communications facilities which belong to it."²¹ If this is true, then in our preoccupation with transportation systems we may be going about things the wrong way. Telecommunications is not only ignored in the design of new communities, it is largely neglected in the study of old ones. And even in readers and compendia devoted to the topic of communications, one often looks in vain for some mention of it. Radio, TV, and newspapers have been extensively studied and discussed (largely because of the pioneering efforts of Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his students), but the telephone is conspicuous by its omission.

As for what might be done in the future, let us keep in mind that between now and the year 2000 hundreds of new communities (ranging in size from 10,000 to 500,000 people) are being planned for the U.S. alone. Whatever else, their potential contribution as laboratories for social and technical innovations is inestimable. Telecommunications might be included in a number of ways in our speculations and designs for the future.

Communications in the Home

In his study of proxemics and invisible personal bubbles and buffers, Edward Hall has suggested that cultures, groups, and individuals vary considerably as to the distances considered comfortable or appropriate for interpersonal, face-to-face communication.²² To my knowledge, this work has not been extended to the bubbles of privacy required by different types of telephone users. But if our personal distance bubbles are not standardized, then why should we expect the telephone to be standardized - either as an artifact or in terms of various settings and purposes for use? In particular, since the telephone is a two-way channel of communication and an active medium permitting some exercise of individual will and control, personal and subjective factors should be at least as important here as they are in the cars people drive.

The problem of standardization plagues many of our ideas about suburbia and new towns. We assume, for example, that everyone's family conforms to the American ideal of a residentially independent married couple and their young children. But many studies have shown that only about half the families are standard in this sense. In addition, even standard families vary greatly in their uses of internal domestic space, their tastes in furnishings and appliances, their habits of entertaining and leisure, the amount of illness in their households per week or per month, and in their attitudes toward noise and privacy. How many of the accidents that occur in the home, for example, result from racing for a telephone that is inconveniently placed or too far out of reach?

As Daniel Bell has pointed out, one of the earmarks of modern society is "the loss of insulating space." This has pointed relevance for the location and accessibility of telecommunications within the home. While sheer availability of telecommunications is important, it is equally important to consider their location; privacy is indeed in short supply in the modern American home. Soundproofing, in particular, seems greatly neglected.²³

Furthermore, families also differ in how much time they spend at home, what they expect from family life, and how much togetherness they desire. An early study by a Cornell team identified nine different value orientations among house dwellers, a number of which are directly associated with communications behavior and demands. Those devoted to leisure-time reading, record listening, and conversation (including, one would suppose, telephone conversation) stress privacy and noise control and the desire neither to overhear nor to be overheard. Those devoted to physical health or to social climbing, on the other hand, would stress quite different design features and communications devices.²⁴

Communications Outside the Home

...

Other Communications Needs in New Communities

In the process of developing coherence and continuity, communities go through several phases; communications planning might do much to help in the transition from one phase to the next. Four phases of adjustment to a new community have been identified: (1) separation from the old familiar community and feelings of isolation and strangeness in the new settlement; (2) a
frantic period of neighboring and socializing to counteract the loneliness, the inadequacies of the unfamiliar setting, and the personal anxieties engendered by the move; (3) a settling-down process followed by a retreat to the home and selective attention to neighbors and to community organizations; the latter eventually leads to (4) a more urban texture of life in middle-class suburbs versus a more provincial reaction in working-class suburbs.²⁷ None of these phases of adjustment has yet been related to the accessibility to various communications media and channels.

In the first phase one finds frequent references to the isolation of new residents. They have not yet been caught up by life in the new setting; the isolation is discussed almost solely in terms of inadequate transportation to the places and kin left behind or of inadequate human relations in the new setting. One would think, however, that the telephone would alter both of these reactions. While it may not be able to replace the daily visits between British Mum and her working-class daughter, it can bring them into daily emotional contact. Where there is access to a telephone within the new home, phase 1 should see an upsurge of telephone visiting and greatly speed adjustment.

Phase 2, which involves most face-to-face contact, should also benefit from any available technical aids to communication. Phase 3 may not occur at all without judicious use of the telephone. Phase 4, in which territorial proximity gives way to interest-based contacts, is also bound up with use of the telephone.

Other adjustment problems in new communities, albeit without any temporal phasing, involve an especially important age group - the adolescents. A major portion of Levittown's adolescents, for example, considered the community Endsville because there was not enough for them to do. Their chief complaints centered on a lack of sports, play, and meeting facilities, a lack of transportation to get to facilities that were available, and lack of privacy at home. All of this convinced them that Levittown was not planned for them, as indeed it was not. At home their rooms were too small to entertain and they lacked privacy and soundproofing to talk with ease. Presumably this includes talking over the telephone, a favorite pastime for young people.²⁸ Similar complaints have been voiced in most other new towns both in the United States and abroad.

In addition to the young, elderly citizens must not be neglected in the planning of new communities. Such aids as instant signaling devices to convey sudden illness or other emergencies, "programmed automatic telephone dialing of critical numbers" for the housebound, and other conveniences have been proposed.²⁹ Old people like to sit and watch others, which is their way of participating in the active life around them at a pace they can manage. Perhaps they might also be served by making it possible for them to sit and hear conversations - anonymous, street conversations piped into their homes.
 

SOME CHANGES AHEAD

If we are to integrate telecommunications and life in new communities in some explicit way, we must consider some of the broader trends and developments for the years ahead which would affect both.

In a famous essay, Melvin Webber discusses one of the significant developments affecting future communities in terms of moving from communities based on territoriality and proximity to "communities without propinquity." These would replace the current place-dependent communities by breaking down the territorial confinement of past communities. Webber does not specifically analyze the role of telecommunications in the formation of such communities, but it is obviously closely bound up with developments in communications.³⁰ Surely the radius of interconnections is bound to increase the radius of interest and cohesion in the global village of tomorrow and affect human behavior in ways still largely unexplored.

In this connection the telephone has long been seen as a decentralizing influence, for it permits spatial dispersion while encouraging interpersonal cohesion. Thus McLuhan, with his customary penchant for the exotic, suggests that the call-girl is a creation of the telephone just as the red-light district is its victim.³¹ As J. R. Pierce, who has written extensively on communications in the future, reminds us, we "use the telephone because we have interests that lie beyond the home, the family, and the neighborhood."³²

Spatial dispersion, even with a telephone close at hand, may nonetheless spell loneliness for those who have no one to call, and this loneliness should not be casually dismissed in the current urban aggregates of transients and strangers. Some, unsuited by personality or talent to meet others, may well remain deeply isolated from human contacts even while surrounded by telecommunications and the bustle of urban life. Indeed, most accounts of new communities, even as they stress the new-found sociability of the incipient suburbanite, also refer in passing to some who remain isolated from the main hub of invitations and communality. But here again the telephone could be used far more effectively as a public service than has occurred to us in our individualistic culture. On Sesame Street not long ago, one of the characters who needed to complain simply "dialed a grouch" just as some are already dialing a prayer in real life or dialing a last SOS when contemplating suicide. Such dialings might not only be expanded to meet a variety of needs now ignored but might also be formally and explicitly organized from without. A new role of telephone confessor, counselor, and therapist might thus be installed, responsible for calling the community's elderly, ill, or isolated as a sign that somebody does care.

We might here turn our attention to other proposed innovations involving telecommunications in the future. In addition to picture phones and Magnafax, there is the projected art of "telefaction" which would permit us to feel and manipulate objects at a distance via telefactor gloves.³³ In view of such novelties as bank-a-phone, education by television, shopping via closed circuit TV displays, and computer-telephone diagnosis of medical ailments, it may also be possible to conduct a major portion of certain types of work from one's home and perhaps dispense with the office, the department store, and the central city core altogether.³⁴

Even more dramatic projected developments in science and society will transform life as we know it today. They also will help usher in the "second industrial revolution," the electronic society, or the automated world. This society of tomorrow, according to many serious observers, will be a society of communications, moving information and images as we now move people and goods. "We are," writes Robert Theobald, "moving from an order based on transportation and production to one based on communication, in which decisions and their results become simultaneous."³⁵

There are really only two basic modes of creating contacts between human beings and their world. One brings human beings to the experience and the other brings the experience to human beings.³⁶ We have lived by the first, and we are moving toward the second - toward the electronic encounter with the world. This should permit us to experience the world in a far less fragmented manner than heretofore and may restore to us a wholeness and richness which the first industrial revolution destroyed. Of course it may also make us all more stationary, but with the difference that our senses would be in constant and instant touch with any part of the world and its happenings.³⁷

Unfortunately, few of these projected possibilities have yet found their way into the minds or plans of the planners. All too many still think largely in terms of territories divided into stable residences from which people move to and from work, to and from shopping, and to and from amusements. Only a minority are thinking along the lines just mentioned.

I do not wish, in this brief foray into futurism, to ignore or minimize unforeseen problems that the electronic society may usher in. We already suffer from communications overload, both in terms of what existing channels can carry and what our nervous systems can process.

But the problems go even deeper. They touch on basic ways of perceiving and responding to the world and involve a basic reorientation in our designs for living. They challenge all those props of our existence we had thought immutable. Among these are the values of "settling down" in one place and one routine, of owning things, of having one occupation, one house, and one spouse for life - in short, all the idols of domestication: permanence, security, familiarity, and continuity. The world ahead, as conceived early in this century by H. G. Wells and in more recent years by Arthur Clarke and Buckminster Fuller, is just not like that.

Instead, as John McHale has suggested, we will increasingly be renting rather than owning things as we develop a culture geared to mobility and improvisation. A whole ethos of personal possessiveness - of land, house, car, and kin - may thus recede and with it a whole chunk of human history.³⁸

In line with this McHale sees a shift to new work patterns in round-the-clock cities, thereby breaking the artificial and by now superfluous dawn-to-dusk rhythm of agricultural and early industrial societies. He sees the coexistence of many alternative types of communities and settlements, each presumably with its own characteristic mix of communications media. Among these he singles out the mobile and flexible instant city, the university city which is inconceivable without advanced telecommunications, the festival city, recreation and museum cities, and experimental cities where new life styles may be explored by young and old.

As a final thought, perhaps we will not inhabit cities or communities in the future at all, no matter what their shapes or attractions. Having discarded the idea of fixed roots and definite boundaries, the idols of the foyer and the comforts of the hearth, perhaps we will turn into a species of exotic insects, stationary nomads, going everywhere without moving from one spot, in instant contact with any and everyone, armed solely with ourselves, our personal computers, and our portable telephones. 

1. "Iceland: Women Strike," New York Times, October 25, 1975, p. 34.

2. Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner, Human Behavior (New York: Harcourt, 1964).

3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

4. Elizabeth Bolt, Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock, 1957).

5. Andrew Tobias, "Sorry, Right Number," New York Times, October 4, 1972, pp. 77-87.

6. Robert A. Wright, "Urge to Dial Answered by Recorded Message," New York Times, November 20, 1971, p. 33.

7. "Phone is Lifeline to Homebound Aged," New York Times, October 23, 1973, p. 29.

8. Raymond H. Andersen, "In Need of Advice, Hungarians Dial a Psychologist," New York Times, February 17, 1973, p. 20.

9. Henry Jordan, "Social, legal problems flood hotline headquarters," Daily Princetonian, October 11, 1974, p. 4.

10. Ben J. Wattenberg and R. M. Scammon, This U.S.A. (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 251-253.

11. Ray Brosseau and Ralph K. Andrist, Looking Forward (New York: American Heritage, 1970), p. 81.

12. William Michaelson, "Space as a Variable in Sociological Inquiry: Serendipitous Findings on Macro Environment," paper delivered to Annual ASA Conference, 1969.

13. Stanley Milgram, "On the Experience of Living in Cities," Science, March 13, 1970, pp. 1461-1468. See also, Suzanne Keller, Twin Rivers, Study of a Planned Community (School of Architecture, Princeton University, Sept. 1976).

14. Alien H. Barton, Communities in Disaster (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), p. 170.

15. Ibid., p. 171.

16. Ibid., p. 218.

17. Lawrence K. Altman, "Phones to Speed Emergency Care," New York Times, May 23, 1974, p. 19.

18. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 394.

19. Ibid., p. 379.

20. Ibid., p. 389.

21. Robert W. Prehoda, Designing the Future (New York: Chilton, 1967).

22. Edward Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959).

23. J. E. Montgomery, "Impact of Housing Patterns on Marital Interaction," The Family Coordinator, 19, No. 3, July 1970, pp. 267-274.

24. G. H. Beyer (ed.). Housing: A Factual Analysis, Chapter 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1958).

25. John Wiebenson, "Planning and Using Resurrection City," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, November 1969, pp. 5-411.

26. Brosseau and Andrist, Looking Forward, p. 66.

27. Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood (Magnolia, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), p. 72.

28. Herbert Cans, The Levittowners (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 206.

29. M. Powell Lawton, "Planner's Notebook: Planning Environment for Older People," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, March 1970, pp. 124-139.

30. M. M. Webber, "Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity," in L. Wingo (ed.). Cities and Space (1963), pp. 23-54.

31. McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 233 ff.

32. J. R. Pierce, "Communications," in Daniel Bell (ed.). Toward the Year 2000 (Daedalus, 1967), pp. 909-1021.

33. Edward N. Hall, "The Anomalies of Urban Requirements," United Aircraft Corp. (1969).

34. Olaf Helmer, "Simulating the Values of the Future," in Kurt Baier and N. Rescher (eds.), Values and the Future (1969), pp. 193-214.

35. Robert Theobald, An Alternative Future for America (Swallow Press, 1968), p. 140.

36. Don Fabun, The Dynamics of Change (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 1-30.

37. C. F. Pierce, in "Communications," p. 921, comments: "Hopefully, in the future we will be able to live where we like, travel chiefly for pleasure, and communicate to work."

38. John McHale, "Future Cities: Notes on a Typology," The Futurist, Vol. Ill, No. 5, October 1969/ pp. 126-130.