The sensate Society

Three factors combine to emphasize the accelerating necessity to build excitement into the very core of business activity. One is that we live in a society in which so many people have so many more things and so much more money than need to sustain life at some reasonable level of amenities. Second is that there is so little to set one generic product off from another. And third is the inevitable routinization of man's daily task, whether in business, at home, or at play.

Routine is a consequence of mechanization. Premechanized society routinized life according to the cyclical regularity of natural phenomena : the daily rising and setting of the sun, the periodic cycle of the seasons. Machines, however, have produced many more routines, and these in important respects deprive man of his freedom. The postindustrial farmer, even though the sun predictably roused him to the fields, had enormous freedom regarding how he could spend his time until sunset. On balmy summer days he could without a second thought take a siesta under an apple tree. In the fall he might hunt, and in the winter sleep. Industrial man does not use the sun as his alarm clock. He gets to work not at about eight o'clock, but at 8 A.M. sharp. That is when the assembly line is turned on and the office begins to hum. The siesta, no matter how tempting, is obsolete, as the rising industrialization is making clear in Latin countries. The machine cannot economically be turned off for the civilized midday privileges of preindustrial life. Not even so profoundly important a national ritual as baseball's World Series commands enough authority to slow the machine. Where the machine itself does not directly pace industrial life, such as in the office, the World Series gets attention only via the subterfuge of the transistor radio hidden in the desk drawer.

This fact tells us as well as anything how powerful are the routinizing and regimenting consequences of the underlying technology. The simple twelve hour rhythm of the preindustrial day is inverted to the complex and demanding clockwork of the preindustrial day is converted to the complex and demanding clockwork of the present. The industrial day is a series of highly involuted and programmed cycles, from the harsh ring of the morning alarm clock to the scheduled rush to work: from the periodic rest and coffee breaks to the standardized dinner hour at home : and finally to the closing weather report on late night television. The necessity of such routinization is so profound that we understandably begin acculturating the smallest child. Demand feeding of infants gives way to scheduled feeding. By the time the child is old enough to go to school, he doesn't view getting there on time as anything but routine. Even the acceptance of the necessity of organized routine is routine.