On the Threshold of a
Post-modern Family-Home
PAULINE TERREEHORST

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to raise an ethical question: how to live? How should one live in a society dominated by virtual reality? What should our home look like? If we state our problem this way, we also recycle Socrates' age-old question in a way he could never have predicted. We can talk endlessly about the future and all the fantastic technological possibilities it will bring, the dematerialization of home and relations and the Web society that we are going to establish, but is highly improbable that every citizen in Holland, Europe, the United States or Japan is going to behave as Vincent Grosso predicts. Let me give you one example. In science fiction literature of the nineteen-fifties, our future was perceived as a future in outer space. Somewhere on another planet, we would start anew, flying around in personal jets, wearing shiny costumes and fancy helmets, living in houses of glass and steel in which everything was automated, from cooking to cleaning. Nothing of this sort has happened. We live in houses in which we tend to make our own spaghetti as Italian grandmothers did in 1900. We furnish them with impractical kilims brought home from a trip to rural Turkey and we have to clean them by brushing them with soft soap on our knees. We did take advantage of all kinds of inventions taken from aerospace technology, but we use them to make our lives better here on earth.

From E-mail to virtual reality, everything we now see as an integral part of the tele-society we live in here on the old planet was invented to be used on the moon. Not only did the optimistic scenario fail, the pessimistic predictions are hopelessly outdated. The horror scenarios of the future in the beginning of this century in science fiction films have not come true. All of you have seen famous films such as Metropolis and Modern Times. What were they saying? Work would change under the influence of modern machines. Human beings would become a part of those machines, as Chaplin demonstrated in the most hilarious scenes of his picture. What has happened? Did human beings become part of machines? Only temporarily--the outcome of automation and computerisation was not the dehumanization of work but the removal of human beings from the direct production process. The horror spectre of the future is not a society with people working like machines, but a society in which work is available only for a privileged group of primarily white, middle-class males living in urban areas in the western world.

Technology is not a Force of Nature

What can we learn from these examples? That technology is not a force of nature. It is shaped by the needs of a society, by economies and all kinds of irrational psychological processes.

Hence, in this conference, we should talk about the home not as a place where technology will take over in human relations, as if this is the automatic outcome of an isolated process. Rather, let us conceive home as a place where things could be better organised with the help of technology. We should not look at possibilities, but at the needs of normal people: men, women and children living together in a place called home. Information technology could be used to make their lives easier, to let them cope better with the difficulties of daily life.

My first point of debate is that a sophisticated information society with all the possibilities of wireless communication could give people who are now excluded from the wealth of our western societies a new opportunity. They could work anywhere. Not only men and women rushing from home to office between child care and workload, but also others. Adventurous people come from other continents to our countries in search of work, leaving their homes and families, from which they will be brutally separated for many years. Currently, they are treated as illegal refugees or criminals. With wireless communication devices, they too could make a new start. It is possible and we know it.

We live in an age in which seventy percent of the work required to produce one article consists of information work. Information workers make up sixty percent of today's work force. Information can be digitalized and processed into any form and sent over great distances. What is the reason that only a small percentage of people are actually working at home, in their cars, planes and somewhere on the road in nowhere land--working for a company that has only a letterhead and an E-mail address?

This is caused by psychological barriers that will not disappear by themselves as the natural outcome of the revolution of telematics. The present situation will only change if we want it to change and struggle to change it.

If we become convinced that is desirable for men and women to work at home--better for our children and for our relationships--then it will happen. We will give this outcome the shape most useful to us.

I know that employees will not be the ones to decide whether this vision becomes reality, but they can try to lure their employers with promises of cost reductions in buildings and workplaces. They can also set up small enterprises for themselves.

Neither fears nor hopes about a society in which work is automated have come true. Instead of a society of masses, we live in a world that is fragmenting before our eyes, with all the accompanying negative and positive effects. This is the outcome of the desire of people to live on their own terms. But these desires were not part of scenarios for the future written in nineteen hundred or nineteen fifty. We should learn from that experience and begin to base our thinking about the future on desires and needs of average citizens rather than technological possibilities.

Citizens of the western world are mainly pragmatic, ironic and sarcastic. They have lost their belief in the grand stories of socialism or religion. It is this pragmatism that I would like to fuel with some utopian energy. Not to sketch a new utopia, but simply to build a better world to live in for men, women and children. I want a utopia for the folks at home. They are not only consumers or viewers. They are also humans.

Despite all the immateriality around us, one can be pretty sure that we will keep on eating, sleeping, and making love. We will continue to have children and will be eager to watch them grow up in our neighbourhoods. Men and women have had this strange habit for many centuries, from the beginning of civilisation, in fact. They organise their lives in families (households is the economically correct term). It is a mistake to think that families are Christian or right-wing institutions. It is true that they have acquired prominent places in Christian, capitalistic ideologies and conservative rhetoric about family values, but that is not their fault. These already existed and will keep on existing despite the drive towards individualisation in our societies. Individualism is not necessarily linked to living alone. To want your own assessment notice for income tax does not necessarily mean that you also want to have your own front door.

A recent survey by the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Bureau showed that ninety percent of the Dutch population wants to be a part of a family. Only ten percent persists in wanting to live alone. Nevertheless, only half of the population actually lives in families with children. The discrepancy between desire and reality is caused by all kinds of things. One is the difficulty of combining work and raising children. The other is the workload, which is increasing to an insane level. Practically no-one with a full-time job works the regular forty hours a week. This is especially the case in the middle and higher income categories. People seldom have time to meet each other and establish a satisfying relationship. When they have a relationship, making it a success in the long term requires more time than most couples can spare. Thus, loneliness becomes a big threat in western, industrialised societies.

Gaining Time

My second thesis is that people could gain time by using telematics to reorganise their life; create more time and space to live and love together. How can they create this better life? They can and should do this in the `home'.

I am fully aware that with so many kinds of theories about immaterialization making the rounds, it might sound strange to hear someone speak about the home as a conglomerate of matter. I am convinced that we will not be able to exclude matter from our lives, in spite of all the devices produced to minimise human contact with matter. Not only do we need food; we need physical contact with other human beings, as numerous experiments with people living in isolation have shown. We also need objects around us. Those objects are filled with images of loved ones. They have fetishistic and mystical properties and keep our love alive for persons temporarily absent. Think about the famous Fort-Da game of the small child in the Freudian theory or the analysis of Melanie Klein. Maybe that was the reason for the crying of Mitch Ratcliff's child Taylor. He lost his teddy bear. Grown-ups can cherish objects--furniture, the design of rooms and so on, because it reminds them of loved ones and keeps their love alive. I will call this environment with its possibilities for tactile relations home. Home is where the heart is. This home could again become the centre of life.

Short History of Home-Perception

Ladies and gentlemen, inhabitants of a virtual future: it has been a long time since home was the centre of daily life. To sketch the way we might live in the near future, I must arrange a historical excursion. We have to go back to the eighteenth century, to the moment when the family home lost its privileged position because of the first industrial revolution. At that time, the family endured its biggest trauma in history. People could no longer earn their income in or near the homes they lived in. They were forced to leave their homes and go to new places called factories and offices. They lost the competition with new steam-engine-driven machines that were owned by few and made it necessary to centralise work, often near growing cities or urban areas. This revolution marked the division of labour between men and women. Men went to work and women stayed at home to look after the children. The well-known different spheres emerged in which the home became the castle of a lonely woman. It is often said and believed that the invention of electricity lightened the work women did in the home. There is no doubt that the electrical oven, vacuum cleaner and refrigerator lighten the load. However, they replaced the work done mainly by men, children and servants, such as chopping wood. Servants, until then a common element in every household, were no longer needed. The net effect was that by the time the servants disappeared and the men had left for the factories, mothers were left alone in the home with machines that still took a lot of time to manage. She could now manage the household by herself, with less energy, but in the same or an even greater amount of time than ever before.

Something similar could easily be the outcome of the invasion of the telematics revolution into our daily lives. Today, men and boys are the main consumers of computer games. Men have practically a monopoly on the Internet. The spectre, the horror scenario that emerges is that if women don't pay attention to what is happening, they will become servants of an ever-increasing group of family members who stay home and want to be fed and taken care of. I want to stress again that it is necessary to think about the way telematics can be used to create a breakthrough and to lift the barriers between different spheres that were created by the industrial revolution. When home becomes the centre of life again, the male and female spheres can amalgamate. I am asking for a third wave of the feminist revolution to make this happen, including a cyborg feminism. This time it will not only be a revolution of women, but also of men and children who want to bring back a way of life that was good to them.

My House of the Future

I now want to invite you into my house of the future. I must warn you that it's not a smart house of the kind being built in several western countries to promote solar energy, domotics and ecologically responsible construction materials. Such a house exists in the Netherlands, in Rosmalen, created by the Dutch futurologist Chriet Titulaer.

The Rosmalen house promotes new products from Dutch firms like Philips. It is not based on a new way of living for men, women and children. We don't have to go there, for you will have sensed by now that my goal is to promote a new way of living. I have called this new way of living the farm mould , which is the title of the book I published yesterday about the same subject. The term `mould' reveals that this is a virtual home. It only exists on the harddisk of my Mac. It is a home of ideas, histories, wishes and desires. So what does my home look like? First of all, it is not a closed building where families can go on cocooning. If one of the family members wishes it to be that way, it is open for consideration. It can have all kinds of functions, depending on the activities of the people who live there, because it has only virtual thresholds.

Let's look for the living room. Can it be defined as the room with an open hearth, that nostalgic residue of times when farms were heated with wood? Or should we locate it where we can find a television set? When we click on the icon of the box, suddenly every room of the house lights up: bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens. The days of the television as replacement for the open hearth as the centre of the house are numbered. Every room in the house can be a living room, just as the living room can become one's private room as soon as one sits in front of one's own laptop and tries to contact Netfriends. We have to think of something for the family members to do together in their living rooms. Maybe they are watching a movie, listening to music or finally talking to each other about the future of their children. The quality time they spend here is reflected in their environment, their furniture, the objects they have collected in this room. Tactile qualities count here, the texture of sofas, rugs, chairs and cushions are very important.

Functionality or form celebrations are interior design strategies that belong to the past because they are designed to be looked at or to be used efficiently.

That is why nature, in the form of plants or gardens, forms an integral part of this home that we can call a villa urbana in the tradition of the Tuscan renaissance villas built in rural surroundings on hills, but near enough to Florence to see the city in the distance and to keep in touch with what is happening there. In our villa urbana, we will always be within reach unless we ourselves filter the incoming messages and allow only privileged people to come through to hear and see us speak. Here, family, relatives and friends finally choose to meet again after all the time they were separated by work they had to go elsewhere to do.

Home/Work

Work in the office or factory used to be the dominant frame of life. When work is brought into everyday domestic life again, this frame will lose its power. It will then allow us to re-think the place work has in our lives. This will not be easy. Leaving home to go to work is a ritual that many cherish. When they stay at home to conduct their work, people may think them ill. But when people go to work in their homes or as a telecommuter (the term coined by Jack Nilles), using their homes as a base camp or running their own company in the way John Naisbitt sketched in Global Paradox, then this whole social structure will be turned on its head. The two poles of life --family and work--that we've grown accustomed to will be mixed up and will give way to a new centre of life and a new network. The post-modern family will be bound by love and work in their homes, which will be the size of a metropolis. We need more space and other houses for that. It is especially the functions of the rooms should change.

Many things will be dematerialised in our home but one thing we will inevitably be seduced by is food. Let's have a look at the kitchen in my farm mould. The kitchen used to be second only to the living room as centre of the house. Here you find an open fire. Here the family members expressed their mutual love by making hot meals for each other. Making a hot meal is still an important element in life and friendship, but for that, you do not need a kitchen. You can make food in a microwave oven and that oven can be placed almost anywhere--in your bedroom, attic, wherever you have space. If you don't mind the smell food produces, you can cook in any room. Here again you can see the thresholds disappearing, stressing the actions that take place in a certain environment and not the function of the space itself.

The revolution of telematics goes hand in hand with the revolution of the microwave oven. This household device enables anyone, including small children, to make a warm meal. Because it is a new piece of technology, it still has not been totally gendered. Men like to use the microwave oven because of its seemingly precision functioning, with beeps and flashing lights that make it similar to a VCR or a television set. Manipulating the microwave oven is like channel surfing. It also does not remind you of your mother stooping in front of an oven wearing an apron--a powerful image. You can handle these things casually rotating on your chair. Between your computer and your oven, there is no gender barrier to cross.

The Face of the Future Home

What important role can your computer play in this heaven of matter--the home of butter, meat and cheese? You can install a CD-ROM with all the best recipes plus instructions by world famous cooks that will help you make delicious meals. You can net contact a special gourmet service that enables you to make your favourite dish with the ingredients they offer. Of course, it will be delivered to your home in no time. You don't even need a kitchen when you do this regularly. Yet, this seems only an option for singles and not responsible parents who occasionally think about vitamins and the health of the people they take care of. Besides, making food is a way of expressing your feelings for each other and that is the quality living we will yearn for when everything else we do is so distanced. We should not prevent children from playing a role in this love game, it will distract them from Myst, Nightwatch or manipulating Bambi interactively so that the mother deer does not die.

Will they be the puppies of my Farm Mould or the young urban consumers Faith Popcorn was predicting in her famous Popcorn Report? Home Alone in SoHo can mean that they will isolate themselves under a virtual reality helmet, earphones or anything else that keeps them out of the reach of the voice of mothers and fathers. Perhaps they will find themselves playing in the virtual theme park that the Vincent Grossos will create for them. Whatever their endeavour, one thing will change dramatically. Parents, caretakers or whatever name we will give adults who are living together with children, will be home more often. And that will be extremely important for children who need caring adults to guide them in life until they are old enough to set up their own households. Parents working at home have his opportunity. They can and should have more physical contact with children.

When we are talking about teleworking, we must also consider tele-education. Some think this is the solution for the environmental and financial problems of an expensive institution, but what is the profit for children when sitting at home in front of their computer? They may miss their friends. They need others in a very different way than adults. That is why tele-education can be a solution for long distance problems and especially for children living in the Australia bush, for example.

Schools will keep on playing an important formative role for children. It will make them curious about subjects they would never encounter at home and also in help them find a place for themselves. Teaching is a profession. It cannot be left to the good will of fathers and mothers who often supervise children through a bulletin board.

It is true that learning can be like playing, but we never should give children the impression that learning and analysing is akin to playing a Nintendo game. Learning, analysing and writing, the three keystones of effective information gathering, are sometimes dull, tiresome and downright difficult. Learning must not distract but enable people to concentrate on the right subjects. In an information society, the ability to concentrate and select are the most sought-after qualities. You cannot develop this in a playground filled with computer games or a theme park connected to a computer.

Conclusion

I started this lecture with the question of Socrates: how to live? Maybe I gave you the impression that I'm only interested in families and installing family values. That is not the case. I am simply a parent of four children who is concerned about their future and I hope that I gave you enough reasons why it is necessary to think about a new role for the home in which families live. A home that is characterised by its openness to the rest of the world and not confined by fences against intruders. I told you that it was important to set up a third wave of feminism, including cyborg feminism to make this utopian idea come true. And I hope that I have succeeded to some degree in convincing you that we have to start from desires and needs and not from technological possibilities. I call for the strength and imagination of artists who were omnipresent in the sixties, but who I miss in the present discourse. I hope they will sketch, far better than I can, the new homes for the twenty-first century. The future should not be some island on which we are accidentally washed ashore. The future should be the destination of a journey that we chose to make.