Indoor plumbing and telecoms pulled life and commerce out of public space.

Evidence

It was aided and abetted by a whole series of technological innovations. The trolley, the railroad, and eventually the automobile added fuel to the flame of urban expansion. Indoor plumbing not only moved a variety of activities indoors, it moved them from public to private space. Changes in building techniques, the use of electricity, and heating innovations made staying at home a good deal more pleasant for masses of people than it had ever been before. The same innovations probably also contributed greatly to the enclosing of much commercial activity. Inventions like the telegraph and the telephone made physical presence unnecessary for communication and thereby reduced the need to be out and about. Innovations in printing (combined with increasing literacy) strengthened reliance on newspapers as another medium of communication, and at least some huckstering activity moved out of the public space and into newspaper pages. Ironically, greater advances in technology, the radio, and television, would place the urban citizen far more at the mercy of the sellers than were his preindustrial counterparts. The latter, at least, could escape the “hard sell” by going home. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 328

Categorization

• XREF: This causal account of how technologies emptied public space is evidence for the reader’s cross-reading goal linking urban spatial structure to stranger-relations and the observing self.
• SEED: The irony — later media put the citizen more at sellers’ mercy than escaping home ever could — is a natural inversion essay contrasting public-seller harassment then versus targeted digital advertising now.