Television and media eliminated the small town’s experienced autonomy

Evidence

This small-town content was not, in the postwar period, really “provincial” any longer (as in Lewis or John O’Hara, let alone Dreiser): you might want to leave, you might still long for the big city, but something had happened — perhaps something as simple as television and the other media — to remove the pain and sting of absence from the center, from the metropolis. On the other hand, today, none of it exists any longer, even though we still have small towns (whose downtowns are now in decay — but so are the big cities). What has happened is that the autonomy of the small town (in the provincial period a source of claustrophobia and anxiety; in the fifties the ground for a certain comfort and even a certain reassurance) has vanished. What was once a separate point on the map has become an imperceptible thickening in a continuum of identical products and standardized spaces from coast to coast. One has the feeling, however, that the autonomy of the small town, its complacent independence, also functioned as an allegorical expression for the situation of Eisenhower America in the outside world as a whole — contented with itself, secure in the sense of its radical difference from other populations and cultures, insulated from their vicissitudes and from the flaws in human nature so palpably acted out in their violent and alien histories. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 614

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘imperceptible thickening in a continuum of identical products and standardized spaces’ is the spatial/Cultural-Logic thesis applied to the American landscape; connects to the book’s argument that postmodernism is spatial rather than temporal (here the reader’s ‘cognitive map’ goal).