particularly interesting

Too interesting for me to resist...via my cousin:

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever occurs beyond its four walls. (TV rooms are called ‘family rooms’ in builder’s lingo. A friend who is an architect explained to me: “People don’t want to admit that what the family does together is watch TV.”) At the same time, the television is the family’s chief connection with the outside world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way: rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

James Howard Kunstler (via warmgun)