Graduate School of Business, 'Automated equipment ... permits the production of a wide variety of products in short runs at almost 'mass production' costs.' Many engineers and business experts foresee the day when diversity will cost no more than uniformity.
The finding that pre-automation technology yields standardization, while advanced technology permits diversity is borne out by even a casual look at that controversial American innovation, the supermarket. Like gas stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike whether they are in Milan or Milwaukee. By wiping out thousands of little 'mom and pop' stores they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Yet the array of goods they offer the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.
The reason for this contrast is simple: Food and food packaging technology is far more advanced than construction techniques. Indeed, construction has scarcely reached the level of mass production; it remains, in large measure, a pre-industrial craft. Strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions, the industry's rate of technological advance is far below that of other industries. The more advanced the technology, the cheaper it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication, gas stations, airports, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mold. Uniformity will give way to diversity. (Where the process has begun, the results are striking. In Washington, D.C., for example, there is a computer-designed apartment house – Watergate East – in which no two floors are alike. Of 240 apartments, 167 have different floor plans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere.)
While certain parts of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United States has already leaped to the next stage – the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey.
The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favor diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European and Japanese cars into the American market in the late 1950's opened many new options for the buyer – increasing his choice from half a dozen to some fifty makes. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted.
Faced with foreign competition, Detroit took a new look at the so-called 'mass consumer.' It found not a single uniform mass market, but an aggregation of transient minimarkets. It also found, as one writer put it, that 'customers wanted custom-like cars that would give them an illusion of having one-of-a-kind.' To provide that illusion would have been impossible with the old technology; the new computerized assembly systems, however, make possible not merely the illusion, but even – before long – the reality.
Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as 'the one you design yourself,' because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there 'isn't a dungregular Mustang any more, just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) ? 4 (engines) ? 3 (transmissions) ? 4 (basic sets of high- performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modifications don't apply) + 2 (Shelby grandtouring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/ transmission combinations).'
This does not even take into account the possible variations in color, upholstery and optional equipment.
Both car buyers and auto salesmen are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buyer's problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and subdecisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants.
Yet we are only beginning the march toward destandardization of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that 'Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ... When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination.' Many of McLuhan's other assertions are highly debatable. This one is not. He is absolutely correct about the direction in which technology is moving. The material goods of the future will be many things; but they will not be standardized. We are, in fact, racing toward 'overchoice' – the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer's decision-making process.
Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. 'It's what's inside that counts,' they say, paraphrasing a well-known cigarette commercial.
This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it foolishly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of goods available to man we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way men actually live.
More important, however, is the very
One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million of population. The more standardized the tastes of the public, the fewer titles will be published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. This was the reasoning behind a study of world book trends published by UNESCO. Conducted by Robert Escarpit director of the Center for the Sociology of Literature at the University of Bordeaux, it provided dramatic evidence of a powerful international shift toward cultural destandardization.
Thus, between 1952 and 1962 the index of diversity rose in fully twenty-one of the twenty-nine chief book-producing nations. Among the countries registering the highest shifts toward literary diversity were Canada, the United States and Sweden, all with increases in excess of 50 percent or more. The United Kingdom, France, Japan and the Netherlands all moved from 10 to 25 percent in the same direction. The eight countries that moved in the opposite direction – i.e., toward greater standardization of literary outputwere India, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria. In short, the more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity.
The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic marketplace.
When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later he worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. Today he faces a large audience split into a milling mass of subgroups. According to John McHale: 'The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary 'mass' culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices ... The 'mass,' on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different 'audiences.''
Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for 'mini-markets.' And as these markets
