There are no shops on Main Street. No people, either, not counting those in cars-and on a Sunday afternoon, too.
In this Southern California town that is modern to the point of being futuristic, Main Street is a highway, bordered by subdivisions of pseudo-Spanish homes and the square, glass office buildings of insurance companies and computer firms.
It isn`t just pleasant; it`s downright desirable, which helps explain why Irvine has grown so fast. But it isn`t a traditional town, the kind where people walk in and out of stores, greeting the proprietors and fellow shoppers by name. It`s too big for that.
It also lacks the bustle, the noise and the constant human interaction of a city neighborhood-Chicago`s Northwest Side, for instance, or Manhattan`s Yorkville, or even Santa Ana, just a few miles away.
In many ways, though, Irvine may be the wave of the future. More and more people live in places such as this, places with no central business district, no obvious identity and, perhaps, no place to go-except home.
Which is where more people are going more often.
”Cocooning” is what the sociologists call it. A recent national survey of affluent families by Knapp Communications Corp. found that 72 percent of the respondents said they are spending more time at home.
According to another national survey by the Lempert Report, a New Jersey- based business newsletter, home-delivered restaurant meals are increasing in popularity and are expected to grow by 30 percent over the next few years. No wonder. Homes are nicer than they used to be, and there`s more to do in them. In 1960, the typical home had 4.9 rooms for almost four people; by 1980, it had 5.1 rooms for less than three. And in place of that other person, there is probably a big television set with cable or a satellite dish picking up scores of channels, a computer for playing games or gathering information and a stereo set good enough to make the music sound as if it were being played right in the house.
But it is not just that people are staying home more. Even when they`re out, they are on their own, or with their own. Especially in Southern California, people spend increasing amounts of time all by themselves in their cars, which also are nicer than they used to be. With tinted glass, air-conditioning and a tape deck, today`s typical car is almost like home.
So while the 1980s may have rejected much of the storied rebellion of the 1960s, Americans as never before seem to be embracing one of that decade`s cliches: Do your own thing.
In part this is because more people have more money with which to pursue individual pastimes. Whether it is bird watching, bicycling, bowling, ballplaying, guitar playing, hang gliding or stargazing, more people seem to be spending more time in their own little corner of the world.
Business knows this. One of the fastest growing sectors of the economy is direct marketing, using the phone or the mails to target customers as individuals, according to their specific interests and passions.
It is a segment of the economy that has its own association, the Direct Marketing Association based in Philadelphia, its own magazine, Target Marketing, and its own in-house philosopher, Dick Hodgson of Westown, Pa.
”We have gone through an evolution where people tend to do their own thing,” Hodgson said. ”People now have the money to be different, and business can target people according to their individual differences.”
What made this targeting possible, Hodgson said, was the computer.
”We used to deal only with geographics, where people lived. Once the computer came along, we started in with demographics, dealing with people in groups according to things like race and educational levels, but still not dealing with them as individuals,” he explained.
”The latest phase is dealing with psychographics, the internals rather than the externals, dealing with people one at a time.”
All this is not as complicated as it sounds. Target marketers start with auto registration lists. The car you drive, Hodgson said, ”is your basic lifestyle indicator.”
Then they combine other information, such as political party registration, clubs, magazine subscriptions and charities to which people contribute. Run all that through the computer and it is possible to send a letter to just about every middle-aged Italian-American who drives a Ford Bronco and likes to fish for bass, or all the 25-year-old single women who vote for liberal Democrats and never eat meat.
Now the politicians-behind the curve, as usual-are about to catch on. Up in New Hampshire, a pollster and political consultant named Dick Bennett is perfecting a plan for winning elections that he calls ”custom clustering.”
By using techniques similar to those of the target marketers, Bennett said, a campaign can identify the voters most likely to support a particular candidate, and show where they live, what they read, what they watch on television and what kind of message would be most likely to appeal to them.
”This isn`t traditional,” Bennett said. ”It`s segmentation. What it does is, it increases the hit rate so a candidate can spend less time and less money to get to more people. We can identify hard-core supporters, 500 to 600 a week, based on where people live, how they live, their lifestyle, what they do in their leisure time.”
Though his plan would work for any election, Bennett said, it would be especially productive in a race such as the always important first-in-the-nation presidential primary in his state, where a lesser-known contender can sometimes take advantage of a five- or six-candidate field to forge a surprising plurality win.
”With this plan, we can find people who usually don`t vote,” said Bennett, ”people who aren`t in the system. We could find 20,000 of them, which can have a big effect up here. These voters can become an instant organization on just about any level.”
While some politicians seek to use the realities of an increasingly diffused, individualistic society, others bemoan it.
”Our society is becoming atomized,” said Curtis Gans, a student of political behavior who thinks this separation into parts helps explain why fewer people bother to vote. ”We`re becoming spectators, consumers. People are not being invited into communities.”
The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, of which Gans is the director, reported that a smaller percentage of eligible citizens had voted in this year`s presidential election than at any time since 1924.
Though there are many reasons for the drop in voter participation, one of them, according to Gans, is a ”shift of values, a decline in the sense of civil responsibility.” In a world in which more people are ”cultivating their own gardens,” Gans said, it is harder to maintain the spirit of citizenship.
And it is where people are most likely to ”cultivate their own gardens,” in places like Irvine, that most of the job and population growth of the next several years is likely to take place. According to a government study, one-third of the growth will take place in just 50 counties, with the largest gains expected in Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas.
The growth will not come downtown, but in the suburban rings marked by shopping malls and housing subdivisions alongside the interstates. It is in shopping malls where more than half the retail sales in America, excluding automobile sales, now take place.
As more and more people do more and more different things, fewer do anything together. Television, which provides communal glue during such traumatic events as a presidential assassination or on election nights, is no longer the same unifying force it once was. The networks are losing audiences to smaller, more specialized stations that come over cable or through satellite dishes.
Even the Super Bowl, which supposedly dominates the entire country for at least one day a year, isn`t as universally followed as it was just a few years ago. The audience was off by more than 9 percent last year, a drop only partially attributable to the lack of a team from the big markets of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
Both national political conventions and all three candidate debates drew smaller television audiences this year than four years ago. President Reagan may be ”the great communicator,” but when he communicates with the people via television, fewer watch him than watched President Jimmy Carter-and fewer watched Carter than watched President Gerald Ford.
General circulation magazines are almost relics of an earlier age, but special interest magazines proliferate. There were 11,593 of them in 1987, according to a study by a professor at the University of Mississippi, 1,800 more than a decade earlier. The vast majority of these magazines are about one business, hobby, or leisure activity.
Clearly, there are fewer places where people meet. Despite all the attention paid to the rise of fundamentalist religion, a smaller percentage of Americans went to church last Sunday than on a comparable Sunday 10 years ago. A 1987 Gallup Poll reported that 40 percent had attended a religious service the previous week, down from 47 percent in 1977. Other surveys report slightly different figures, but the same trend.
Movie-going is down, too. Gross receipts are up because tickets cost so much more, but actual attendance has declined. Who needs to go to the theater when films can be seen at home on the VCR?
Not that there is anything new about all this. America has always been an individualistic country; since it began, people have pursued private wealth and private pleasures. Nor is the new trend universal.
Millions of people still prefer the jostling, communal life of cities or the traditional communities of small towns to the subdivisions of Irvine or the totally planned new towns springing up east of here.
But there are clear signs that ultra-individualized styles of life are growing fastest, and that it is among younger, affluent people that the sense of civic responsibility is weakest.
It`s the younger people who are least likely to vote or care about public matters, especially national issues. A poll of 18- to 44-year-olds, the much discussed postwar Baby Boom generation, showed that half of them vote regularly-and only one-third follow the news.
When asked what would impel them to get involved in public affairs, these respondents in the poll taken by Peter Hart for Rolling Stone magazine listed local, personal events, not more general issues. One-third said they could be mobilized to battle drunk driving, and another third said they would join a neighborhood crime watch.
So it may be no accident that many of the issues in this year`s national campaign were really local matters. The candidates discussed crime more than they debated the budget deficit, for example.
This could be because people know that neither party plans to do much about the deficit anyway. Or it may be that politics is simply following the rest of society in being more concerned about the local and the particular than about the national and the general.
If some candidate decides to follow Dick Bennett`s advice, the next presidential campaign will use techniques even more targeted to individual concerns.
”Is it Big Brother?” Bennett wonders.
”In some ways it is. I don`t know whether it`s good or evil. But it`s a way to identify people, to figure out their precise dreams, fears and desires. It`s effective. It`s going to happen.”
