Description
Continuing his history of friendship over the last five hundred years, Dr Thomas Dixon explores how friendship was changed by a new form of technology and a new type of science in the early years of the twentieth century.
Episode 12: The Suburbs of the Heart
Just as the internet has been seen as an enemy of friendship, so the new technology of the early twentieth century - the telephone - was initially viewed with mistrust. Magazines and newspaper articles listed it along with the telegram and the motor car as potentially detrimental to the art of friendship.
One author wrote: "we live, alas in the suburbs of each other's hearts".
Meanwhile, as the real suburbs were extended, the new science of psychology began to advise lonely city-dwellers on how to form new alliances and friendships.
Dr Thomas Dixon hears from Professor Mark Peel about the impact of urbanisation on friendship, and is won over by his surprisingly passionate defence of Dale Carnegie's often mocked best-seller, How to Make Friends and Influence People.
Producer: Beaty Rubens.
Dr Thomas Dixon brings his major new series on the changing face of friendship to a close with a look at how the old and the young are navigating their friendships today through technologies old and new, and at how friendship might look in the future.
Episode 15: The Lonely Cyborg
A group of...
Published 04/11/14
Dr Thomas Dixon brings his major history of friendship up to the 1970s, when gender politics began to change friendships once again, and considers how popular culture both reflected and influenced this change.
Episode 14: Families of Choice.
Professor Barbara Taylor shares with Thomas Dixon...
Published 04/10/14
Dr Thomas Dixon continues to trace the changing meaning of friendship over the last five hundred years.
Episode 13: In Need, In Deed, By Post
Mass Observation and the archive of the Co-Operative Correspondence Club provide intimate evidence for friendship during the Second World War.
Dr...
Published 04/09/14