After a busy day, there’s nothing quite like coming home. It’s the headquarters of our private sphere, a sanctuary made sacred by our most intimate relationships. It’s a safe place that shields us as we let our guard down and practice being ourselves.
Up until the early decades of the 20th century, most companies and institutions abided by the unwritten rule that the family home was off-limits. As author Tim Wu points out in “The Attention Merchants,” before 1930 “there remained a divide between the highly commercialized public sphere and the traditional private one. A newspaper or leaflet might be brought inside, but otherwise, the family home was shielded from the commercial bombardment to which one was subjected in public.” But with the advent of the telephone, radio, and television, that began to change….