Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized DesireFrom the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction. In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve into an uncharted chapter of American history, shedding new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience. In the space of only a few decades, junk foods, cigarettes, movies, recorded sound, and thrill rides brought about a revolution in what it means to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. New techniques of boxing, labeling, and tubing gave consumers virtually unlimited access to pleasures they could simply unwrap and enjoy. Manufacturers generated a seemingly endless stream of sugar-filled, high-fat foods that were delicious but detrimental to health. Mechanically rolled cigarettes entered the market and quickly addicted millions. And many other packaged pleasures dulled or displaced natural and social delights. Yet many of these same new technologies also offered convenient and effective medicines, unprecedented opportunities to enjoy music and the visual arts, and more hygienic, varied, and nutritious food and drink. For better or for worse, sensation became mechanized, commercialized, and, to a large extent, democratized by being made cheap and accessible. Cross and Proctor have delivered an ingeniously constructed history of consumerism and consumer technology that will make us all rethink some of our favorite things. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Chapter 2 Containing Civilization Preserving the Ephemeral Going Tubular | 19 |
Chapter 3 The Cigarette Story | 61 |
Chapter 4 Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth | 89 |
The Birth of the Phonograph and Record | 131 |
Projections Snapshots and Motion Pictures | 167 |
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Common terms and phrases
addictive advertising American amusement park appeal attractions became beer Beverage bottle brand camera camera obscura candy captured carbonated water chap Chicago chocolate ciga cigarettes cigars Cinema cocoa Collier's color commercial Company Coney Island consumers consumption containerization create crowds culture cured cylinder discs distilled drink early Eating Edison electric �mile Durkheim especially example festivals film flavors History Home Journal human ice cream images industry innovations invention Jell-O John Kinetoscope Kodak labels London magic lantern makers manufacturers marketing mass mechanization modern MPPC nature nickelodeons nicotine nineteenth century novelty offered pack packaged pleasure packaged pleasure revolution panorama patent phonograph play pleasure garden popular preserve produced radio record rolled roller coaster sensation sensory sensual smoke social sold sound spectacle sugar sumer sweet Talking Machine taste Thomas Edison tion tobacco Trade Cards transformed tubes University Press Victor Victrola video games visual voice York