Cover of Packaged Pleasures
Packaged Pleasures How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire
by Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-12127-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-14738-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

From 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gary S. Cross is distinguished professor of modern history at Pennsylvania State University and the author of many books, including An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America and The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century.  Robert N. Proctor is professor of history of science at Stanford University and the author of many books, including Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis and Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge.

REVIEWS

“This book persuasively addresses one of the key questions in modern history: how human experience has been reshaped by mass marketing. It includes but goes beyond attention to advertising, to a fascinating exploration of technology’s impact on products and packaging, and how the result has transformed sensory response. A groundbreaking effort.”
— Peter N. Stearns, author of The Industrial Revolution in World History

“Well argued, stimulating, captivating. Packaged Pleasures unwraps the secrets of modern consumer societies!”
— Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute

“When pleasure was linked with scarcity, we could not over-indulge and satiate ourselves.  The emergence of industrialised, packaged pleasures—whether  recorded music or confectionery—allows gratification to conquer constraints, putting us on a treadmill of desire and addiction.  Are we happier or merely over-loaded with desire; should we abandon instant gratification for something slower and more contemplative?  Gary Cross and Robert Proctor ask fundamental questions about our health and well-being in a world of packaged pleasures.  Their book is essential reading for anyone interested in questions of public health, the regulation of the food industry, and the shaping of economic policy.”
— Martin Daunton, University of Cambridge

“Packaged Pleasures is a wonderfully evocative account of how technology has changed the way we enjoy the world around us. Through a series of superb case studies, Cross and Proctor show how the way we see, hear, taste, and feel has been transformed by the mass production of cheap luxuries. In doing so they raise challenging questions about the effects of modern industrial capitalism and what we do to ourselves as consumers. The opportunities for pleasure and enjoyment could not be greater, but does this make us any happier?”
— Matthew Hilton, University of Birmingham

“What makes Cross and Proctor’s book both unique and extremely useful is its examination of a cross section of areas that are rarely, if ever, addressed in combination. There is a rich literature on food, cigarettes, motion pictures, the recording industry, and photography, but this is the first in-depth examination of these ‘packaged pleasures’ in combination so that we can see the interconnections and relationships among these mainstays of consumer culture. The book also brilliantly demonstrates the ways that the rise of corporate capitalism fundamentally transformed these separate spheres in very similar ways.”
— Gerald Markowitz, coauthor of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children

“Highly original and fascinating tour of the commodity world, especially its ubiquitous but underexamined delivery systems. This book is itself a packaged pleasure, but make no mistake,  it contains health warnings that, if heeded, would save untold lives.”
— Iain Boal, Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology

“For the historian of consumer goods, Packaged Pleasures offers a comprehensive discussion of an eclectic mix of products including confectionery, convenience foods, cigarettes, sound recordings, film and amusement parks.”
— Times Higher Education

“Think your hankering for a Hershey’s bar or yen for Die Hard movies is simply individual preference? Think again. In PackagedPleasures, historians Cross and Proctor present an ambitious chronology of consumerism and consumer technology.”
— Discover

“Cross and Proctor have a keen ear for detail and anecdotes. . . . While networked technologies are reconfiguring associations between the senses, space and society—with work emails checked on holiday, selfies taken at funerals and 3D objects printed locally from a CAD file stored in the “cloud”—Packaged Pleasures offers a timely reminder of the longer history of the relationship between technology, industry and the self.”
— New Scientist

“Instead of buying things out of barrels or listening to music in groups, we have singularized those sorts of central experiences and not just made them individual—in individual ‘packets’ of sound like a phonograph or packages of junk food—but we have in most cases made that individualization portable. In Packaged Pleasures Cross and Proctor look at the health and social impact of key consumer innovations at the turn of the last century.”
— Globe & Mail

“The book reads well, moves along very rapidly with just the right amount of detail to inform without becoming boring. . . . A great way to see what marketing has done and is doing.”
— San Francisco Book Review

“It’s a keen insight and a valuable reminder of the power of seemingly trivial inventions to utterly transform our notion of ‘normal’ life. . . . The authors are at their best when showing how incremental improvements cumulate to create dramatic technological and cultural changes.”
— Weekly Standard

“An outstanding history. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Choice

“Packaged Pleasures is itself a packaged pleasure: a succinct telling of how industrialization led to the packaging of food, candy, tobacco, sound recordings, still and moving images, and the hedonistic pleasures of the amusement park. While many of these stories are well known, Cross and Proctor challenge the reader to look beyond technological innovations and clever advertisements to see manufacturing and marketing as a seamless process designed to deliver the product—and its life altering pleasures—more effectively. . . . Packaged Pleasures is a fresh account of the history of mass-produced joy, sustained by considerable research and a trove of facts.”
— American Historical Review

“Cross and Proctor’s claim that the era’s pleasures were newly ‘packaged’ presents an insightful way of exploring the history of such mass-produced goods as candy, cigarettes, cereal, and soda pop. While telling the history of ‘containerization’ via these products, Cross and Proctor provide interesting details about the development of paper, plastic, and other packing materials, as well as about the specific histories of these products.”
— Journal of American History

“What do cigarettes, phonograph records, and Snickers bars have in common? According to Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor, all are ‘packaged pleasures,’ by which they mean artifacts of industrial capitalism that ‘capture and intensify sensuality.’ … This is history with a message. Throughout this engaging volume, they reiterate that easy access to such pleasures has not necessarily been a good thing either for our individual physical and psychological well-being or for our ability to connect with each other socially.”
— Arwen P. Mohun, Winterthur Portfolio

“Packaged Pleasures contributes to what we know by combining a range of case studies rather than conducting a deep dive into any one technological story. The larger story helps us think about unintended consequences—such as overconsumption, obesity, and cancer—and the relationship between technology, marketing, and public policy. Aimed at a broad readership, the authors hope to spur change, noting that ‘We need to recognize what the package has done for us, but also to us, and to look for pleasures beyond its confines.’”
— Technology and Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0001
[addiction, capitalist, consumer, fast food, free market, jeremiahs, pleasure, technologies.]
The packaged pleasure, a neglected topic in industrial and consumer history, emerged from new capitalist technologies, appearing mostly between 1880 and 1910. These pleasures transformed how we eat, drink, see, hear, and feel, in ways we still benefit from today, but also intensified the gratification of desires far more easily satisfied than before, thus shaping and often distorting sensibilities. Fast food and cigarettes are obvious examples, sometimes leading to addictions, but new technologies also sped up our consumption of visual, auditory, and motion sensoribilia that expanded, but also desocialized and displaced past pleasures. Rejecting the overgeneralization common to both jeremiahs and free-market populists of consumer culture, we analyze how the idea of the packaged pleasure reveals links between cigarettes, bottled soda, phonograph records, cameras, and amusement parks even as the impact of these inventions has been very different, requiring new and distinct ways of coping with these technologies. (pages 1 - 18)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0002
[bottle, canning, cooking, distillation, fermentation, labeling, name-brands, pots, patent medicines, technologies]
We survey the long history of efforts to preserve and store the fruits of the hunt and harvest, through containerization (pots), cooking, fermentation, distillation, and ultimately syringe-delivered psychoactive drugs as a prelude to the technologies of packaging in the 19th century (canning, mechanized bottle making and capping, cardboard boxing, and plastics). Mass-produced containers (mostly in tubes) not only increased access and convenience, but fostered labeling, creating name-brands transforming how consumers related to retailers and manufacturers, and led to mass-advertising. Labeling transformed the product by color, image, and text. Packaged patent medicines and promotion through trade cards led to magazine advertising of trademarked goods. Popular distrust of packaged goods of uncertain origin and contents was countered by appeals to convenience, cleanliness, and superiority as manufacturers of packaged foods encouraged new dietary habits. The linked technologies of packaging made formerly elite goods accessible to the masses, while delocalizing and depersonalizing our links with nature. (pages 19 - 60)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0003
[addictive, Bonsack, cigarettes, brands, consumption, continuous process manufacturing, habit, magazines, nicotine, pipe]
A quintessential but extreme form of the packaged pleasure is the industrial cigarette, consumed for its addictive nicotine. While native Americans used tobacco in ritual and through the 19th century it was chewed or smoked in pipes and cigars, flue curing (with low alkaline and high sugar content) eased inhaling the "milder" cigarette while modern matches increased access, and mechanized rolling decreased cost, all leading to a massive increase in cigarette consumption. While Don Luis Susini's rolling machine (imitating hand rolling) failed, in 1881, James Bonsack succeeded with his machine based on continuous-process manufacturing, producing cigarettes in an endless stream that could be cut into standardized lengths and mechanically loaded in colorfully-labeled packs, marketed as distinct name brands, and advertised in national magazines. While the cigarette is similar to other packaged pleasures, vastly expanding the market for and intensity of its use, many smokers consume cigarettes as an addictive and deadly habit and not for pleasure. (pages 61 - 88)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0004
[candy, carbonated water, chewing gum, children, chocolate, Coca Cola, diet, food, ice cream, women]
Building on the discoveries of sugar, chocolate, carbonated water, and diverse processed oils, we explore how 19th-century food engineers produced a wide range of sweets, ice cream, soda drinks, and snack foods that were energy-rich if nutrition-poor. Sugar is a pleasure based on natural scarcity, but once readily available, promoted, and transformed into diverse forms (candy, chewing gun, and even Jell-O) transformed diet and endangered health. Chocolate and ice cream also, formerly available to elites, with their mass production attracted the powerless, the poor, women, and children. Carbonated water from natural springs, considered a curative from ancient times, was manufactured by 1806 in the US, first as a medicine, then a pleasure when flavored in soda fountains and later bottled and corporately-manufactured, especially by Coca Cola. These junk superfoods supplemented the traditional diet, accommodated the fast pace of industrial life, but also desocialized the traditional sharing of food. (pages 89 - 130)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0005
[acoustic, Bell (Alexander Graham), Berliner (Emile), cylinder, disc, Edison (Thomas A.), phonograph, record, sound, Victor, voice]
This quasi-supernatural power of capturing and preserving sound obsessed early philosophers in their efforts to create machines that could reproduce the human voice. The breakthrough came by imitating the ear, emerging from the more practical goal of transferring business telegrams by Thomas Edison in 1877. His phonograph combined existing technologies: the stylus, the diaphragm, the cylinder, and the feed screw, hoping also to facilitate dictation. In the mid-1880s, Alexander Bell improved Edison's cylinder and Emile Berliner developed a disc record (without recording capacity). By 1893 Columbia, challenged Edison with phonographs for entertainment (coin-operated phonograph parlors), but home-based recorded sound prevailed. Acoustic recording captured only a small spectrum of sound, but recording, shaped by Tin Pan Alley offered intense but brief hits of sound. Edison, Victor (from Berliner), and Columbia competed with technological innovation, a price-point scale, a segmentation of taste communities, and ultimately the arm-chair mastery of the elusive voice--producing an ambiguous legacy. (pages 131 - 166)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0006
[camera, camera obscura, Daguerre, Edison, films, Hollywood, Kodak, movies, panorama, snapshots]
Efforts to extend sight and make images mobile, shareable, and permanent led to scientific toys that culminated in the personal celluloid-film camera and publicly exhibited movie (1888-1895). The medieval novelty of the camera obscura, where a dark room's exterior was projected onto the room's inner wall through a pinhole was miniaturized and the image chemically-fixed in Daguerre's camera of 1839, a technology that culminating in Eastman's Kodak celluloid snapshot camera (1888) and Edison's motion picture camera (1891). The magic lantern, panorama, and stereoscope led to the projected motion picture (1895). Kodak's snapshots encouraged amateur photography, capturing fleeting images of the informal and delightful child, while movies favored visual novelty. A shift toward narrative accompanied movie makers' accommodation of middle-class taste, the rise of a new oligopoly of film makers along with feature films, the star system, and the shift to Hollywood. The result liberated the eye while prioritizing capsulized images. (pages 167 - 206)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0007
[amusement parks, Coney Island, fairs, Ferris Wheel, pleasure gardens, rides, roller coasters, saturnalian, spectacles, world's fairs]
The multi-sensual novelty of the self-contained commercial pleasure site of the amusement park culminates a long history of elite pleasure gardens (from the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Vauxall park of 18th-century London) medieval popular fairs with freak shows, and 19th century world's fairs like Chicago's Columbia Exhibition that offered both futuristic scientific spectacles and the Ferris Wheel. Coney Island ignited the amusement park craze (1896-1904) with Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland that combined architectural fantasy, electric lighting, travel and historic spectacles (trips to the moon and hell, disasters, and battles), with mechanical rides that evoked vertigo and simulated danger (roller coasters especially). Coney Island's parks were widely imitated along on streetcar lines, often near water and nature. These parks attracted immigrants and youth seeking freedom from cultural constraint and industrial routine, but combined the saturnalian delights of the past with industrial innovation. (pages 207 - 240)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0008
[CDs, cigarettes, digital, Disneyland, fast food, movies, roller coasters, soda, supermarkets, video games]
Packaged pleasures were intensified (and made more accessible) and optimized (modulated and fully integrated into daily life) in the 20th century with new electrical, electronic, laser, and digital technology combined with aggressive marketing. Concise surveys of innovations in soda, candy, snacks and cigarettes made available in supermarkets and fast food outlets are followed by major trends in recorded sound (electric phonographs in the 1920s facilitated by radio technology, the competing formats of long-playing and "45" RPM records from 1948, semiconductor technology, cassette tape by 1964 that was supplanted by digital CDs from 1982 and MP-3s thereafter). Innovations in film and other visual "packages" (sound movies by 1927, fast-paced action movies in the 1970s, video games from the mid-1970s, and personal digital cameras by the mid-90s) and amusement rides (thrill-producing tubular roller coasters introduced at Six Flags and other new parks, but also multi-sensory thematic rides at Disneyland) reveal the full impact of packaged pleasures. (pages 241 - 270)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.003.0009
[asceticism, addictions, children, happiness, health, inequality, Jeremiads, libertarian, pleasures, profits]
In conclusion we ask how and if packaged pleasures are problematic. We argue that manufactured pleasures for maximizing profits, without regard to how commodified pleasures have displaced non-market pleasures that are often social, diffuse, and refined and sometimes produced addictions (as in the highly profitable cigarette). Efforts by cultured elites to constrain alcohol and tobacco use, overeating, and challenge the impact of recorded music, movies, and amusement parks has been confused, compromised, and ultimate failures. Rejecting ascetic Jeremiads against consumption and libertarian embrace of unlimited consumer choice, we argue for a measured response appropriate for different packaged pleasures, recognizing the health dangers of some, but also how others distort our priorities with their convenience, desocialize us while freeing us, and exacerbate global inequality. Greater happiness may result from pragmatically reassessing children's access to packaged pleasures while seeking alternative pleasures that may be less intense and packaged. (pages 271 - 288)

Notes

Index

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