Packaged Pleasures

Name: Packaged Pleasures
Price: 62.95 AUD
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ISBN: 9780226121277

How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire

Gary S. Cross, Robert N. Proctor

$62.95

Hardback

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English

Chicago University Press
30 September 2014

Society & Social Sciences; Material culture; Consumerism

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.

InPackaged 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.

By: Gary S. Cross, Robert N. Proctor
Imprint: Chicago University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 23mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 3mm
Weight: 595g
ISBN: 9780226121277
ISBN 10: 0226121275
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 30 September 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 for Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire

"""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"