Week 5 [Reading Notes] - The Place and Space of Everyday Technology

Week 5: The Place and Space of Everyday Technology

Reading 1:
Michael Bull (1999) ‘The dialectics of walking: Walkman use and the reconstruction of the site of experience’ in Jeff Hearn and Sasha Roseneil (eds) Consuming Cultures: Power and Resistance, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Macmillan. pp 199-220



Reading 2:
Anna McCarthy, 'From Screen to Site: Television's Material Culture, and Its Place', October 98, 2001, pp. 93-111

See Reading For Highlighted Notes

Martin Heidegger’s famous description of television as the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness” in “The Thing” leads smoothly toward Jacques Derrida’s coded allusion to television’s particular (im)materiality in an essay on a novel by Philippe Sollers: “While we remain attentive, fascinated, glued to what presents itself we are unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than does the visibility of the visible, the audibility of the audible, the medium or ‘air’ which disappears in the act of allowing to appear.”1 Together, these images bracket a core preoccupation with television as a form of writing across space, as a remote inscription that produces—and annihilates—places: the place of the body, the place of the screen, the place of dwelling.
p. 93

Week 9 [Reading Notes] - The Practice of Everyday Media Life

Week 9 [Reading Notes] - The Practice of Everyday Media Life

Reading 1:
Manovich, Lev (2008) 'The practice of everyday (media) life', in Lovink, Geert and Niederer Sabine (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 33-44.

From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production
Today ‘social media’ is often discussed in relation to another term ‘Web 2.0’ (coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004). While Web 2.0 refers to a number of different technical, economical, and social developments, most of them are directly relevant to our question: besides social media, other important concepts are user-generated content, long tail, network as platform, folkson- omy, syndication, and mass collaboration.
p. 33

if the Web was mostly a publishing medium in the ‘90s, since the year 2000 it has increasingly become a communication medium. Communication between users, including con- versations around user-generated content, take place through a variety of forms besides email: posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and tokens, votes, links, badges, photo, and video.
p. 33

According to 2007 statis- tics, only between 0.5 – 1.5 percent of the users of most popular social media sites (Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia) contributed their own content. Others remained consumers of the content produced by this small group. Does this imply that professionally produced content continues to dominate as the primary source from which people get their news and media? If by ‘content’ we mean typical twentieth century mass media - news, TV shows, narrative films and videos, computer games, literature, and music – then the answer is often in the affirmative.
p. 35

The Practice of Everyday Media Life: Tactics as Strategies
For different reasons, media, businesses, consumer electronics and web industries, and academics converge in celebrating content created and exchanged by users. In academic discussions, in particular, the disproportional attention given to certain genres such as ‘youth media’, ‘activist media’, ‘political mash-ups’ – which are indeed important but do not repre- sent the more typical usage of hundreds of millions of people.
p. 35

Indeed, if the twentieth century subjects were simply consuming the products of culture industry, 21st century prosumers and ‘pro-ams’ are passionately imitating it. That is, they now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.
p. 36

To help us analyse AMV culture, let’s put to work the categories set up by Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life. 14 De Certeau makes a distinction between ‘strategies’ used by institutions and power structures and ‘tactics’ used by modern subjects in their everyday life. The tactics are the ways in which individuals negotiate strategies that were set for them. For instance, to take one example discussed by de Certeau, a city’s lay- out, signage, driving and parking rules and official maps are strategies created by govern- mental and corporate interests. The ways an individual is moving through the city, taking shortcuts, wondering aimlessly, navigating through favourite routes and adopting others are tactics. In other words, an individual can’t physically reorganise the city but she can adopt itself to her needs by choosing how she moves through it. A tactic ‘expects to have to work on things in order to make them its own, or to make them ‘habitable’’. 15
p. 36/7

As De Certeau points out, in modern societies most of the objects which people use in their everyday life are mass produced goods; these goods are the expressions of the strategies of designers, producers, and marketers. People build their worlds and identities out of these readily available objects by using different tactics: bricolage, assembly, customisation, and  to use the term which was not a part of De Certeau’s vocabulary but which has become important today – remix. For instance, people rarely wear every piece from one designer as they appear in fashion shows: they usually mix and match different pieces from different sources. They also wear clothing pieces in different ways than they were intended, and they customise the clothes themselves through buttons, belts, and other accessories. The same goes for the ways in which people decorate their living spaces, prepare meals, and in general construct their lifestyles.
p. 37

The Web 2.0 paradigm represents the most dramatic reconfiguration of the strategies/tactics relationship to date. According to De Certeau’s original analysis, tactics do not necessary result in objects or anything stable or permanent; ‘Unlike the strategy, it [the tactic] lacks the centralised structure and permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a competitor to some other entity... it renders its own activities an ‘unmappable’ form of subversion.’ 18 Since the 1980s, however, consumer and culture industries have started to systematically turn every subculture (particularly every youth subculture) into a product. In short, the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies now sold to them. If you want to ‘oppose the mainstream’, you now had plenty of lifestyles available with every subcutural aspect, from music and visual styles to clothes and slang - available for purchase.
p. 38

What before was ephemeral, transient, umappable, and invisible become permanent, map- pable, and viewable. Social media platforms give users unlimited space for storage and plenty of tools to organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts, opinions, behaviour, and media to others. You can already directly stream video using your laptop or mobile phone, and it is only a matter of time before constant broadcasting of one’s life becomes as common as email.
p. 38 

According to De Certeau 1980 analysis, strategy ‘is engaged in the work of systematizing, of imposing order... its ways are set. It cannot be expected to be capable of breaking up and regrouping easily, something which a tactical model does naturally.’ The strategies used by social media companies today, however, are the exact opposite: they are focused on flexibility and constant chance. Of course, all businesses in the age of globalisation had to become adaptable, mobile, flexible, and ready to break up and regroup – but they rarely achieve the flexibility of web companies and developers. 20
p. 39 

Media Conversations
Often ‘content’, ‘news’ or ‘media’ become tokens used to initiate or maintain a conversation. Their original meaning is less important than their function as such tokens. I am thinking here of people posting pictures on each other’s pages on MySpace, or exchanging gifts on Facebook. What kind of gift you get is less important than the act of getting a gift, or posting a comment or a picture. Although it may appear that such conversation simply foreground Roman Jakobson’s emotive and/or phatic communication functions 24 described already in 1960, it is also possible that a detailed analysis will show them as being a genuinely new phenomenon.
p. 40 

Consider another very interesting new communication situation: a conversation around a piece of media – for instance comments added by users below somebody’s Flickr photo or YouTube video which do not only respond to the media object but also to each other. 26 The same is often true to comments, reviews and discussions on the web in general – the object in question can be software, a film, a previous post, and so on. Of course, such conversation structures are also common in real life: think of a typical discussion in a graduate film studies class, for instance. However, web infrastructure and software allow such conversations to become distributed in space and time – people can respond to each other regardless of their location and the conversation can in theory go on indefinitely. The web is, in effect, millions of such conversations taking place at the same time. These conversations are quite common: according to the 2007 report by Pew internet & American Life Project, among U.S. teens who post photos online, 89 percent reported that people comment on these photos at least some of the time.
p. 41

Is Art After Web 2.0 still possible?
Have professional artists (including video and media artists) benefited from the explosion of media content being produced online by regular users? Have they benefited from the easily availability of media publishing platforms? Does the fact that we now have platforms on which anybody can publish their videos and gain revenue from the downloads mean that artists have a new distribution channel for their works? Or is the world of social media – hundreds of millions of people daily uploading and downloading video, audio, and photographs; media objects produced by unknown authors being downloaded millions of times; media objects fluently and rapidly moving between users, devices, contexts, and networks – making professional art irrelevant? In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratisation of media production and access?
p. 42 

In my observations, while some of these projects do come from prototypical ‘amateurs’, ‘prosumers’ and ‘pro-ams’, most are done by young professionals, or professionals in training. The emergence of the Web as the new standard communication medium in the 1990s means that today in most cultural fields, every professional or company, regardless of its size and geographical location, has a web presence and posts new works online. Perhaps most importantly, young design students can now put their works before a global audience, see what others are doing, and together develop new tools (a good example being the processing.org community).
p. 43

perhaps the most conceptual innovation has been occurring in the development of the Web 2.0 medium itself. I am thinking about all the new creative software tools - web mash- ups, Firefox plug-ins, Facebook applications, etc. – coming out from both large companies such as Google and from individual developers. Therefore, the true challenge posed to art by social media may not be all the excellent cultural works produced by students and non- professionals which are now easily available online – although I do think these are also important. The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.
p. 43


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Reading 2:
Burgess, Jean (2008) 'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?' Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. In: UNSPECIFIED, (ed) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101- 109.

Viral marketing‘, for example, is the attempt to exploit the network effects of word-of-mouth and Internet communication in order to induce a massive number of users to pass on marketing messages‘ and brand information voluntarily‘. 
p. 101

The contested field of memetics‘ is the best-known, but by no means only, strand of this kind of thinking, which began with Richard Dawkins‘ proposal in The Selfish Gene of the meme‘ as the corresponding cultural unit to the biological gene. Similar to the scientific usage in meaning if not analytical precision, in contemporary popular usage an internet meme‘ is a faddish joke or practice (like a humorous way of captioning cat pictures) that becomes widely imitated. In this popular understanding, internet memes‘ do appear to spread and replicate virally‘ – that is, they appear to spread and mutate via distributed networks in ways that the original producers cannot determine and control. 
p. 101

Dan Ackerman Greenberg runs an astroturfing‘ company, employing covert strategies to turn apparently authentic (but actually commercial) videos viral‘. In his now-notorious post on the technology business weblog Techrunch, Greenberg defines viral videos as videos that have travelled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views‘.
p. 102

In considering what these new social dynamics of engagement with media might mean for thinking about cultural production and consumption, Henry Jenkins argues that value is primarily generated via spreadability‘. Through reuse, reworking and redistribution, spreadable media content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values.‘ By this logic any particular video produces cultural value to the extent that it acts as a hub for further creative activity by a wide range of participants in this social network – that is, the extent to which it contributes to what Jonathan Zittrain might call YouTube‘s generative‘ qualities.
p. 102

Burgess and Green‘s recent content survey of YouTube drew on a sample of 4,300 highly popular videos to compare user-created and traditional media content across four measures of popularity. 9 From this data it is possible to distil a super popular top ten‘10 – videos with all-time views in the millions (even the tens of millions), and comments and video responses in the thousands.
p. 103

 Successful viral‘ videos have textual hooks or key signifiers, which cannot be identified in advance (even, or especially, by their authors) but only after the fact, when they have been become prominent via being selected a number of times for repetition. After becoming recognisable via this process of repetition, these key signifiers are then available for plugging into other forms, texts and intertexts—they become part of the available cultural repertoire of vernacular video. Because they produce new possibilities, even apparently pointless, nihilistic and playful forms of creativity are contributions to knowledge. This is true even if (as in the case of the Chocolate Rain‘ example) they work mostly to make a joke out of someone.
p. 105/6

In contrast, internet 'meme‘ based viral videos rely on inside jokes that are spoiled by going mainstream, and therefore quickly reach a tipping point and tend to have relatively short shelf lives. A good example is the Rickrolling‘ phenomenon. Rickrolling – posting a misleading link that leads to Rick Astley‘s 1988 hit music video ‗Never Gonna Give You Up‘, ‗forcing‘ the unsuspecting viewer to set through yet another viewing of the irritating one-hit wonder – gained particular prominence online and in the popular press throughout 2008. And it was widely reported by those in the know that once the Rickrolling meme had made the pages of the mainstream press, it was over.
p. 108

Without stretching an overstretched metaphor too far then, the dynamics of viral video could be understood as involving the spread of replicable ideas (expressed in performances and practices), via the processes of vernacular creativity, among communities connected through social networks. Rethinking viral video‘ in this way may contribute to a better understanding of how the cultures emerging around usercreated video – imitative, playful and often ordinary – are shaping the dynamics of contemporary popular culture.
p. 108

Week 4 [Reading Notes] - Domestication: Media and Technology becoming everyday

Reading 1:
Elizabeth Shove and Dale Southerton (2000), 'Defrosting the Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience', Journal of Material Culture, 5, 3, 2, pp. 301-319. 

Fridges and freezers account for 26% of energy used by all domestic appliances, following space heating and lighting in the league table of UK household energy consumption (DECADE, 1995). Moreover, 30 years ago only 3% of the UK population owned a freezer but by 1995, more than 96% of households had one or more, a rate of diffusion unrivalled by any other kitchen device (DECADE, 1997).
p. 302

Indeed, the question of how the freezer became normal might be answered by showing how its diffusion relates to such factors as the development of the frozen food industry1 or the relation- ship between this and changes in the division of domestic labour. Both sorts of correlation are possible. In Britain, female workforce participation increased from 58 per cent to 75 per cent between 1971 and 1997 (Social Trends, 2000) and analyses of household time budgets (Gershuny, 1992) suggest that the coordination and management of domestic labour is increasingly problematic.
p. 303



Introduction 60-70s

Despite the domestication of industrial technology through this ‘softer’ reference to home efficiency and family welfare, the domestic freezer got off to a relatively slow start. We suggest that this was due to an initially primitive construction of demand. To begin with, the only people who really stood to benefit were those confronting seasonal ‘problems’ of over production. The freezer was first marketed to the housewife who could freeze her home baking, her home-grown crops of fruit and vegetables, and perhaps her own pig. New skills had to be acquired for the mastery of freezing depended on (at this stage) the effective blanching of vegetables, the precise timing of freezing to preserve fruit in the best possible condition, appropriate packaging, labelling, and so on. Providing this knowledge was in place, the freezer’s purpose and novelty lay in its ‘ability to beat the seasons . . . to freeze summer fruits and eat them in the winter’ (Norwak, 1969). At this point in its history, the freezer required a substantial supply of suitable food, carefully and properly prepared by its owner.
p. 306

Establishment 70-80s

Reducing cost, the potential for fast freezing and the introduction of the upright format are all important features, yet the really critical development was the rapid expansion of superstores and with them an extensive and reliable commercial infrastructure for frozen food. In Britain, the first self-service grocery stores were introduced in the 1950s but it was not until the late 1960s that large supermarkets were devel- oped on any scale. The first specialist frozen food store, ‘Iceland’, opened in 1970. By the early 1990s there were some 800 ‘Iceland stores’ (Iceland Corporate Relations Department, 2000), and many frozen food counters in supermarkets up and down the country.
p. 307

[H]aving a freezer means that you can take advantage of any bulk-buying special offers of perishable foods. Careful shopping, a beady eye and a freezer can certainly pay dividends. (Rennie, 1973: 7)

To sum up, adding a freezer to your domestic equipment will allow you to cater more economically and more flexibly; to control the output of your own energy in a way you never could before . . . cooking . . . can be done at times which suit you better. (Ellis, 1973: 5) 

Economy means different things to different people, some are more short of time, like the working housewife, some are more short of effort, like the elderly and the handicapped, and it would seem that all of us are short of money in these days of ever-increasing prices. Is there anything the housewife can do to keep pace with the rising cost of living, the increasing pressure of daily life and the shortage of hours in the day? One answer to her problems is the HOME FREEZER. Imagine all the foods you walk around several shops to buy, all in your own kitchen, and at the most reason- able prices. (Hastrop, 1972: 1) 

By now the benefits are overwhelming. So much so that freezers are presented as necessary rather than optional appliances for the modern household. In the extracts quoted here, there is nothing extravagant about the freezer or its contents. Freezer-dependant foods such as burgers, pizzas and ice cream have become normal, as have expectations of bulk buying and the experience of having a mini-supermarket within ‘your own kitchen’.
p. 308

The freezer’s acceptance within the kitchen may also relate to the introduction of the microwave.11 Although first available on the domes- tic market in the late 1970s (McMeekin and Tomlinson, 1998), it was not until the early 1980s that microwave cookers found their way into British homes in any significant number. (See Figure 2.)
 

Looking back at the 1970s, themes of efficiency dominate. The freezer is positioned and represented as a device which promises econ- omic efficiencies in terms of bulk buying and infrequent shopping, and efficiencies of household management and cooking. Its move into the home and its acceptance as a central rather than a peripheral appliance is in turn related to the rationalisation of space within the fitted kitchen. The freezer’s progress during these years was evidently aided by a surrounding frozen food infrastructure, and by a network of related technologies including the microwave and the proliferation of freezer- dependent food. Having become normal with these terms, the freezer seems to have adapted to new conditions and demands emerging from the 1980s onwards.
p. 310

Redefinition 80s onwards

‘Frost free’ appliances include a de-humidifier and fan, they cost approximately £100 more than their non-frost-free equivalent, and are considerably less efficient to run. They are, however, more ‘convenient’ in that they never need defrosting and do not require regular de- and re-stocking. Discussing the benefits of frost-free models, a retailer homed in on themes of time and ‘hassle’:
Frost-free is now very popular because they [i.e. frost-free freezers] are so convenient, they not only save the time it takes to defrost, they also save the hassle. Defrosting is a major job which requires either eating the freezer down, which is a hassle in itself as you have no food stocks, or it means emptying the freezer and trying to defrost it as quickly as possible . . . Frost- free saves on all that and means you don’t have to worry.
p. 311

If the 1970s growth of superstore shopping opened the way for the freezer’s establishment, the development of convenience foods (Gofton, 1995) has altered its associated benefits and the practices it permits. While it would be dangerous to claim that the freezer has transformed our diet, it is plausible to suggest that it has played an important part in changing patterns of food provisioning, and that this role is both dependent on and constitutive of the food industry at large (Hewitt, 1993; Warde, 1999).
p. 313

Freezers provide the convenience of ready access, rapid preparation and the security of long-term storage. These time-related arguments represent an elaboration of earlier narratives rather than a total overhauling of anticipated benefit. As before, freezers still make it possible to take advantage of special offers and one-off price reductions, but now it is the time which counts. If the freezer is ‘necessary’, then it is so not because it is necessary to have frozen food, but because it has become increasingly important to manage time and domestic labour in ways that only freezers allow. That is the need to which freezing now represents a response.
p. 313

Being and Becoming Normal

In the first phase, freezers were essentially good for managing seasonal gluts of food; in the second their main purpose lay in the more efficient management of the household economy. Today, the freezer is perhaps best seen as a ‘time machine’: that is a device with which to manage the otherwise intolerable demands of scheduling, ordering and co-ordination (Warde, 1999).
p. 315

The freezers of today promise to help people cope with the compression and fragmentation of time. But in so doing they lock their users into certain practices and habits, at the same time requiring an extensive if routinely invisible supporting infrastructure. As well as depending on a reliable electricity supply, and accommodating kitchen designs, freezers presuppose a network of manufacturers, frozen-food producers, global transport systems and agricultural practices.
p. 315

Household appliances do not embody every aspect of social order, nor should we expect to discern the prospects for sustainable consumption in the details of their design. But, by opening up the ‘white box’ of the freezer we have been able to capture aspects of ordinary consumption which would otherwise have slipped the net. In particular, we have been able to follow the transformation of sociotechnical regimes and systems of consumption and practice from the perspective of one ever-changing device.
p. 316 

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Reading 2:

Johnson, Jim (1988) 'Mixing humans and non-humans together: the sociology of

a door-closer', Social Problems, 35(3), pp. 298-310.

This is where the age-old choice, so well analysed by Mumford (1966), is offered to you: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only function is to open and close the door. This is called a groom or a porter (from the French word for door) or a gatekeeper, or a janitor, or a concierge, or a turnkey, or a gaoler. The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behaviour. No matter who these others are and where they come from, the groom will always take care of the door. A nonhuman (the hinges) plus a human (the groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma.
p. 300

It is at this point that you have this relatively new choice: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated nonhuman character whose only func­tion is to open and close the door. This is called a door-closer or a "groom." The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one nonhuman and may safely leave the others (bell­ boys included) to their erratic behaviour. No matter who they are and where they come from polite or rude, quick or slow, friends or foes-the nonhuman groom will always take care of the door in any weather and at any time of the day. A nonhuman (hinges) plus another nonhuman (groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma.
p. 301

As Akrich notes, 'prescription' is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. In spite of the constant weeping of moralists, no human is as relentlessly moral as a machine, especially if it is (she is, he is, they are) as "user-friendly" as my computer.
p. 301

As a technologist. I could claim that, provided you put aside maintenance and the few sectors of the population that are discriminated against, the groom does its job welL closing the door behind you constantly. firmly. and slowly. It shows in its humble way how three rows of delegated nonhuman actants (hinges, springs, and hydraulic pistons) replace. 90 percent of the time, either an undisciplined bell-boy who is never there when needed or. for the general public, the program instructions that have to do with remembering-to-close-the-door-when-it­ is-cold. The hinge plus the groom is the technologist's dream of efficient action. at least it was until the sad day when I saw the note posted on Walla Walla Sociology Department's door with which I started this article: "the groom is on strike." So not only have we been able to delegate the act of clOSing the door from the human to the nonhuman, we have also been able to delegate the little rat's lack of discipline (and maybe the union that goes with it). 
p. 302

The label "inhuman" applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices that exist for figuring or de-figuring, personifying or abstracting, em­ bodying or disembodying actors.
p. 303

Humans are not necessarily figurative; for instance, you are not allowed to take the highway policeman as an individual chum. He/she is the representative of authority, and if he/she is really dumb, he/she will reject any individualising efforts from you, like smiles, jokes, bribes, or fits of anger. He/she will fully play the administrative machinery.
p. 306

why did the little (automatic) rat go on strike? The answer to this is the same as for the question earlier of why few people show up in Walla Walla. It is not because a piece of behaviour is prescribed by an inscription that the predeter­ mined characters will show up on time and do the job expected of them. This is true of humans, but it is truer of non-humans. In this case, the hydraulic piston did its job, but not the spring that collaborated with it. Any of the words above may be used to describe a set-up at any level and not only at the simple one I chose for the sake of clarity. It does not have to be limited to the case where a human deals with a series of nonhuman delegates; it can also be true of relations among nonhumans. In other words, when we get into a more complicated lash-up than the groom, we do not have to stop doing sociology; we go on studying "role expectation," behaviour, social relations. The non-figurative character of the actors should not intimidate us.
p. 308

Machines are lieutenants; they hold the places and the roles delegated to them, but this way of shifting is very different from other types (Latour, I988b).
p. 309 

If, in our societies, there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we have delegated competences, it means that what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans. Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability are not properties of humans but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters. Since each of those delegates ties together part of our social world, it means that studying social relations without the nonhumans is impossible (Latour, 1988a) or adapted only to complex primate societies like those of baboons (Strum and Latour, 1987). One of the tasks of sociology is to do for the masses of nonhumans that make up our modern societies what it did so well for the masses of ordinary and despised humans that make up our society. To the people and ordi­ nary folks should now be added the lively, fascinating, and honourable ordinary mechanism. If the concepts, habits, and preferred fields of sociologists have to be modified a bit to accom­modate these new masses, it is a ssmall price to pay.
p. 311

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Reading 3:

Zalewski, J, (2015) Consumer revolution in People’s Poland: Technologies in Everyday Life and the negotiation between custom and fashion (1945-1980) in Journal of Consumer Culture, 0(0), pp. 1-19 

The adoption of innovations was associated with a wider process of withdrawing from the natural economy to develop the state market, enhancing the participation of households in the money economy and increasing expenditures on industrial goods, or an economic consumer revolution (McKendrick et al., 1982).
p. 2

In sociological terms, the consumer revolution can be understood as a generalised shift in socially organised patterns of consumption away from regulation by interdiction or sumptuary law over particular social categories and towards fashion governing consumption through social emulation (Appadurai, 1996). In this broad sense, the consumer revolution occurred in different periods for different sections of Western societies, reaching a level of mass consumption at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States (Aldridge, 2003) and after the Second World War in Western Europe (De Grazia, 2005).
p. 2