“And it all happened in our lifetime” – progress and comfort: the meaning of technology domestication practices

Abstract

The process of domesticating technology coincided with the development of modern market societies. The first sociological work on home technologies referred to “the industrial revolution at home” because when the book appeared in the 1970s the term “consumer revolution” had not yet been coined (Cowan 1976). While the industrial revolution concerned the mass production and increased supply of goods, the consumer revolution involved mass consumption and increased demand. The consumer revolution was not solely the result of a greater supply of goods on the market and of consumers’ financial resources but of the requisite change in forms of organizing consumption to reflect both daily habits and beliefs and a religious worldview2. Arjun Appadurai (1996) claims that there are three patterns of socially organised forms of consumption. For traditional communities, a typical form of consumption is “interdiction,” that is, guidelines for specific groups and social categories: what was or was not permissible to eat often depended on the season and was embedded in religion. Appadurai sees such an approach as reflecting a close connection between cosmology and everyday life. On the other hand, in a feudal society, where social status was assigned by birth, sumptuary law might specify, for example, the use of certain colors or types of cloth for estates of the realm. Consumption clearly has meaning for status and identity; it shows who an individual is – to what group or category he belongs. The form of consumption proper to modernity is fashion, that is, social emulation of the social environment (Appadurai 1996). This form of consumption is more flexible: there are no bans, taboos, or legally written norms about what can be consumed by whom. Flexibility requires openness to novelty, to a constant change of habits and beliefs. Nevertheless, it also has a status-and-identity function; individuals imitate the groups and categories to which they aspire, but they also have sufficient economic or cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) to manifest their belonging to those