The science of packaging desire

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Thanks to technology, we now take for granted the ability to enjoy anything and everything in the comfort of home – things like the convenience of streaming television content when it suits our schedule. We can listen to live band recordings while tuning out the crush of shoppers at the mall.

They're the same sort of innovations that initially excited people about phonograph records in the late 1800s, or when bottled soda and then vending machines replaced soda fountains. Convenient packaging came along and made socially or financially rare pleasure experiences "special" and available to the masses. It was arguably a democratizing force. It's always why for all the convenience, we can feel alone in a crowd.

The packaging in question isn't the physical packaging itself, but the notional packaging of experiences and products. 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: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire, Gary Cross and Robert Proctor look at the health and social impact of key consumer innovations at the turn of the last century. The Globe spoke with Cross, distinguished professor of modern history at Penn State, down the line from Harrisburg, Pa., about what meting out pleasure in two-minute increments has meant, and where it's all headed.

The point is that personalization has been highly depersonalizing, because people could just self-serve and do that now more than ever, with no human interaction required.

If you think about vending machines, what the personal "package" does is allow you not to have to confront the salesperson. This meant a lot when it first came out, in a positive way, because you didn't have to speak English, and often people find it much easier to relate to goods than they do to each other.

You also write about packaged music as "severing the listening experience from performance" – the shared moment, yet attendance at live music performances is arguably on the rise.

That's partly because it is an experience that people long for now because the normal experience is so different and in a certain way, disabling. I see this across a whole lot of things – it's amazing that we see 16-year-olds wanting a vinyl record of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. People are nostalgic for what you might call a remediated experience. Why would a 16-year-old want to hear that in vinyl? It's not nostalgia for a memory, it is a longing to recover in the past a perceived value, something that is better than today.

You argue that these packaged experiences and goods have had high social costs. Are you optimistic that any social aspects can be reinstated?

The packaged-pleasure experience is something that is very attractive because it's convenient, it's personalized, it's portable and in some ways it's more intense than natural experiences or, for that matter, refined ones which often are more subtle. But that doesn't mean that people don't realize that there's a loss. People tend to want to pull back.

The way Twitter and TV shows are partnering and promoting simultaneous viewing commentary – it's a second parallel channel of sharing and engagement, to people who are otherwise segmented from one another.

Liz Cohen wrote years ago about how listening to radio created a set of common interests and values among people in the Chicago area in the 1920s and 1930s from different ethnic groups and made it easier for the unionists to organize them in the late 1930s. That can happen because of not only sharing an experience – a media event – but sharing it at the same time. Mediated communities are positive because it's the idea of a lot of people sharing a common moment, at the same time. That was of course what television was all about, particularly live television for many years. Everybody stopped what they were doing when Amos 'n' Andy came on the air. What's interesting with Twitter linking with TV stations is they're trying to re-establish that link and what they're doing is forming a community around a shared real-time experience.

It seems disruptive, trying to bring back real time, or stopping time and limiting individual convenience. At least in light of this idea of the packaged pleasure as a certain kind of supreme selfishness – Edison's all things to all men at all times, of their choice.

The phonograph and eventually movies do this as well – it isn't just that they make experience highly personal but they also displace it and make it possible to experience it conveniently, at any time and any place. And you don't have a community unless you have in some fashion a geography, in a space and a time.

A tablet or smartphone doesn't seem all that different from the Edison of 1896 or a Kodak instant camera.

And in a way packaging hooks into the seasonal issue – people only began to wrap their presents elaborately at about the same time as their regular goods were being wrapped about 100-110 years ago. People used to get a doll under the tree, or something on the tree, but with the coming of Santa Clauses at department stores and then the elaborate wrappings of colourful paper and ribbons in the stores, they all take off at the same time.

Is that in any way for the same reason?

Yes, because the wrapping is so enticing and also deceiving. The whole idea of the "special" gift is an extension of the idea of the packaged pleasure because it's both wrapped and meant to be "more than" what's inside it. It all gets into the amazing deception that we introduce our children to when they can still barely speak – the idea that Santa has brought this special package, that it isn't just something on the shelf at Walmart.

This interview has been condensed and edited.This interview has been condensed and edited.