In fact, women users appropriated this device in ways that were not foreseen by the engineers who designed it. Mapping the evolution of the microwave oven, Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod demonstrate how consumers can modify the meanings and values of technologies in the practices of everyday life. These cultural meanings, in turn, enter the design and production of goods themselves. Indeed, the authors conceive of technologies as in a continuous process of negotiation, as we “domesticate” or make new technologies our own. The finished form of the microwave, which redefined the gendered character of the user, meant that the microwave literally shifted its place in the department store. It now sits alongside washing machines, fridges, and freezers as a humdrum domestic appliance.
The making of the microwave, then, is as much a story about the transformation of a quintessentially human activity, cooking, as it is about a technical invention that saves time. It is perhaps the perfect hypermodern convenience device as it solves problems of meal coordination and synchronization. However, in order to grasp its full significance, we need to move beyond the focus on a single device.
Domestic technologies are adopted as part of larger organizational and technical infrastructures. Microwaves, for example, rely on freezers and are largely used as a defrosting machine. They also depend on a complex food supply chain involving an international workforce largely invisible to the purchaser. Convenience meals still require shopping in a context where car dependency and urban growth means traversing long distances to the supermarket. While the market for convenience foods has increased exponentially, so too has the practice of eating out, even though it requires temporal and spatial coordination. Today, about half of the money used to buy food in the United States is spent in restaurants.23 Fast foods restaurants, such as McDonald’s, are the main beneficiaries of this trend, and it is notable that they market themselves as “fast.” The fast food industry exemplifies the way in which the capacity of more afluent households to buy time through utilizing consumer services is made possible by the supply of cheap, often migrant, labor.
Chapter five
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