{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":186,"pdf_page":194,"physical_index":194,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7a766689bf6f5b4c6f25265025c27a356ec63acc49abfa06ae585a00041a84ff"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Above and beyond the particular cultural associations with a given brand, brands were thus received as signaling devices about product quality.15 Viewed in this way, the proliferation of brands, from the later nineteenth century onward, can be understood as one dimension of a more general concern to standardize product quality. The point of a brand was to indicate a standard set of properties that consumers could reasonably expect in the products labeled with the brand.16 And indeed, the arguments made by manufacturers in favor of branded goods were similar to those they made in favor of standardized goods. W. W. Wachtel, chairman of the executive committee of the Brand Names Foundation, speaking in 1951 on the importance of trademark protection, argued that, as a result of the quality commitments entailed by branding a product, “brand-name products will always resist the pressure of higher costs and material shortages, and are the last products upon which prices are increased or qualities lowered.”17 In the middle of the twentieth century, to brand a good was thus to indicate that it was a standardized product, notionally endowed with predictable and stable use value. And those goods were acquired using buying power that was safeguarded by inflation-resistant, productivity-linked standardized wages.\n\nThe emphasis on the mechanical properties of consumer objects was reflected in the content of advertising in the mass consumer market. The growth of consumer brands was accompanied by a massive expansion of advertising aimed at spreading brand name recognition. Between 1890 and 1929 advertising expenditure increased tenfold, from \\$360 million to \\$3,426 million, and thereafter continued to swallow an ever greater part of GDP (Bureau of the Census 1960, p. 526). By 1998, total expenditure on advertising amounted to \\$201,594 million.18 According to cultural historian Jackson Lears, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, this marketing onslaught emphasized the narrow functional and material properties of commodities. In Lears’s account, this reflected a growing demand for “a kernel of hardness” or “actuality” in product information—a demand that came to inform the medium as well as the message of advertising. Lears suggests that the very rapid rise to prominence of the photograph as the dominant representational medium in visual advertisements can be explained by the belief that photography delivers an unmediated picture of reality. Photographs in advertisements thus disclosed the “actuality” of consumer products. In the catalog for a 1930 exhibition of advertising photography, quoted by Lears to illustrate this conception, photographs are described as promising: “sincerity in displaying [a] product [as well as] drama in portraying its virtues” (Lears 1994, p. 324, emphasis added).\n\n186\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":185,"next_page":187}