{"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":212,"pdf_page":220,"physical_index":220,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"bb33632c3b721efea45e1d633551cc485de7683a650a5a4709460dd52c1948dc"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"OCOOO OOOCO\n\nFig 8.1: Harvey Balls. mintsauce/openclipart.org/CC0 1.0\n\nby CR is displayed in the lowest row in the figure. In CR’s system, two colors are used. The more red (represented here as gray) there is in the circle, the higher the quality of the product; conversely, the more black there is in the circle, the lower the product quality. The empty middle circle represents “average” quality.\n\nThe thing to note here is that this system of ideograms, although in one way presenting an ordinal ranking of quality, is graphically suggestive of proportional relations between what appear to be the quantities of quality represented by each circle. For example, in the system shown in the second row above, the fully shaded circle represents the highest-quality rating, while the empty circle represents the lowest-quality rating. This mode of graphic representation implies that as the circle becomes more completely shaded, quality proportionately increases. The CR system, shown in the bottom row, is more complex in that, as noted, two shading colors are used, red and black, with red denoting degrees of above average quality and black denoting degrees of below average quality. Yet still, an intuitive interpretation of the almost fully filled in red circle is that it represents roughly twice as much quality as the half-filled circle—which in turn contains twice the quality of the empty middle circle. And likewise, the half-filled black circle represents twice as much quality as the fully filled in black circle. The semiotics of Harvey Balls thus suggest a translation of qualitative assessments into quasi-quantitative ratings. The use of the same quasi-quantitative system of ideograms to rate a very wide range of consumer products implies that there is a metric by virtue of which qualitatively quite distinct items (for example, cars and stereos) can be rendered commensurable. Such a metric suggests the existence of a kind of universal unit of quality, which makes possible a comparison between proverbial apples and oranges. Later in its history, Consumer Reports shifted from the sole use of ideograms, to joint use of ideograms and a numerical product score for each qualitative dimension of tested items, along with an aggregate score for each item. In efect, this turned qualitative assessments directly into quantitative scores. This trend in the representation of product test results became quite general over the course of the last third of the twentieth century, with widespread use in the media of quasi- or fully quantitative scales to represent degrees of product quality.\n\n212\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":211,"next_page":213}