不知道有没有人想过自己是不是一开始就喜欢吃巧克力、看电影？到底是真的喜欢这些事物，还是受到影响才开始喜欢上？在这之间，真正享受到的又是什么？
 
十九世纪后半期，科技革命为人类消费及感官体验带来了重大的改变，从糖果到香烟、唱盘到云霄飞车，全部都不一样了。食物、饮料还有其他的消费性商品全部进入量产、瓶装、罐装、浓缩还有蒸馏，这些事情不仅触发了人们前所未有且愈演愈烈的喜悦、兴奋，还让人上了瘾。
 
两位作者Gary S. Cross与Robert N. Proctor 在书中深入探究美国历史上的未知篇章， 厘清现代消费文化的起源以及科技转化人类感官体验的方式。短短几十年间，垃圾食物、香烟、电影、录音还有刺激的云霄飞车为尝、闻、视、听、触的定义带来了一场革命。 装箱、标签与真空的新技术让消费者只要打开包装就可以尽情的享受其中的乐趣。制造商不断生产高糖、高脂的食物，看起来很好吃，但却危害健康。 自动机械卷好的香烟一进入市场，便让数百万人成瘾。 有些包装让天然的美食变得不讨喜或是被替换掉。不过，这些新技术也让药物的取用变得方便有效，提供了前所未有的机会，让人们可以享受音乐与视觉艺术，让人们可以食用到更卫生、多元且营养的食物及饮品。不论好坏，人类感官都已经被便宜及方便变得机械化、商业化，在很大的程度上来说，也被民主化了。两位作者给读者的是巧妙建构起来的消费主义与消费科技历史，这些内容会让看过的人都重新思考自己最喜欢的事物。
 
好评
“For the historian of consumer goods, Packaged Pleasures offers a comprehensive discussion of an eclectic mix of products including confectionery, convenience foods, cigarettes, sound recordings, film and amusement parks.”
(Times Higher Education)
 
“Think your hankering for a Hershey’s bar or yen for Die Hard movies is simply individual preference? Think again. In PackagedPleasures, historians Cross and Proctor present an ambitious chronology of consumerism and consumer technology.”
(Discover)
 
“Cross and Proctor have a keen ear for detail and anecdotes. . . . While networked technologies are reconfiguring associations between the senses, space and society—with work emails checked on holiday, selfies taken at funerals and 3D objects printed locally from a CAD file stored in the “cloud”—Packaged Pleasures offers a timely reminder of the longer history of the relationship between technology, industry and the self.”
(New Scientist)
 
“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 Cross and Proctor look at the health and social impact of key consumer innovations at the turn of the last century.”
(Globe & Mail)
 
“The book reads well, moves along very rapidly with just the right amount of detail to inform without becoming boring. . . . A great way to see what marketing has done and is doing.”
(San Francisco Book Review)
 
“It’s a keen insight and a valuable reminder of the power of seemingly trivial inventions to utterly transform our notion of ‘normal’ life. . . . The authors are at their best when showing how incremental improvements cumulate to create dramatic technological and cultural changes.”
(Weekly Standard)
 
“An outstanding history. . . . Highly recommended.”
(Choice)
 
“When pleasure was linked with scarcity, we could not over-indulge and satiate ourselves.  The emergence of industrialised, packaged pleasures—whether  recorded music or confectionery—allows gratification to conquer constraints, putting us on a treadmill of desire and addiction.  Are we happier or merely over-loaded with desire; should we abandon instant gratification for something slower and more contemplative?  Gary Cross and Robert Proctor ask fundamental questions about our health and well-being in a world of packaged pleasures.  Their book is essential reading for anyone interested in questions of public health, the regulation of the food industry, and the shaping of economic policy.”
(Martin Daunton University of Cambridge)
 
“What makes Cross and Proctor’s book both unique and extremely useful is its examination of a cross section of areas that are rarely, if ever, addressed in combination. There is a rich literature on food, cigarettes, motion pictures, the recording industry, and photography, but this is the first in-depth examination of these ‘packaged pleasures’ in combination so that we can see the interconnections and relationships among these mainstays of consumer culture. The book also brilliantly demonstrates the ways that the rise of corporate capitalism fundamentally transformed these separate spheres in very similar ways.”
(Gerald Markowitz, coauthor of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children)
 
“This book persuasively addresses one of the key questions in modern history: how human experience has been reshaped by mass marketing. It includes but goes beyond attention to advertising, to a fascinating exploration of technology’s impact on products and packaging, and how the result has transformed sensory response. A groundbreaking effort.”
(Peter N. Stearns, author of The Industrial Revolution in World History)
 
“Well argued, stimulating, captivating. Packaged Pleasures unwraps the secrets of modern consumer societies!”
(Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute)
 
“Highly original and fascinating tour of the commodity world, especially its ubiquitous but underexamined delivery systems. This book is itself a packaged pleasure, but make no mistake,  it contains health warnings that, if heeded, would save untold lives.”
(Iain Boal, Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology)
 
“Packaged Pleasures is a wonderfully evocative account of how technology has changed the way we enjoy the world around us. Through a series of superb case studies, Cross and Proctor show how the way we see, hear, taste, and feel has been transformed by the mass production of cheap luxuries. In doing so they raise challenging questions about the effects of modern industrial capitalism and what we do to ourselves as consumers. The opportunities for pleasure and enjoyment could not be greater, but does this make us any happier?”
(Matthew Hilton University of Birmingham)
 
关于作者
Gary S. Cross 是宾州大学现代历史的特聘教授，同时也是一位作家，作品包括： An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America and The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century。
 
Robert N. Proctor是史丹佛大学科学历史的教授，他也是许多书籍的作者，作品有： Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis 与 Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge。
 
目录
1 The Carrot and the Candy Bar
2 Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular
3 The Cigarette Story
4 Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth
5 Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record
6 Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures
7 Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle
8 Pleasure on Speed and the Calibrated Life: Fast Forwarding through the Last Century
9 Red Raspberries All the Time?
Notes
* Index