Internet Studies

There is a lot of reading required for this module. I just finished reading How the Refrigerator Got its Hum and aparently gas refrigerators have been around as long as compression refrigerators have. They are actually a simple machine will less moving parts, easier to maintain and better for the consumer. Even though, the compression (electric) refrigerators took over the market.

A few years ago, we used to work on a very remote island with limited and unreliable source of electricity. Our bosses owned and managed an eco-lodge. They used to charge a set of car batteries every day for a few hours using a portable generator and used these batteries to power the lodge. They were looking into buying a gas refrigerator, which was a very expensive item. Till then, I had no idea gas refrigerators existed. I grew up with our electric refrigerator knowing nothing about better options.

I think, a couple of the last paragraphs summarise the point of the article best:

We have compression, rather than absorption, refrigerators in the United States today not because one was technically better than the other, and not even because consumers preferred one machine (in the abstract) over the other, but because General Electric, General Motors, Kelvinator, and Westinghouse were very large, very powerful, very aggressive, and very resourceful companies, while Servel and SORCO were not. Consumer ‘preference’ can only be expressed for whatever is, in fact, available for purchase, and is always tempered by the price and convenience of the goods that are so available. At no time, in these terms, were refrigerators that ran on gas really competitive with those that ran on electric current.

In an economy such as ours in the United States, the first question that gets asked about a new device is not, Will it be good for the household - or even, Will householders buy it? but, rather, Can we manufacture it and sell it at a profit? Consumers do not get to choose among everything that they might like to have, but only among those things that manufacturers and financiers believe can be sold at a good profit. Profits are always the bottom line, and profits are partly compounded out of sales—but only partly. Profits are also compounded out of how much staff time has to be spent, whether a marketing arrangement is already in place, how easily manufacturing facilities can be converted, how reliably an item can be mass-produced—and similar considerations.

Link: Donald MacKenzie, Judy Wajcman, 1985, How the Refrigerator Got its Hum, The Social Shaping of Technology, Open University Press