Scientific engagement and the way for marketing

Did the mass-consumption society change our relationship with things? We can easily guess so. Industrialization altered radically the process of creation of objects, and lowered drastically the production costs. As a result, every person in the Western world owns today an extraordinary number of things, while the life span of single objects has dropped dramatically. Following social, economical, and semiotic studies, the material culture we live in has also started to motivate historical studies of consumption, possession and collection of things. Where does this attitude come from? Is it conceivable as a self-apology of a progressive capitalism? Is it a new kind of reification-based religion that tries to freeze in tangible things a fleeting image of wealth? Is it the democratization of a concept of social distinction dating back at least to the Renaissance? Or it is simply the very matter of identity? The topic is of course complex and widely studied, so it is not my intention to provide anything new. It is anyway interesting that the weight of current mass-consumption dynamics was particularly reflected in many English activities.
During her “Hans Rausing lecture” at Cambridge, Nelly Oudshoorn suggested a redefinition of the role of users of technoscience. Her will seems to escape victimizing readings and, probably, their political consequences. When presenting the “Time and Space Project” of the Greenwich Maritime Museum, Gloria Clifton illustrated to us the market analysis that the Museum commissioned, and announced proudly that the resulting catalogue was a best-seller. Three of the four talks given by graduate students at the History of Science department in Cambridge were concerned with aspects of commercialization and mass-consumption of things connect to science. In London, the Science Museum shop was the biggest we saw in our tour. Robert Bud’s talk on the “Making the modern world” website (no need to say how much the name is meaningful) focused on a hard challenge of our days: what strategies should a science museum adopt to narrate objects’ stories now that we jumped from the mass-possession of knowledge to its mass-production? Detailed reports on the worldwide use of the “Making the modern world” and “Ingenious” websites show that sensibility in “leaving the ivory tower” is not just a question of words.
Should we look for the historical roots of this geography of intellectual interests? When presenting itself, the Science Museum traces back its origins to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Whether this specific reminder is the “invention of a tradition” or not (since the actual setting of the Science Museum is dated 1909), it is quite natural that English-oriented culture is deeply involved with that central moment in modern Western history, when grand narratives of the relationship between science and technology were represented in a so crucial and socially appealing ways that the power of those representations spread all over the world and lasted up to now.
An object at the Whipple Museum narrates that vision. It is an ornament produced by W. Scackhton in the form of a little diptych, presumably destined to enter an average middle-class house. Inside there are no saints or places for pictures, but the representation of a lunar crater as seen with a Newtonian reflector. The ornament was shown at the Great Exhibition and won a special prize because it was “beautifully executed”. The wedding between science and technology was celebrated here, not only because of the mediums (a Newtonian reflector, graphic technologies for a lunar crater) but because the “beautiful” representation was finally made accessible to everyone. But what about the “religious” iconic shift? What would push an average person to acquire this object?
At the Scott Polar Research centre another object poses similar questions. Ponko the Penguin, a plush toy, was invented by Herbert Ponting, the cinematographer of the 1911 English expedition to the South Pole, to advertise his film of the expedition. Thus, Ponko is probably the earliest marketing ploy related to a scientific enterprise. One hundred years later, Ponko is still on the market as a successful tool to narrate stories about the history of South Pole expeditions to children. Where does its unique evocative power come from?