More work for mother, more commercials on the DVR

If you asked a roomful of historians of technology to list the books that impressed them most as students, and demonstrated the power of the discipline to surprise and illuminate, one of the books that would end up on a lot of lists is Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother.

The book asked a simple question: why was it that, almost a century after the introduction of labor-saving technologies in the home, women spent almost as much time doing housework as their grandmothers? The answer was that while the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and other household appliances have made individual tasks easier-- it's certainly easier to put clothes in a washing machine than to do them by hand-- the appliances have also changes who does housework, and how often those tasks are done. (Details are in the extended post.)

The big lesson is, to understand technologies, you've got to pay attention to how technologies fit into people's lives, and how they affect patterns of behavior-- not just what they're intended to do. Today's Mercury News has a piece that serves as a reminder of this lesson: apparently, while DVR (digital video recorder) users fast-forward through commercials, they watch more hours of TV, so it may all be a wash. Says the article:

Even though nine out of 10 people with digital video recorders say they usually fast-forward through commercials, broadcast executives argued Wednesday that doesn't mean the death knell for advertisers.

People with DVRs watch more television, and even if they zip through ads, they notice them....

[T]he industry's chief fear is that people with DVRs will completely tune out commercials.

That's not completely unfounded: a CBS survey found 64 percent of DVR users said they always skipped commercials and another 26 percent said they skipped them most of the time. A separate study by Forrester Group put the ``skip'' rate at 92 percent.

But Alan Wurtzel, NBC's chief researcher, said it was an ``urban myth'' that DVRs make commercials worthless.

The networks said their research showed that a majority of people are watching their screens even while darting through the ads, and most of these notice the ads. (Still unanswered is how much these spots are sinking in as they speed by.)

More people are also likely to say they skip ads when they actually don't, they said.

This suggests that the challenge for advertisers may be to design commercials that can get their message across in, say, 5 or 10 seconds-- short enough so that viewers find it easier to sit through them than use the fast-forward function-- or find other ways to adapt to viewers who watch more TV, but have the capacity to cut (but not eliminate) the amount of attention they give to ads.

There was another interesting point:

The ability to watch without being tied to a schedule can significantly increase the visibility of programs that might not be appointment viewing. For example, people with DVRs are watching the WB shows "Supernatural" and "Smallville" at more than twice the rate of people without the machines.

Technorati Tags: smart_home, STS, television, work

So how did labor-saving technology translate into "more work for mother?" Two big things happened.

First, automating housework changed standards of cleanliness. It's less work to get a shirt clean, but we now put a shirt in the laundry after wearing it one day (even if we have jobs that require virtually no physical labor). A century ago, we would have worn a shirt for three days before washing it. Put the two trends together, and the result is, as it were, a wash.

Second, it changed who did housework. Vacuuming a carpet is less work than picking it up, taking it outside, and beating it. But who used to do that work? Fathers and sons. Wealthy and middle-class women didn't do their own laundry before the invention of the washing machine: they sent it out. Cooking is easier in an age of ready-mix cakes, but a century ago, Mom would have had a couple other sets of hands working with her. Broadly speaking, labor-saving technologies feminized housework, and turned women who previously had managed housework-- delegating, supervising, and evaluating the work of washerwomen, sons and daughters-- into manual laborers.

Comments

[Victoria]

Fast-forward over a :10 spot and you'll see nothing. Longer-form commercials, though, like the rare :60, get about 20 s to sink in, which is almost enough time to get out a message. I'd expect longer, not shorter, commercials, with increased text and more depth of information.

And I love my TiVo for helping me watch more discerningly.

What did Nielsen say about the viewing patterns it observed through its partnership with TiVo?

[Nancy]

I was very happy after this past election when I realized that I had NO recollection of seeing ANY political ads!