Michael Lissack demand to one of oversupply. No longer did consumers have one choice of bread, sold by the local baker; now they could buy any of a half-dozen kinds sold by large corporations. In the increasingly crowded marketplace, innu- endo began to squeeze out the very product information with which con- sumers might shop smarter. Until the beginning of the twentieth century people typically had a craft knowledge of most things they bought -- they understood how the product was made and how to judge its quality -- and advertising rarely outweighed it. But as the number of products and their technical sophistication grew, people could not maintain a craft knowledge of most items. Most have neither the opportunity nor the expertise to in- spect technically sophisticated goods coming from around the globe. History moved us along from an age of individualized craft markets to the mass consumption communities described by Boorstin. The industrial revolution transformed the country from a land of excess demand to one of oversupply. No longer did consumers have one choice of bread, sold by the local baker; now they could buy any of a half-dozen kinds sold by large corporations. In the increasingly crowded marketplace, innuendo began to squeeze out the very product information with which consumers might shop smarter. Until the beginning of the twentieth century people typically had a craft knowledge of most things they bought -- they understood how the product was made and how to judge its quality -- and advertising rarely outweighed it. But as the number of products and their technical sophis- tication grew, people could not maintain a craft knowledge of most items. Most have neither the opportunity nor the expertise to inspect technically sophisticated goods coming from around the globe. As our consumption patterns changed, our demands on government changed as well. Mass production, where the consumer picks from what the producer supplies and distributes, became the pattern in our governing procedures. Rules, laws, regulations, bureaucracies all became ossified in the specification of particular procedures, specific policies, detailed analysis. You can have any color you want as long as it is black applies to the way our government functions today as much as it did to the buyer of a Model T. But, the information age has changed all that. In our consumption communities
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