Fridges: Where The Internet Ends.
Fridges it turns out, may just be where the internet comes to a stop. We rejected their being digital. They are our analog bastion in our digital word. Why?
Some squat under a table or a counter, utilitarian, ignored beyond opening a closing. Others loom like a shiny rectangular robot, no arms, but baleful bright LED lit blue eyes, ready to regurgitate frozen cubes or a stream of cold water to its owners. Their universal language a persistent, low hum. We listen to it in our unconscious to know it is healthy, our food safe.
The earliest of consumer fridges were a bit more elegant. Boxes for an ice cube in the top or bottom. We didn’t have magnetic words to make silly sentences and poems to stick on them yet.
The fridge is everywhere in homes around the world, both visible and invisible. In the Philippines and some other Asian countries, perennially wrapped in plastic, venerated, almost worshipped, it must be kept clean. In many Western countries they are covered in little travel magnets, post-it notes, children’s scrawls proudly displaced. Pictures of family events, the desiderata of modern life. they are social fridges.
Today, these social fridges resemble a trend in our digital lives, towards more intimate groups, less life bragging and virtue signalling to the world. The fridge has, for many decades, been a social signal in and of itself, as some technologies are.
A large fridge tells a narrative, it weaves together stories old and new, telling families their bellies will be full. A safe place for empty juice and milk cartons for the teenagers of a home. A reliable petri dish for college kids food experiments.
Fridges adorned with the bits and pieces of life tell the story of a family. They remind members of the family they are part of. They tell visitors of places you’ve been or remind the visitor that brought the magnet from Tokyo that their in that social group. The photos boast of life achievements, signalling to outsiders that unity of family is here.
The makers of these fridges promised some years ago that we could clean up this unsightly mess, put it all into a screen. You could organise those photos, keep your shopping list there. Certain were they that when the teenager left the empty milk carton in the fridge, they would be certain to spend a minute or two entering onto the shopping list on the screen. Ah, the wistful hope of the engineers.
Instead, the screens stay dark, covered in sticky notes. No one wants to wipe the finger prints smudged on the screen, sticky notes and papers cover up the bare truth of our laziness.
Some fridges promised us they would track all our food, noting each item and sending a squirt of data over the aether to the grocery store, which would then put the list together so we could pick it up on the way home. Or they’d deliver. Our fridge would be perfectly fulfilled, it’s cold belly never empty.
Others proclaimed they would have an even bigger screen that would show us the belly of the cold beast and all that was inside. Now our visiting friends and family could see the incredible feats our engineering skill in packing leftovers and plastic tubs. Our kids months old food experiments. The nightmare that is our fridge laid bare like a B rated horror movie.
The internet connected fridge it seems, didn’t really want to be a part of the cacophony of our digital lives. The screens stayed dark, the automatic itemiser and scanners just another surface to be occasionally cleaned. Their job satisfaction immeasurable as they sit idle.
Fridges are an invisible technology in the sense that they are just part of a home, they are in that species of technologies we just include along with the stove, microwave, toaster, washer and dryer.
And like those other appliances, their makers, wanting to be seen as all things digital as progressive and modern, they set the engineers loose in the stark, sterile labs with the command from the board room. Make it digital!
As commanded, they did. But we mostly ignored them. Some of us, curious and intrigued, brought these new almost sentient it seemed, things into our homes. But the screens, the buttons, knobs and glowy things just added and interfered with how many magnets and things we could stick on the front. Haughtily, these digital fridges, they seemingly took away our agency of being social creatures. They interfered with our animal.
Quietly, the grumbling executives paid the consultants who had decried a digital transformation was the road to 21st century digital enlightenment. But the consumers, messy and lazy as always, preferred this small but mighty analog technology.
The fridge magnets, the photos with corners curled up, clipped bills, calendars and clutter of life, they held the day, triumphant in the analog. For they are the stories, the weaving narrative, of our lives. Social signals, declarations and statements.
In a world of productivity hacks, we have declared the mess, the desiderata and small tributes of our fridges to be sacrosanct. At the fridge, the internet stops.
Note: This article was inspired by netnographic and ethnographic research I conducted.
Ah, the endless appeal of digitizing the fridge! This is great. Even as a devoted 'calendar' researcher and designer, my household can't function without my paper calendar on the fridge and the tactile importance of tracking each and every messy day. I have been so tempted by products like hearthdisplay.com and although I get caught up in the fantasy of it, I know I would most likely return to the imperfect but whimsical analog version, next to my photos and magnets and tests marked 10/10.