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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
When I was a teenager in 1990s UK – a period which coincided with the height of public obsession with the TV show Friends – a series of adverts for hair products circulated featuring the Friends actor Jennifer Aniston. Famous for her glossy hair and ‘Rachel cut’, in the ads she talks about falling in love – with a shampoo. The most famous version of the advert doesn't only feature Aniston, however: she breaks off with the immortal words ‘Here comes the science bit – concentrate!’, allowing the ad to segue into an animation representing the shampoo in question's innovative technology and a (male) voiceover that explains this technology. According to the scriptwriters, this allowed them to include the ‘obligatory scientific message’ with humour and a sense of fun.
I have forgotten a lot of things from this period of my life, but – for better or worse – this advert is not one of them. And perhaps it is ripe for re-analysis. There's a lot to reflect on in it: that the ‘science bit’ is framed as comprehensively separate from Aniston; that it is disembodied; that it involves jargon (the product contains Ceramide-R!); that there is the suggestion, through Aniston's winking ‘concentrate!’, that it is boring or at least demanding. The advert is just one example of the ways in which science and technology populate culture, not only through the technologies we use or how we imagine the role of science in society, but in popular media, consumer culture, and entertainment. Technoscience permeates leisure as well as politics.
This chapter explores some of the ways in which it does so, and how it comes to shape our shared visions and imaginations not just of science but also of collective life and the future. In it we look at how science is represented in news and entertainment media, and at some of the subtle ways – such as that shampoo advert – in which it forms part of public culture without us really being aware of it. At least some of these manifestations of technoscience may seem trivial: who really cares about what is represented in a shampoo advert, after all?
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