Made to Break (Part II)

If you think that you have a product that is safe from obsolescence, you’re wrong, because every thing you own is subject to obsolescence in one form or another. In the second part of Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade, he begins to talk about the numerous ways in which obsolescence began to effect America throughout time. Giles Slade starts off with one of the biggest industries, radio. Around this time is when the term “death dating” started to be used and this is when planned obsolescence really started to include actually engineering parts to fail after a certain amount of time. From there, Giles Slade moves on to other industries such as housing, computers, and even production of highways. In the description of these industries I think Slade makes a very important argument, that although obsolescence may seem like it only effects what products people buy, it also affects their ideologies and beliefs.

If you think that obsolescence is only limited to the products you buy, your wrong, because even your beliefs and definitions of the world are subject to becoming obsolete. This is a very important argument that I feel Slade makes, because it really shows how obsolescence affects more than just what we buy. In radio, obsolescence seemed to mainly be concentrated on the “death dating” aspect of planned obsolescence, but even radio made some ideas obsolete. For instance, with the invention of the transistor, many companies began inventing much smaller radios that were meant to be kept in a persons pocket so that they could take it with them wherever they went. In order to market this item, the idea of just sitting down with one’s family and listening to the radio was made obsolete. What took its place was the idea of being able to listen to the radio on the go and do other things simultaneously. Also, a perfect example of ideas becoming obsolete is the front porches and basements of houses. When new housing at the outskirts of cities began to be created, very few of them had a basement or a front porch. The businesses did this to keep costs down, but these houses were advertised in a manner that made the whole idea of having a front porch or basement obsolete. Unbeknownst to the buyer, they would suddenly have their old opinion of having a front porch and basement removed from their mind and replaced with this new one. It was almost a form of mind control. Furthermore, an extremely good example of this kind of obsolescence is in the invention of electronic computers. With the creation of the electronic computer, the definition and value of engineers changed. As Larry Owens says “it marked the obsolescence of the cultural values of early twentieth century engineering in which students honed their problem solving talents with graphical methods and mechanical methods of various kinds.” (pg. 141) Obsolescence may be controlling which products we buy and how often we buy them, but it also seems to be controlling how we think of the world.

Without controlling obsolescence, we will not be able to control our own beliefs and values. This is the real point that I think Slade tries to get across through this argument. When the atomic bomb was created and the power and devastation it created was seen, it was proclaimed that modern man was obsolete. (pg. 146) Fortunately for us, man was not yet obsolete, but just the fact that such a conclusion could be come to shows the kind of power that obsolescence has. American culture needs to keep a tight leash on obsolescence, because without it American culture will simply become a large group of people running around looking for the next advertisement to define their beliefs and opinions.

Made to Break (Part I)

The next time you need to replace your computer or car, don’t think that you got the most you could out of it, because it was designed to last much shorter than it could have. This past week, I have been reading Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, by Giles Slade. So far, the main goal of this book has been go give the reader a clear understanding of what planned obsolescence is and the history behind its creation. Planned obsolescence is actually a simple idea, but being that it completely goes against the business ideology prior to it, it took some time to really become a widespread method of production. Planned obsolescence is the idea that companies purposely design their products to fail after a certain time period, usually being earlier than normal, in order keep customers coming back to buy more products. This method of conducting business began around the time when General Motors started using an early form of obsolescence in order to compete with Ford. After the success General Motors achieved using obsolescence, this idea quickly spread to all other products. The main argument I think Giles Slade makes in this first part of this book is that the whole idea of planned obsolescence is, in essence, causing people think that instant gratification is best mentality for any buyer.

Although planned obsolescence is often thought of as designing products that fail after a certain time period, there is a whole other side to it that most people don’t even realize. Designing products that fail sooner than they should is only the physical part of obsolescence; there is also the psychological part. As Giles Slade discusses, this psychological part of obsolescence is all about trying to instill the idea in people’s minds that waiting for something to wear out or break before replacing it is pointless and people should buy new things to stay modern. Basically, it’s all about creating a sea of potential buyers that actually want to buy new products just because they are new. Giles Slade really defines what the psychological aspect of obsolescence is all about when he says “If a person has money to purchase the latest items of self-presentation, he or she seems superficially more affluent and therefore presumably more socially successful, more desirable.”(pg. 50) He really says it all right there, the businesses used advertising and marketing to create an environment in which people would actually feel undesirable or even ashamed if they weren’t using the most up to date technology or sporting the newest fashions.

The problem though is that this mentality leads to people constantly acting on impulse and not actually thinking about the consequences of their actions. Such a mentality is supported in Neil Postman’s Technopoly. In Technopoly, Neil Postman discusses how people are willing to blindly adopt new technologies and throw old technologies in the trash without even thinking about what they are giving up, which is a very similar mentality to that of obsolescence. Giles Slade even brings up technocracy as a movement created in order to get out of the great depression, but according to him technocracy was not very successful and for the most part faded away, while Neil Postman seems to argue that it was quite successful and in America it even evolved into technopoly. Personally, I feel that Giles Slade’s argument is very valid and obsolescence definitely causes people to think that they should just buy anything they want right now and never think about what could happen tomorrow. The effects of this mentality can been seen today in the landfills full of scrapped CRT televisions and old computers and other various older technologies that no one knows what to do with. At the rate people are throwing away old products, if a proper method of disposal is not invented, we are going to run out of space for all of the trash in the near future.

The World and Wikipedia (Part II)

In my last post I began by saying “Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is here and it’s definitely not going anywhere”, but after reading the second half of The World of Wikipedia: How we are Editing Reality by Andrew Dalby, it’s pretty obvious that we love it. In the second half of this book, Andrew Dalby really gets into the reasons and theories behind why so many people have come to depend on and love the website known as Wikipedia. Wikipedia may have had a large amount of skeptics and criticizers during its early years, but that group has only grown smaller and smaller as Wikipedia became bigger and bigger. Also, Andrew Dalby discusses why some people do not trust Wikipedia and are hesitant about using it, but ultimately will come to trust Wikipedia and rely on it as Wikipedia becomes a stronger power and force on the internet. Even now Wikipedia is a force to be reckoned with on the internet, but it is still getting bigger and more popular. Wikipedia is becoming more and more commercially and officially popular. By officially, I mean that as Wikipedia becomes bigger, more television news stations and newspapers and factual literature in general are getting information from Wikipedia and citing them one of their sources (sometimes their sole source). In particular I found most interesting the argument that the love of Wikipedia greatly comes from the community based interactions.

The World and Wikipedia (Part I)

Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is here and it’s definitely not going anywhere. This past week I have been reading The World of Wikipedia: How we are Editing Reality, by Andrew Dalby. This book has definitely brought up some interesting points and views about Wikipedia. The book starts of with some prime examples of how Wikipedia is used and how it works. The first page of chapter one gets right into a perfect example of the power of Wikipedia, telling about an article that was written about an earthquake in Italy only an hour or so after it actually occurred. The article was written in Spanish, but by the end of the day there was an English version of the article about the earthquake, and both articles had been edited numerous times. (pg. 1) From there, Andrew Dalby goes on to give a brief history of Wikipedia and encyclopedias in general. He starts from the times of the first known encyclopedia, which was a bit before 100 AD, and moves on to popular encyclopedias like the Britannica. He then tells about how everyone began converting encyclopedias to data format in order to put them on CD's and on the internet, which inexorably led to the creation of Wikipedia. Andrew Dalby then goes on to discuss why numerous people were (and maybe still are) against the use of Wikipedia and why so many people used it over other encyclopedia programs and software. In particular I found the chapter about why many people did not like Wikipedia to be the most interesting. This chapter of the book brought up a very good argument. Although Wikipedia is a vast resource that encompasses almost anything a person might want to know, maybe people put too much faith in its articles when they should be a bit cautious.

Wikipedia is great source for all kinds of information, but it is far from perfect and I think many people don’t realize this. I’m not going to say that Andrew Dalby makes this argument, as he seems to stick to mainly reporting the facts and other people’s views, but many of the people he talks about definitely feel this way. One of my favorite quotes in this book so far is by Ira Matetsky and he says “The best feature of the site is that anyone can edit virtually anything contained on it. The worst feature of the site is that anyone can edit virtually anything on it” (pg. 50). I think this quote very clearly defines the pros and cons of Wikipedia, because in essence they are the same thing. Wikipedia is very much a double edged sword. Since anyone can edit it, information can be edited and improved over and over until nearly perfect, but on the other hand this makes Wikipedia very vulnerable to vandalism and falsifications. When Wikipedia was first started, people were much more suspicious about it, but as it grew and grew in popularity people seemed to become less and less suspicious. Today it is the most popular and most used resource for information, but it is still just as susceptible to vandalism and false facts as it ever was, maybe even more so now since so many people use it. As it was put in Technopoly by Neil Postman, this source of information is very much adding to the information “glut” that is surrounding American culture. Since Wikipedia almost always is the first link you see when you search for information on google and it’s so easy to use, it seems people are choosing easy and quick access to information over quality of information. Not to say that the information on Wikipedia isn’t quality information as I am sure much of it is, but people are not even second guessing it or considering that it might not be. If it’s on Wikipedia it’s correct, that’s the attitude that our culture seems to be embracing. Personally, 99% of the time the only thing I use Wikipedia for is scientific or mathematical type information, because the way I see it, to be able to write detailed information about scientific theories and facts, a person really needs to know what they are talking about so there is good probability that the information is correct. It’s still not 100% probability though, so if something seems strange to me I would still cross reference it with something known to be correct. I rarely use Wikipedia to look up current events or things of that sort, because you could read and article and learn from it, but then read it again an hour later and it could look completely different. Wikipedia was a great idea and it works very well for many sources of information, but not for everything, and people need to keep that in mind when researching information on it.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Part II)

America has not completely forfeited it’s humanity to technology yet, but in the race to get there America is definitely in the lead and running strong. After reading the second half of Neil Postman’s Technopoly, that is one of the main messages that comes to mind. In the second half of this depiction of humanities disintegration into the ocean of technology, Neil Postman discusses the different forms of technological cultures and further develops his arguments about why and how we are losing control of our culture. According to Neil Postman, technology-using cultures can be split up into three groups: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. These three groups cover a spectrum that ranges from people who have complete control over their technology and have clear and distinct purposes for it, to technology that has spread like wild fire and has no clear purpose or intent other than the murky idea that more information is always better. Furthermore, he discusses how technology and more specifically technopoly have been able to spread unbeknownst to most people, such as through the medical trade, computers, and even statistics (what Neil Postman calls an “invisible technology”). Through the second half of this book, two very important arguments that I felt Neil Postman made were that technopoly succeeds only through people ignorantly allowing it to become the “master” and also it seems as though America is in the greatest need of salvation from this technological overrun.

Although it is most likely not intended, people’s over confidence and faith in technology is beginning to blur the lines between “tool user” and “tool”. This argument by Neil Postman, which I wholly agree with, basically says that people are just putting too much faith in their technology. That is the second time I used the word “faith” and I meant to do so, because regardless of whether people realize it or not, this technology is actually become the source of a people’s belief systems. In Technopoly, at one point Neil Postman even states “We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional, and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculations.” (pg. 118) Even he uses the word “faith”, because when people begin to put so much devotion and loyalty into something it becomes an ideology, and according to Neil Postman, one of the very important things that a technology needs in order to survive is ideology based around technology. What is happening as a result of this is that creative and original thought are being diminished. Any time someone has a problem or is curious about something they just go straight to the computer to find an answer; people are thinking less and less for themselves and instead allowing their technology to think for them. If changes are not made, computers will become the users of people.

As a result of America’s willingness to unconditionally adopt any and all technology into its life, it seems that America is now ahead of all other countries in terms of technological sovereignty. Although there are other technologically advanced placed around the world, they would still be considered by Neil Postman to be “technocracies.” Those places, such as Japan, Europe, and England all have similar levels of technology relative to America, but the difference is how the people there have adopted it. America is the only place that has actually began to adopt technology as an ideology. Neil Postman even says that one of the “pillars” of technopoly is the “idea that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.”(pg. 147) Who knows what the future will hold, but at this point in time, the only culture that has began adopting this idea is American culture. For this reason, American culture is the only technopoly and is the closest to surrendering its culture to technology (as the title states) completely. There is clear support for this argument in Computers: The Life Story of a Technology, by Swedin and Ferro. When electronic computers were first being created, any person who wanted to take advantage of their capabilities in any way needed to have a strong understanding of the inner working and limitations of them. This created a very clear line between man and machine. At the end of the book though, Swedin and Ferro describe the current state of computers, and computers are now so easy to use and so accessible that people rely and depend on them without really knowing anything about them. If a belief system can be defined as something a person puts their faith, reliance, dedication, and secrets into without truly understanding, then computers and technology in general has definitely become a belief system in American culture.

P.S. I have found that I rarely use algorithms in my internet use. Actually, I seem to go to efforts I did not even realize in order to prevent algorithms from being used. Fairly often I will delete my cookies, cache, and other internet preference files in order to prevent websites from keeping track of me and using my information in algorithms.