Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America pgs 83-185

The second part of Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade goes through various advances in American products such as the FM radio, nylon stockings, housing, and cars. In all of these cases Slade spends a good portion of time explaining the business portion of these advancements. He describes how companies would try to compete with one another and how their strategies to compete and make more money factored into how items became obsolete.

Companies are both hurt and can benefit from the obsolescence of their products. In order for a company to not be harmed by the obsolescence of a product, they must be willing to promote the next advancement that makes their previous product obsolete. RCA is described as doing just that when Slade explains how RCA was promoting the invention of the television as making their AM radios obsolete. This greatly increases the obsolescence of goods since it forces companies to constantly aim for making their products obsolete in order to stay ahead of their competition. As the book Computers shows the development towards making things as small as possible forces products to become more complicated. Slade describes the problem with this by discussing the pocket sized FM radio. Before the pocket sized radio, most things such as radios and televisions used vacuum tubes that were known to break easily so the products were designed to be able to take replacement parts with small amounts of maintenance. In order to make the pocket radio small the use of glass tubes did not make sense so a more complex technology was used making it impossible for the consumer to fix. This idea of not being able to replace a broken part leaving the whole product obsolete has not only become more common, but has become the standard. At the end of the second part Slade brings up that their was backlash against obsolescence such as this. The companies would describe it as people's want to have newer better items as "planned obsolescence" where as the consumer viewed this more as companies' way of making products that do not last. When it came to Volkswagen actually did quite well advertising that they would not make pointless changes to their model just to get their consumers to believe the old model was obsolete.

When it comes to American culture obsolescence seems to have become the standard. There are not many things we own that when they stop working we buy a replacement part. Instead we go out and buy a whole new device. Even with the occasional backlash about our wastefulness technology is moving to fast for everyone to understand how our products work in order to service them. Companies also use the fact that certain advances have become a necessity to being part of our culture and make getting the simplest design nearly impossible. Whenever I go to the cell phone store because my cell phone stopped working because they are not made durable enough to be kept in my pocket (where they are intended to be kept), I cannot get a phone that does not have a camera, access to the Internet, or hundreds of other seemingly useless capabilities. It has reached the point where we do not have a choice, but to contribute to the obsolescence and still remain part of the culture in America.