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.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America pgs 1-81

The book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade describes how America has come to this point where almost everything we own is disposable or will become obsolete in the near future.  In the introduction he briefly touches on why this is a bad thing due to our increase in waste, and then spends the rest of the first part describing specific key events bringing us to this way of life.  He claims this has come about through advancements in technology, new marketing techniques, and America's crave to have the latest up-to-date things.

Advancements in technology are presented to us as ways to improve our quality of life.  The problem with this is that in order to achieve this new quality one must continue to buy newer things making their previous belongings obsolete.  In Made to Break Slade spends a good portion of time talking about Henry Ford's model T and how Ford did not want his automobile design to become obsolete, but due to advancement in technology such as the electric starter and the competition using newer technology the obsolescence of the model T seemed inevitable.  In the past obsolescence did not seem to be that much of a worry.  This is not because people did not crave the most current items, but because the advancements in technology were not as rapid.  The book Computers presents this growth by showing how in the initial stages of computer development advancement occurred very slowly and seemed almost linear, but as time progressed it turned out to actually have exponential growth.  This obsolescence is also fueled by the fact that we seem to accept these technological advancements blindly, therefore allowing everything we own to become obsolete.  The book Technopoly discusses our willingness to accept technology and how we should take a step back and see if these advances are truly beneficial to us.  By taking this approach it would also allow us to see which items should be allowed to become obsolete and which ones are better the way they are.

A big part in this obsolescence is caused by American culture.  Pretty much everyone is raised under the idea that we should strive to be as successful as possible, and of course along with that success comes luxuries.  In the past many luxuries we enjoy today could only be achieved through large amounts of wealth.  Now, due to cheaper materials and mass production, these luxuries can be obtained by a much larger population.  Along with this though comes our competitive nature.  Many would view success almost like a rank, so can one be seen as a success if everyone else is just as successful?  This then leads to even more obsolescence since in American culture, one must not only have up-to-date technology, but also have up-to-date technology that others do not have.  This of course allows us to throw away old technology without a second thought.

The World and Wikipedia pgs 114-225

The second half of The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality by Andrew Dalby explains why we love, the chaos behind, and why we trust and do not trust Wikipedia.  For why we love Wikipedia the book discusses how it makes everyone as equal, and the fact everyone gets to write about whatever they want.  The following chapter is cleverly titled "Chaos and Beyond; or Why We love it Version 2.5."  This chapter talks about all the editing wars and vandalism on Wikipedia, but then explains why this also makes a lot of people more interested in Wikipedia.  On why people don't trust Wikipedia Dalby writes on the fact that the readers do not know why an author has written the articles they have posted which means they might be biased.  When it comes to why we do trust Wikipedia the point that all facts are subjective no matter what encyclopedia one reads is brought up.

The Internet has made it so everyone is a contributor and not just readers or watchers.  When it comes to Wikipedia a apparent sixteen year old boy from New Jersey was able to win awards and receive recognition for articles he posted on the British Peerage system.  Just like the case of youtube people have been able to be recognized as amazing dances without having to go to school for it or even travel to show off what they can do.  In the Ted talk they even mentioned how a gathering of dancers from youtube performed at the Grammies. Even the chaos involved in Wikipedia just showed how much more we love it.  Normal encyclopedia's are viewed as borrow, the reason why is because there is no drama.  Wikipedia is described in the book as another social networking site where people argue through editing of articles.  Like the same reason facebook is popular, Wikipedia allows us to get caught up in the drama of writing an encyclopedia and we cannot seem to get enough of it.

Many worry that our culture will be effected negatively by this because nobody knows the reason why the author of an article posted the article in the first place.  This of course causes a lot of people to worry that everyone will be relying on biased information that has been posted on Wikipedia.  The fact is though that our culture is already based on biased material.  Almost everything can be viewed as subjective.  The book talks about how some encyclopedias just credit Edison for the light bulb while others also credit Sir Joseph Swan.  Its impossible to write anything without being a hundred percent unbiased, but if an encyclopedia is written by many biased people wouldn't that make it less biased than an encyclopedia written by one person?

Current Event Post

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/10novel.html?_r=1&ref=technology

The current event I found titled Wider Streets for Internet Traffic by Anne Eisenberg from nytimes.com was about how our use for the Internet has increased so much there are worries that technology will not be able to keep up with our hunger for the Internet.  The future of Internet transportation is fiber optics, which is sending the information by light waves down tiny fibers.  The reason why light is used is because its an electromagnetic so information can be put on each varying wavelength.  In the past it was just based off of the intensity of light, sending a signal of either being on or off.

The most interesting point made in the article is that many professionals in the field never thought this technology would be needed since information can already travel at such fast speeds with the technology we already have.  Now everyone is worried that if the rate of every one's Internet use continues to grow the way is has been this new technology might not be able to do the job fast enough.  One electrical engineer is quoted as saying, "We are looking at a point soon where we cannot satisfy demand and if we don't it will be like going over a cliff."  When this problem was expressed to the class no one seemed particularly worried about this, not because they would be able to handle using the Internet less but because they just figured more servers could be put up and that could solve the problem.  This shows a very common view of the Internet in American culture which is that most of us do not see the Internet as physical thing that is also limited to the laws of physics.

Another question that comes up is that should we let ourselves reach this "cliff" or should we start now to limit ourselves to soften the blow?  If we reached this limit today we would basically being going off the Internet cold turkey and there would be panic.  It would be a horrible blow to the economy and a line of communication will be shut off which many people rely on.  With everyone using the Internet as a global market place and people having the Internet as the only form of contact to at least someone in their life for our case we only have contact with our teacher through the Internet like these blog entries.  We know their would be panic if this happens since every time our class cannot figure out how to send in their homework our teacher gets flooded with emails.

The World and Wikipedia pgs 7-113

The book The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality by Andrew Dalby attempts to explain how Wikipedia works, where it comes from, and the positive and negative impacts of it.  The book begins by giving examples of how contributors to Wikipedia sometimes basically have to compete using their Wikipedia editing skills in order to get the information they want up on the web page.  The next chapter gave a history of the encyclopedia, which allowed for a comparison of it to Wikipedia.  The reading assigned ended with a chapter on common criticisms of Wikipedia followed by a chapter of why we use it anyway.

The difference between old encyclopedias and the new Wikipedia is that now anybody can update the information inside.  The obvious negative part, which is always pointed out, is that the information could possibly be incorrect or bias.  A hope of Wikipedia was that experts could be able to update articles relating to things they are good at, but from the first part of the book describing how one edits Wikipedia, it shows that the people who know how to use Wikipedia best, are more likely to get their views uploaded.  The positive side of Wikipedia is that the information is not filtered through a select group of people.  Just like many other things that have benefited from the Internet, it has given people the choice of what they want to be exposed to (a close example is youtube and hulu when compared to old fashioned television).  In order for Wikipedia to become what it is now, it needed people to be willing to post and update articles to help popularize the site.  A main contribution to the site was Google putting Wikipedia articles as one of the first things that pop up for certain searches.  This idea of a website having so much control as to be able to popularize a different website is a concept brought up in Technopoly.  The fact that we are so willing to trust technology without thinking of the consequences greatly affects our culture and our everyday life.

The way most people relate the effects of Wikipedia on American culture is how it has become a way for us to use as a reference source and view as straight fact.  This also leads to the complaint that there has been an increase in plagiarism since Wikipedia has been around.  The problem with this is not Wikipedia, it is the fact that our culture does not embrace new ideas fast enough and state how this new resource can be beneficial and how we should avoid using it so it will not become harmful.  Instead the new technology is shunned, but continues to be used by everyone.  This of course is very dangerous because it views the positive ways of using Wikipedia as equal to the negative ways of using Wikipedia (getting incorrect or bias facts).

Technopoly pgs 93-199

The second half of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman explains how our culture has wonderful resources when it comes to technology but the resources are used in negative ways.  He explains how the medical industry could easily be used to keep us healthier but instead its allowing us to be unhealthy by knowing that we can just get our health problems fixed later on in life.  The next chapter discusses the idea that different technologies help encourage different forms of thinking but our culture ignores this and uses certain technologies with wrong form of thinking.  The next point brought up was the fact that symbols do not effect people like they used to since we have become so desensitized to them through commercialism in technology.  Postman ends the book by admitting that he mostly just lists problems without addressing possible solutions, but then explains that his point was to help people distance themselves from the technology thought process so we could then criticize and modify it.

Postman brings up a very important idea about how technology has allowed our culture to become lazy.  Instead of helping us advance and become better people it has made it possible to indulge in the present guilt free and then fix it later using technology.  The best example explaining this was when Postman talked about the increase in heart bypass surgeries and how common they have become in America.  Instead of using technology to allow us to become healthier, we allow ourselves to become unhealthy guilt free knowing its possible to fix ourselves later. Postman blames technology mostly when even he is willing to see the potential in new technological developments that are being abused by the people using them.  Postman even explains how technology is abused because of a lack of understanding of the thought process involved with each piece of technology.  In American culture we seem to want to use the same devices for everything.  We use television to educate and for down time, and we seem to try to use the computer to do pretty much everything.  Postman's main point pertaining to this is that just because the technology is there does not mean we should use it for everything.  One odd point that Postman makes is that through technology we have become desensitized to symbols.  I do not think this is such a bad thing.  This means that people in American culture are so used to seeing symbols along with things that we have finally realized we can not judge things at face value and have become willing to look deeper.  I do not know why Postman would view this as negative since he himself does not want to view technological advancements as what people present to him.