In the last three chapters of the book “Made to Break” the author displays a lot of interesting points that really stuck out to me. He also poses some arguments in the reading that I can’t say that I agree with totally. In Chapter 7 Slade discusses the idea of chips entering society and at the start of a shift into an information society, which clearly has continued shifting and still is today when you analyze our society and observe how information based it is. The chapter goes into talking about the start of an information society was the start of what we know as e-waist. At this point (1960’s) technology was becoming smaller and more portable, thanks to microchips. The author states “…were driving the repetitive consumption of a variety of new products that now included digital watches, calculators, computers, and computer software.” (Pg. 198). This quote really stuck out to me because even today I see this trend of repetitive consumption with things such as I-pods, cell phones, watches, and other electronic devices with microchips. You see this idea of product addiction as well come up because people constantly want the new models so even if their watches don’t fail they will still repetitively consume these products. The interesting part of “miniaturization” that they talk about in this chapter is products can only get so small. They can only make products so small before they have to start changing the ways that they market and sell the products, I believe that in the future the idea of repetitive consumption will be much harder because it is going to get much harder to change a product to the point where the customer feels they should by the new one. The chapter also goes into discussing the slide rule. The book quotes “The obsolescence of the skill set that older generation engineers possessed.” (pg. 203). Although the slide rule is dead for the most part, if you look at this quote deeper you can see how crazy it is. When you think about it if there was only one person that possessed the skill to run a massive program such as the internet or a certain web site that people relied on this could cause huge problems if this person kept to themselves or something happened to that individual. It’s scary to think about this because our society is so reliant on technology so if something were to occur to someone that poses skill sets that no one else does it could cause huge problems for our society.
In chapter 8 the book discusses the idea of “weaponizing” planned obsolescence. The chapter also goes into discussing the idea industrial espionage but the main thing I want to focus on for this chapter is a quote that I found intriguing was on page 228, the quote states “Throwing away… May soon lead us to feel that marriages (and other personal relationships) are throw away items as well.” (pg. 228). The fact that the book referred to marriage as an item totally caught me off guard. I cannot believe that our grasp on items of technology has gotten so lost where we can refer to a personal relationship as an item. This is a statement that I can agree with in a lot of ways which is even scarier to me. If you look at the value of marriage in the modern day it is not nearly as significant as it used to be. I blame this a lot on technology itself because it makes us loose grasp of reality in a lot of ways. The number of divorces in the modern day is significantly higher than the numbers of the past. The main reason that I personally blame this on technology is because technology invades physical interaction between humans. Technology over online worlds has increased significantly and interaction in the household because of this has certainly decreased because people are so caught up in their online worlds. The values and morals are slowly diminishing because of technology and its only a matter of time before the internet will control our children and make them socially illiterate in situations where they have to physically interact with people face to face.
Chapter 9 which is the last chapter in the book discusses cell phones in our culture. The life span on cell phones is note nearly what it should be and creates massive amounts of e-waist. It discusses that miniaturization, psychological obsolescence, and technological obsolescence are all factors in our issue of e-waist. The book talks about why e-waist occurs and shortly after it displays a fascinating quote. The book states “By 2002 over 130 million still-working portable phones were retired in the United states”. (Pg. 263). This is a massive reason as to why e-waist is a huge problem. People are throwing away perfectly good technology, this is a sign of our culture becoming steps closer to us all being technology addicts. Product addiction has everything to do with people throwing away perfectly good equipment for the sole reason they want the latest stuff. I am calling it now that eventually we are not going to be able to do this anymore because we are producing so much waist that the government is going to have to step in and put a stop to it. if people continue to buy and get rid of perfectly good technology we are going to have a huge problem on our hands and eventually our environment will be completely destroyed. Before you know it we’ll be sending people to the moon and other planets to live because the earth will no longer livable! This is a scary thought but in the future if we continue like we are going now I truly believe that we won’t be able to live on the earth because of all the damage we are doing to it. the end of the book discusses some solutions to e-waist and I can see where the author is coming from and I agree with his arguments but I also think the government definitely needs to brainstorm more ideas and put regulations on this because if they don’t then our earth will slowly be destroyed.
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