Made to Break 1

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade is a book that talks about consumerist trends in America. It talks about advertising, and obsolescence, in it's different forms and how we as Americans view items for sale. Obsolescence is an American invention, which started out with the idea of disposable items. Before reading this book, I never realized how many items we use today are disposable. Back years ago, they didn't have disposable items like we have now, so things were valued more. Now we have disposable diapers, razors, cups and pretty much almost anything you can think of. This mentality of throwing things out after it is done with, is perhaps the start of where our obsolescence of expensive and more "non-disposable" items comes from. One quote I really liked from this book, was a quote from a Dutch immigrant. "We had been in the United States only a few days before the realization came home strongly to my father and mother that they had brought their children to a land of waste.."pg 24. Now this of course was from 1870 not 2010 but it really is true. We live in a land of waste. We dispose of so many items on a daily basis, many disposable but others not. You don't even really think about what happens when you throw things out, but it ends up in a huge landfill, which we are running out of places to put. Because of our "disposable" culture, technology keeps coming up with bigger and better things and knows that we will dispose of our old ones and buy the new. They know that all they have to do is make it a little bit better than the last one you had and you will need to have the new one. Our culture makes this obsolescence easy.
Slade does not seem fond of obsolescence in America, and I have to agree it is very wasteful. At the same time though, our culture is to want the newest most hi-tech things. Pop culture shows celebrities on the newest gadget, and so much of the population wants to emulate these celebrities. I do think though, we can divide people into three different groups; the ones who every time something new comes out they are first in line to buy it, the ones who upgrade their items when they see fit, and the people who stick to one gadget for as long as they possibly can, before it breaks. Wealth does have a lot to do with where you fit in, but even people who are not extremely wealthy can be in the first category. Companies keep making products better in speed and appearance that we just have to have it.
I am really excited to keep reading this book, because it is really intriguing to read things about how companies market their items, and really how they control us with their products. Giles talked about GE with the lightbulb and how really they monopolize the entire lighting industry because they can control how long it lasts. It makes me wonder if this is what all these gadget companies do, and why we do start needing new gadgets so quickly. It is a very interesting concept and I can't wait to finish the book.