Obsolescence II

In my first blog post about this topic, I started mentioning how planned obsolescence was making its way into the consumer market. The middle chapters of Made to Break provide an in depth look at how consumer products were affected by this from the early twentieth century up until the 1960's. Some of the topics that are touched upon are radios and radio wave technology, raw material manufacturing, automobiles, and household appliances. Aside from simply describing the evolution of these technologies, Slade also makes a strong effort to inform readers of the cultural nuances of the time that caused this the boom in planned obsolescence.

In chapter 4, Slade provides readers with a brief, yet very informative, introduction to the history of communication in America. He touches on all the big names in radio, focusing mostly on Edwin Armstrong who was the the leading pioneer in FM-radio technology. Right around the the time that FM radio was getting big, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrongs and leader of RCA, had planned for the television to be the invention that would make radios obsolete. This is one of the first instances where a major corporation, despite having a brand new technology, allready planned on inventing something that would replace it in a few years. Sarnoff referred to this as his 'supplantive theory' of business, which was very much related to the concept of planned obsolescence, a term which would be defined many years later. (Slade pg. 91)

Fast-forward to the 1950's, with Motorola's invention of the pocket radio. The pocket radio was revolutionary in the fact that its production had an enormous range of quality control. Motorola developed an automated soldering process that allowed for tiny transistor radios to be built very fast and very cheap. The problem with the radios was that they were not able to be repaired, so if they broke consumers would have to buy another one. This started a trend in miniature electronics that would continue for decades.

Slade makes reference to a periodical that describes three separate types of obsolescence. The first one is Obsolescence of funtion and what this term means is that a product performs the same function as another product, but with updated features or different craftsmanship. This technique is very much associated with the type of obsolescence used in retail personal computer market. The second term is obsolescence of quality. This means that the quality of a product is intentionally designed to degrade. Think of the pocket radio mentioned in the previous paragraph. The last form of obsolescence is obsolescence of desirability which refers specifically to style trends. Once a product is out of 'style' it is considered obsolete despite still performing its original function or not.