  Convenience and material culture  Bookmark and Share
Wednesday, Apr 11, 2007  Via comes a link to this Stay Free!
interview with Giles Slade, author of Made to Break, a book
about planned obsolescence. (I wrote about the book before here
after reading about it here. The whole thing is worth reading,
but these exchanges I found particularly interesting:  STAY
FREE!: How did book come about?  I thought this was an
interesting connection—rather than attribute rudeness and
impoliteness to cultural mores and leave it at that, the move to
ground our understanding of the mores in material culture seems
an absolutely necessary next step. I wonder whether our fixation
on efficiency leads us to build in the desire for convenience
into our infrastructure, into our commonsense approach to the
environments we find ourselves in and how we read them, making
that pseudoefficiency hard to resist. And since convenience is
so often understood as the elimination of human interaction,
does the way our preference for it seems al