By Edward H. Garcia
When I was a kid, there were people around–not necessarily in my family–who could fix every machine they owned. No doubt that had been truer in earlier generations, but even in, say, 1950, most machines were fixable. When one broke down, your first thought was not to toss it and buy a new one. It was in that era that the term “planned obsolescence” gained currency. The concept was seen as a kind of conspiracy to force us to buy new products rather than fix old ones. It was generally decried and cited as another example of how we were going to hell in a handbasket.
Sure enough, it came to pass that most of us could not fix most of the machines we owned. We survived and gave business to those of us who could fix them. And I think we quit worrying about planned obsolescence and embraced it as the new status quo, filling our landfills with old appliances and, more recently, working computers that are just too slow for us.
Now, it seems to me, we have reached a new milestone: not only do we not know how to fix our machines, we don’t even know all that they can do. A friend told me recently that the manual for his phone is 180 pages long. Remember when you just picked up the phone dialed? Now even the simplest, dumbest phone has more features than I know about. I could read the manual, but I don’t. And if I did, would I also have time to read the manual for my computer and my home phone and my car and dishwasher and clothes washer? The refrigerator is still thankfully simple–not to fix, but to use: you open the door, put in or take out the food, and close the door. The dishwasher, on the other hand, wants me to pick from several cycles and various temperatures and variations on drying. The dishwasher is a perfect example of our response to these brilliant machines. Though there are dozens of variations on washing dishes, absolutely every time I press “Normal wash” and “start.” Every time.
I don’t think this is a trend we are going to be able to buck, but maybe there is something we can do to rescue our humanity from the machines. I don’t propose to learn everything you can do with Windows 8, but maybe I can use each of the features of my dumb little Samsung phone at least once. A friend takes his car’s manual to breakfast and pores over it until he’s familiar with all the car’s specifications . We can each carve out a little independence and use or not use the features based on experience, not ignorance. Of course, when it comes to a phone’s 180-page manual, sometimes we just have to retreat gracefully.
