My family has been having issues with our dishwasher. We've noticed that for the past few years our dishes have remained far from spotless. Residues, bits of food, water stains, all dried onto the kitchenware as if they were never truly cleaned at all. I thought we were the only ones, but after visiting other households and noticing this same problem it dawned on me that this piece of technology may be flawed.
Lynn Spigel's article on setting up domestic family life for the arrival TV brought to mind the dishwasher predicament. It's as if technology has always been catered to the elimination of chores. Self-cleaning stoves. Electric can openers. These all eventually break down at one point while your own limbs remain in tact to do these chores thoroughly and completely. I have grown up in the age of mechanical reproduction, where everything is electric and microwaved. When the microwave breaks down, what do we do? Buy another one? And when that one breaks down? This brings to mind Silverstone's managed obsolesence. If these products are designed to give us more time for leisure and relaxation, yet these products are also designed to be constantly replaced or fixed, there is no real safety.
As we are now seeing with the computer age in full effect, children are becoming more and more unable to be self-sustaining. So, in the future, who will fix our broken dishwasher? Who will build us new ones?
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