ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the complex, sometimes unintended—but also potentially very rewarding—consequences of intervening into practices that are more commonly studied from a distance, and the political and ethical implications of this work. It explores what happens when media scholars become actively involved in the reshaping of media experiences and infrastructures, and in some sense become part of the very processes they seek to critique. The chapter discusses issues around the repair of hardware, such as questions of maintenance and planned obsolescence relating to the operating systems and data bases that make these devices function. It describes the field of repair and maintenance, as well as works relating to e-waste and planned obsolescence, with hands-on exploration of repair. Parallel to some students study marketing and business and hope to employ planned obsolescence in order to stimulate consumer purchasing for their future companies.
