ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that obsolescence is rarely a “flat” technological regime that imposes the abandonment of a device everywhere, at the same time. Rather, it is a stratified process that espouses social, economic and cultural fracture lines, making them apparent to observers of the mediascape through the coexistence of different techno-aesthetic paradigms originating from different communities. Beginning with Jonathan Larcher’s anthropological study amongst a Romanian Roma community, this text pleads for the introduction of the category of the marginal user in the taxonomy developed in experimental media archaeology. It probes the way such an addition addresses some fundamental concerns of the discipline, and introduces a spatial and social axis alongside the temporal one that has been foregrounded thus far.
