Listening to Darsha talk about ‘planned obsolescence’, a phrase I had never come across before, was very eye opening. Planned obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially useful lifespan or a purposely frail design so that it becomes obsolete after a certain period of time. This made me think about the term in regards to media and art. For example clothing. There are constantly cycles in style each decade. For instance right now dressing like Hillary Duff in a chick flick is popular. Or dressing like Love park chunky DC shoes era Josh Kalis has increased in popularity. Returning to music, many ways of listening to music have become fashionable again. Vinyls and cassettes have become staples in past years, for the cassettes in certain genres and vinyls all across the board. CDs have also seen a growth in popularity recently, even though spotify and music streaming platforms only really made them obsolete around 2010. Considering both music and fashion are both heavily influenced from the noughties, which in the grand scheme of things wasn’t that long ago, it makes me wonder what will happen once all trends in media and art have been explored? Will there be a constant pattern of “microresurgences” every few weeks or months of past trends? If this were the case I think planned obsolescence may help facilitate the acceleration in trend cycles. The rationale behind this strategy would be to generate long term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases. Or in other words shortening the replacement cycle which may indirectly affect the rate in turnover of trends.

Of course this is all theoretical. Whether this scenario ever comes into fruition or not I feel completely ambiguous to the matter as I feel out of the loop already.