Tivo Technology

My broken object is a Tivo.  It looks like a silver rectangular box, with a black center and a little picture of a character in the middle.  It is about a foot long in width, a foot long in depth, and about two inches high.  There are lots of holes and wires in the back.  Some of the holes make shapes on the back for design.  The other holes have colored strings hanging out of them.  Most of the colors used on the box are black, silver and pewter.  However, then there are red, yellow, and white wires that stick out of the box.  There definitely looks like there is a lot of space on the inside of the box to hold a large amount of stuff.

The purpose of this box is to be a storage system for music.  The wires are used to connect it to and from different technologies so you can store and hear your music.  First, you connect the wires to a radio.  Through the wires, songs and other media are transferred to the box.  You can store millions of songs in the box because it is so large.  Then, you remove the wires from the radio and put the wires into a speaker.  Now you can hear your songs through a sound system.  The point of storing the music is so you can hear it whenever you want.  Your favorite songs on the radio can now be heard anytime, and you don't need to be by a radio to hear them.  This helps because sometimes with radios you do not get a good signal.  Also, not all radio stations are broadcasted in all areas.  So if you like a certain station in Champaign, and then had to leave and go to Chicago, you wouldn't be able to hear the songs you like.  Now, you can take your favorite station along with you, and all you need are speakers to hear your favorite tunes. 

This new technology was intended to make it easier and more convenient for people to be entertained.  However as chapter 2 in Culture and Technology explains, "Convenience does not in any incontrovertible way make life better" (p. 32).  In fact, this new technology made life more complicated and troublesome for people.  People had to lug around this huge box to hear their music.  It also greatly hurt the radio industry.  People were only listening to the radio a small amount to transfer their songs.  Once they had their music stored they did not listen to the station anymore. This made the radio industry suffer economically.  Therefore this technology that was intended to make people's lives more convenient, in fact made them more inconvenient.