Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the alternative social and material infrastructures Polaroid users built in order to secure the continuation of their practice. It explores the residual and tinkering practices and the sharing of skills and knowledge practitioners deploy in order to challenge obsolescence.

Paper long abstract:

As new and innovative media technologies continue to be produced at an unprecedented pace, previous ones that are considered to be less technologically ‘advanced’ end up in landfills. Regardless of the nature of the innovation, there seems to be a prevalent assumption that ‘the new’ always implies a ‘betterment’, and that this is the pathway towards progress. In the last couple of decades, it has become evident that obsolescence produced by the arrival of the new is more concerned with economic return than with actual innovation. Processes of planned obsolescence have evidenced that the life expectancy of technologies is not dependent on the material capacities of said technology but on futurological tropes in which technology appears to be an end in itself. These perspectives, however, have proven to be highly problematic. In a world in which waste play such a fundamental role, understanding the ideological conception of the ‘obsolete’ along with people’s expectations towards technologies becomes of extreme urgency. My paper looks at Polaroid technology and how since the demise of the Corporation Polaroid has continued to be practised albeit the markets’ decision to discontinue. By offering an ethnographic account on the residual and tinkering practices Polaroid users carry out in order to secure its continuation, and bringing attention to the affective relationship users’ establish with the practice, my paper argues that processes of obsolescence can be contested by the emergence of alternative material and social infrastructures that challenge the notion of linear technological progress.