Product Description

The Future has failed to live up to expectations: rather than flying round
in jet packs and taking holidays on the moon, we're sitting in traffic jams
and watching reality TV.

A witty and cynical look at how we have allowed phoney ideas and useless
products to dominate our lives. How did this happen? Why is the world so
full of rubbish?
Steve McKevitt went to QVC and back to find the answers.

Synopsis

Our journey begins with Home Creative Studio (a pointless piece of software
that cost millions to develop), and takes in bottled water, homoeopathy,
the Cosmic Ordering Service, Cillit Bang, spam email, the seven signs of
ageing, personal loans, reality TV, celebrity authors, chicken tikka
masala, Princess Diana, Café Rouge, Big Brother, gap years, online gaming,
The Daily Mail, the Interactive Bible (an ambitious attempt to do nothing
less than improve upon The Word of God) and much more besides.

Discover a world that has embraced technology, but forgotten science; a
world that doesn't know what it wants, but knows when it wants it - now.
Most importantly, find out why the world is full of useless things.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104623 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Steve McKevitt has over 10 years senior strategic communications and marketing experience in the entertainment and consumer electronics sectors.
He also wrote City Slackers (Cyan).

Customer Reviews

A pot pourri of pointless products
"Why the World is Full of Useless Things" is a very readable book that I read through in a matter of hours. There were places where I sniggered, places where I cringed and places where I felt rather ashamed to be working in marketing and advertising, as I do! Steve McKevitt's style is very informal and witty, a bit like having one of those late night conversations with an old mate. And the book is not a snidey rant: McKevitt does offer explanations and ways through the mess we've got ourselves into.
My one quibble with the book is that the author has deliberately used his own experience and the comparison between his 1976 world (age 10) and his world today (age 40.) This automatically fixes his key readership at mid-30s to mid-40s in terms of identification potential and sort of excludes those older or younger. In addition, I'd say that many of the changes 1976 vs. today are as much to do with the author growing up as they are to do with the world changing. As someone at the older end of the target readership (OK, end-40s), I can assure Steve that the 70s and early 80s were also full of useless things, some of which he actually mentions. There were K-Tel albums, Rise & Shine, Instant Whip, Rolf Harris's stylophone, Wondermash, Lentheric perfumes and Opportunity Knocks. One of the first products I worked on when I started in marketing in 1981 was something called Top 'n' Fill (a readymade cake frosting that you squeezed out of the packaging) which was advertised with a character from "On the Buses", as a case in point.
I think part of the problem is not the amount of useless stuff but our decreasing ability (led by the media)to be able to discriminate between substance and froth.

Brilliant
I read this book at the same time as Freakanomics and found it serves as a really good counterpoint. This is a very humourous book, but unlike say Is It Just Me Or Is everything Shite? It does a lot to explain why we've actually ended up with lots of shite things. The second part of the book, which takes the form of a sort of ignorance quiz works very well. I also enjoyed his use of DLT as an example of the dangers of hubris. All in all, it's a great book

Thought Provoking
I really enjoyed reading this book - I took it on holiday with me and read it pretty much in a day - The writing style is really nice, very witty, and with a nice way of making hoodwinking explicit. I started reading The Long Tail straight after (continuing the unusual holiday reading theme) and it's a great book to read after this - both published were last year. I agree with just about everything Steve McKevitt says in this book. Going on from that, I think we've got it in ourselves to move into a more ethical way of being - and the potentially limitless choice of the internet might paradoxically bring that about, as per Long Tail, we stop being passive consumers of mass produced crap, we develop ever more niched niches for our little individual selves to consume and create from, power really does pass back to consumers (sort of) etc.