Archive for June, 2008
Wax Scrawls: Murder, Train Wrecks and Swimming Snakes
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 28, 2008
The Globe’s Ivor Tossell ‘murders’ Tim Russert and writes on the thrill of being the first one to edit a Wikipedia page – in this case, being the first to update the Meet the Press page with the news of Russert’s death. Best part: “[Wikipedia] is not so much an encyclopedia as a registry of – and I use this word with some trepidation – reality. It’s an ever-changing ledger book of where things stand in our universe.”
Recent academic conference on the strange fasciantion we have with train-wreck female celebrities. I haven’t yet found any of the papers online, but it seems that the most interesting question would be the inseparability of desire and revulsion, approval and condemnation, particularly if we consider the media circus surrounding Spears, Winehouse et al a covert return of misogyny and conservative sexuality.
Why I Still Use Windows, by Gizmodo’s Adam Frucci. I almost never agree with Frucci, but from the cult of personality that surrounds Jobs, to commodity fetishism to sheer stubbornness, I could have written this.
A robotic snake that is creepy and a bit terrifying. (I’m really scared of robots taking over aren’t I?)
Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Nine Billion Names of God”. Fuck aliens, supercomputers and other juvenilia- this is what science fiction should do. [via] {Update: As Matthew so rightly points out in the comments: a) this story has a supercomputer in it; b) there is nothing inherently juvenile about aliens or other sci-fi tropes. I was just shooting my mouth off for no good reason at all.}
And finally, Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx. I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch it all but it seems they’re taking pains to emphasise the the Hegelian roots of Marx rather than the Marx’s radical move away from Hegel’s focus on mind and spirit.
ICANN and Something Like Colonialism
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 26, 2008
Today ICANN, the body that oversees the assignment of website domain names, announced a massive overhaul of Top Level Domains i.e. the .com or .ca’s that are, in theory, supposed to organise the internet. The big news for lots of people is the possibility for specialised domains like .football, .travel or .music . While these changes are ostensibly about organisation, like the dot.com boom before it, it will in actuality be a lot more about branding and marketing. As it turns out, most .tv sites do not have much to do with Tuvalu.
But another aspect of the new rules is that TLD’s no longer have to exclusively be in a roman script which, for some inexplicable reason, a few people around the world have decided not to use. This is, I think, a positive step – as more and more people in India, China and numerous other ‘developing’ countries come online, they will be able to do so in their native tongues. Rather than having to learn English, people will now be able to locate their presence online in a language ‘of their own’.
Still, this all feels a little weird. After all, the fact that ICANN – an American-run organisation – had to deign to allow other countries to have website addresses in languages other than English is unsettling. What it makes clear is that there is a relationship between the centralisation of capital and technology in the West and the ‘culture of the internet’. It makes sense, certainly. If the ‘net as we now know it grew out of military and academic research in the richest, most powerful country on Earth, it is hardly surprising that much of the infrastructure and development happens there.
But what it does mean is that we have to be aware of something like neo-colonialism developing online where, in a manner very similar to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is a one-way flow of ideas and influence from West to East. It’s not that I’m entirely against ‘westernisation’ – that difference should be preserved just for the sake of it. Rather, I am suggesting that we need to acknowledge the interrelationship of economics and culture in which those with the most money have the most say. If we do not, we are likely to increase the sort of passive colonialism that has always been the negative downside to globalisation where western liberal democracies – and their attendant cultural reforms of individualism, competition etc. – are seen as the only viable alternatives for social and political reform.
Wax Scrawls: Art, Spirituality, Moving Breasts and Other Deep Shit
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 24, 2008
The Globe’s Scott Colbourne writes about Krazy, an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery that focuses on comic books, manga, video games and other things that are often the subject of derision. Probably the most interesting question though is whether or not video games – a form that is dependent upon the participation of the viewer/player – can be appreciated in a gallery setting.
The sad truth about relationships. It starts out funny. And then gets crushingly sad.
In honour of Mr. Carlin’s passing, here’s a great clip simply entitled “Religion is Bullshit“.
Speaking of the funny and the sad, this 3d recreation of 742 Evergreen Terrace is awesome and seems like it took forever.
This article on Slate wonders if breast motion can power an iPod. I sorta’ had to link to it because it combines my two favourite things in the world – by which I mean science and music.
Not sure how I feel about this argument that Twitter ‘has a culture’, but it’s interesting, if for no other reason than because it again points to the interdependence of technological forms and cultural activity.
The idea of guerrilla gardening – i.e. illegally beautifying grey, urban spaces – makes me happy. The need for it does not.
And finally, my muxtape is sorta’ updated – I’m particularly enjoying the Wes Montgomery, The Field and Mark Kozelek tracks.
Santogold is to Girl Talk as Tolstoy is to Dostoevsky
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 23, 2008
Upon listening to the new all-samples Girl Talk album (download/buy the album here), my first thought was this: “misogynistic lyrics over an amalgam of beats and samples? Really? Ugh.”. After so much chatter and hype, to me this seemed remarkably… unremarkable. How was this any different from Lil’ Wayne’s new disc or countless other albums that are catchy – and sorta’ offensive?
But as I sat there, perched condescendingly atop my high horse, it occurred to me that this was a bit unfair. After all, can you really argue that the lyrics on the Feed the Animals are a projection of DJ Gregg Gillis’ views? That this is self-expression through somebody else’s words? Not really. Listen to the album and what strikes you immediately is that the voice behind the disc is not to be found in individual phrases or samples – if it is to be found at all. This isn’t one of those albums that I refer to as ‘personality discs’, works that are explicitly meant to be a reflection of an individual behind them.
The most recent ‘personality disc’ I can think of is Santogold‘s self-titled debut. As she careens through an array of influences, chanting lyrics like “Me I’m a creator / Thrill is to make it up / The rules I break got me a place / Up on the radar” there is a clear sense that this is Santi White speaking about herself. Similarly, the album’s opener “L.E.S. Artistes” suggests White worries about the sacrifices she makes for art – as in “I can say I hope / It will be worth what I give up / If I could stand up mean / For all the things that I believe” – and draws on a long legacy of personal, self-reflective song-writing.
Santgold is the musical and lyrical expression of an individual, the album becoming like a public diary of inner thoughts, feelings and opinions. Feed the Animals is an aesthetic arrangement of disparate, often contradictory elements into something resembling a coherent whole. And one way to think of this contrast is to turn to Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his distinction between monologic and dialogic writing. To Bakhtin, a dialogic novel was one that, instead of attempting to maintain a singular ‘monologic’ voice throughout a work, aimed to arrange a number of different perspectives and ideologies into an aesthetic whole, allowing the tension or dialogue between the differing views to remain unresolved. Bakhtin’s most common way of demonstrating this difference was to contrast Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Tolstoy, he argued, maintained one dominant voice and perspective through the use on overarching narrator and, as such, a singular perspective shone through by the time the plot resolved. Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky, on the other the hand, arranged a number of different voices and deliberately left them unresolved, and was thus the superior, more sophisticated writer. It’s a point worth considering: what is more ‘realistic’ (and poignant) than irreconcilable differences remaining irreconcilable?
So in my little analogy, the all-samples Feed the Animals is clearly the dialogic novel – it is the aesthetic organisation of a set of contrasting sources. As in a dialogic novel, it is not simply enough to have disparate elements; instead, it is the arrangment of the different perspectives into a coherent – if not necessarily cohesive – whole that makes the work… ‘work’. There is no overarching perspective that dominates in the novel, as there is no overarching generic or lyric theme that runs through Feed the Animals. Rather, the satisfaction for me comes precisely from the ‘irreconcilable’ being put together in a way that feels right, in a manner that works both with and against the very differences that are put into play.
Santogold is quite different. While it is a great album, also culled from a variety of influences, there is something less satisfying to me about the ‘monologic’ nature of it, the singular, overarching voice that sits atop the album. But what I think is most interesting is that Dostoevsky’s dialogic approach has become far more significant than what now feels like the more simplistic monologic style. The question to ask is if Girl Talk are heralding a new age in which the album will be a frame for the arrangement of styles and ideas – rather than the straightforward expression of them.
Microfame: Projecting Identity into the New Public Space
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 19, 2008
I know, I know – I’m about as sick as you are of this blog becoming a fawning paean to Rex Sorgatz. I just find that, for better or for worse, I end up thinking about similar things (well, that or I just steal my ideas from Fimoculous) and I’m intrigued by Rex’s recent piece in NYMag on what he has labelled ‘microfame’. As I see it, Sorgatz is essentially arguing that the internet’s ease-of-entry as a medium has changed the dynamics of fame, creating a more provisional, microscopic version of what constitutes ‘the public’ and success. The closest you could get to crystallising the piece is when he suggests that blogging/twittering/YouTube etc. “eliminate the difference between communication and publishing” – which isn’t a bad way to think about things.
This is something I’ve been struggling to articulate lately: how will the individual, identity and the public need to be reconceptualised in response to the internet? So I thought I’d use this article as a springboard for thinking through some of the issues I’ve been trying to wrap my head around lately. This may be rehash, but I’m hoping to work toward something resembling clarity.
What is Public Space on the Internet?
In the pre-internet age, fame operated through fixed distribution networks: magazines, newspapers, televisions, films and the radio etc. The technological and economic centralisation of dissemination meant that an individual had to reach a critical mass in order to attain fame – i.e. there had to be a reason a person was appearing on those screens and pages. Public attention was focused upon a relatively few number of people because the thing called ‘public space’ – i.e. that virtual projection that people often refer to as ‘culture’ – was constrained by economics, technology and those who had influence.
The internet changes this in that what constitutes the public space begins to move from an ethereal, abstract projection that exists figuratively ‘out there’ to the collection of culture than one finds on the screen. Naturally, we are still talking about an abstract construction (think of the multiplicity of answers to the question “What is the internet?”) but the public space is no longer about passive, one-way dissemination – the media out there that we then react to – but is a participatory arena, the sort the early Greeks could have dreamed of. While hardly a groundbreaking idea, I’d argue this is an important point to reiterate because when entry into the public space is no longer determined solely by economics or cultural capital, the dynamics of the situation change.
The Public Space is a Screen on which to Project One’s Identity
So, if as Rex argues, that communication and publishing are becoming conflated, then the public space needs to be reconceptualised as a blank canvas rather than a locus of mass culture that operates in a top-down manner. Culture in a rather literal sense becomes virtual and is a constantly morphing point of reference that exists in dynamic relation to the individuals that comprise that cultural context. This is a radical shift from even television where ‘individual interests’ were as determined as they were expressed.
So if the location of public discourse and cultural activity has shifted from the physical to the virtual, then this abstract space that is culture becomes a space for the articulation of identity. While this previously had to happen in face-to-face interaction, the (kinda’) universalisation of a publishing network means that there is a virtual space that exists so that I might construct “who I am”. It is important to note that the two-way back and forth of the new public space means that the internet is not a repository for identities or like a grand version of Second Life. Rather, it is both social prosthesis and an entirely new social arena in which identities can be created, morphed and reflected back into ‘real life’. Why, you ask? Because…
Identities are No Longer Attached to Bodies
Finally, as an extension, the issue of ‘who I am’ needs to be rethought. Let me, in a stunning move for a blogger, use myself as an example. On the internet I am even more of a no-one than I am in real life; yet even I am quickly becoming a conflation of my physical self and my virtual projection that exists through this blog, the comments I leave on others, Twitter and my Facebook profile. I can no longer seem to interact with my peers without this other aspect of who I am coming up. So what I am experiencing is a reconfiguration of what you might call the simultaneity of identity: previously, I was who I was in the here and now as centred upon my physical body. I am now, in a very real sense, living both here and there, in my body and online, and to engage in a bit of Kevin Kelly-esque pontification, the contextual relationship between space, time and identity will have to be thought through differently. If social interaction is always about the move into the public – why speak if not to be heard? – then one cannot assert the superiority of one aspect of one’s identity over another, if and when the ‘outside’ public face of identity becomes as important as the ‘inside’. What the internet will lead to is an inversion of the Cartesian cogito in which the self will exist only in as much as it exists in the public space. To put it mildy, the cultural and philosophical ramifications of this shift will be fucking huge.
Wax Scrawls: Introvert Shocked Pale by Close Encounter with a Tornado
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 17, 2008
Wax Scrawls is an occasional feature on Scrawled in Wax where I link to bits and bobs that don’t fit into my usual ‘culture of technology’ schtick. Hope you like ‘em.
This Atlantic piece (courtesy of Matthew‘s Shared Google Reader items) suggests that introversion is an orientation rather than a choice and makes a couple of suggestions for dealing with introverts. It’s hard to tell how much is serious and how much is tongue-in-cheek, but if this is a new form of coming out, then fuck it: “Hi. My name’s Nav. And I am an introvert.”
Is musical consonance something we just naturally like more? Why else, asks this article, have once-avant-garde atonal compositions not become commonplace? I distinctly remember when listening to a punjabi folk song, my brother walked in and remarked, rather disgustedly, “this is totally out of tune”. A lot of Indian music works by invoking a root note – usually with a drone instrument – and then creating a dynamic of tension and release by moving off and then on key. This means that, in a sense, my brother was totally right – and wrong – which I think would support the argument. So yes, in response to your question, atonal medleys by Phillip Glass are a sin against nature.
With all the unsettled weather we’ve been having in Toronto lately, this picture of a tornado makes me not want to leave the house. Like, ever.
This nifty little tool lets you upload a picture of yourself and see what you’d look like as ‘a member of a different race’. I tried it and came out looking like a pale Frankenstein – so, all in all, pretty accurate.
A newspaper clipping from 1971 that criticizes a new show for being boorish and racist. Which show? All in the Family.
And finally, if you’re looking for proof that men are socialised to never grow out of their adolesence, here ya’ go.
Online Reading: Does Language Change When It’s On a Screen?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 16, 2008
By now, many of you will have read the Slate piece on how online reading differs from reading on paper. It was the sort of piece that elicited a great deal of head-nodding, often prompting a simple ‘yup‘ as a response. With the topic sorta’ being up my alley, I thought I might write a long piece in response to it, chock full of long paragraphs, big words and deep ideas – but stopped myself.
Fuck that, I thought. I’ll just make a list. So:
1) How does language function? One of the primary ways in which language ‘works’ is through referentiality – i.e. it points or refers to something beyond itself. Simultaneously however, it only actually ever points to itself. When I say the say the word ‘tree’, I only make sense of that word in terms of other words – i.e. that it is a large, woody plant – and never really get outside language. So language occupies a very weird space where it remains enclosed in itself while always pointing to something beyond itself.
2) What might we then say about language on the page? So, if language occupies this weird dynamic of inside and outside, when we read, you could say that language works in a projective manner. You see words on a page, associate them with concepts that exist in the world and then piece those concepts together into a picture or an argument or story. I tend to think of it like a sort of mental version of the escape and return of a boomerang – language asks you to leave where you are only to return to where you were. This is, very roughly speaking, imagination.
3) How, if it all, does language differ on the screen? If language on the page asks its reader to move her/himself into the space of imagination, then on-screen language must do something similar. But I think something that may differ is ‘where you are asked to go’. While all language is always pointing to other language, words on the internet often point directly to other random shit. So while language works the same way in terms of entering/creating consciousness, words on the screen differ in that they also point to the world that lives behind the screen and the words themselves.
4) So, one way to think of this is simply in terms of distraction. Because the screen is dynamic and can be so many things – word processor, book, movie screen, games console, canvas and so on – consistent reading is difficult because the screen is itself inconsistent. Instead, it is constantly morphing and clamouring for your attention, flickering between presence and absence about 60 times a second.
5) But another way to think of this is the possibility that language functions differently on the screen. So if I say that on-screen language points to a world behind it, how does this differ from the book? After all, if language is constantly gesturing to things beyond itself, how do electronic words differ from printed text? Well, it’s not completely different. But what it does do is destabilise the physical and cognitive barriers between sets of information and their locations. When I read online and come upon a word I don’t recognise, I open up another tab, look it up and continue. But more than that, when I come upon a historical event, a cultural touchstone, a literary reference, it’s all there. I no longer read in vertical silos; rather, I move laterally between systems of thought.
6) So one way to articulate this difference is the contrast between vertical and lateral thinking. In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts argues that print reading lends itself to a sort of introspective depth and ‘internality’. While I scoffed at first, the more often I directly contrast online reading with book reading, the more I am inclined to agree. And the disparity in the functioning of language – where printed language points to the imaginative space and screen language to the virtual space (and yes, the potential for conflation here is deliberate) – may be one way to think about why reading practices are changing.
7) But finally, one cannot posit hard-and-fast rules for all websites. Take this beautiful piece on Salon about a failed affair (those two links are the same – I was just curious how the choice of which words to use as links might change how one reads the sentence). It is in many ways “old-school” – literary, wordy and requiring concentration. One would obviously not read a forum thread or a link blog in the same way. So, returning to the screen’s multiplicity of functions, we have to remember that we cannot simply speak of ‘online reading’ in a singular, straightforward sense.
Why is Ambiguity TV’s New Norm?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 14, 2008
What are we as viewers supposed to do when we don’t like the people we see on screen? Or worse: what happens when we do?
As happens at the end of any significant TV series, there was a great deal of discussion before and after the finale of Seinfeld. While most articles written at the time tended to concentrate on the show’s trademark ‘nothing’, other critics pointed to our strange affection for these lying, sycophantic, machiavellian characters. The defense put forth was often rather Aristotelian: that, unlike drama, comedy shows you how not to be and that, as a viewer, you aren’t asked to identify with the characters as a whole as much as you are supposed to relate to their foibles while laughing at their faults.
This relationship between viewer and object works because it is easy to put oneself in one of two positions: “oh yeah, something kinda’ like that happened to me once”; or “oh my god, I can’t believe they’re doing that! How funny!”. Drama, on the other hand, works somewhat differently, in that you are often asked to relate to the characters, particularly the protagonist. When Hamlet spends weeks procrastinating, the long, introspective speeches and sympathetic portrayal ask you to emphathise with his difficulty. Similarly, the protagonist of Iron Man is unambiguously the guy we are supposed to be rooting for and there is a clear demarcation between good and bad.
It is this latter model of the good guy or gal that dominated TV drama for decades. While Archie Bunker was making viewers squirm, the closest dramatic television would come to ambiguity was when cop/vigilante justice was meted out in a violent fashion. But the cathartic release of watching a criminal ‘get his/her due’ and the lack of shades of grey go hand-in-hand: if dramatic film works by asking you to relate to some of the characters on screen, then one can hardly have evil people up there on the screen; it’d be like being asked to sympathise with the devil. Even when characters seem to be immoral – think Dennis Franz’s character from NYPD Blue – they are usually softened by having a heart of gold or some other form of ‘moral escape route’.
Then what is one to make of the fact that ambiguous, ambivalent characters have come to dominate the TV landscape today? Obviously, the current rush started with The Sopranos and has perhaps best been exemplified by critically adored The Wire. But from more ‘edgy’ shows like Weeds and Dexter to clearly mainstream fare like Grey’s Anatomy, House and Lost, the moral clarity that once so thoroughly permeated television has started to evaporate, and has instead been replaced by an army of characters who one isn’t sure whether to adore, revile or simply watch, uncomfortably feeling a mixture of the two. When Weeds‘ Nancy Botwin sleeps with a rival dealer to placate him, then cries on the drive home, what are we supposed to be feeling? Pity? Revulsion? Disdain? Empathy? Respect? You either come down hard on either side or remain awkwardly in the middle and something, whether it is nuance or yourself, gets lost in the process.
If one were to ask “Why?”, the most obvious response to this development is also the most boring i.e. that these are the aesthetic manifestations of pluralism, cultural relativism and the postmodern breakdown of master narratives. And I can’t help but yawn when I type a sentence like “devoid of moral certainty, TV has come to reflect the ambiguity of modern times”. But beyond being a now-clichéd way to ‘explain’ art, there’s something to the statement that, if not false, still sounds somehow incomplete.
Perhaps a better place to focus than the work itself would be on the relationship of the viewer and the work of art. If dramatic film functions through empathy, then what seems different here is that we are presented with one of a couple of options: a character who is compelling but impossible to empathise with; or a character who, when we empathise with them, forces us to confront not just our flaws and foibles, but our darker, more insidious characteristics. But the thing is, the aesthetic space has always left these options available. You were always free to relate to Fagin or Iago if you so wished. So what does it mean when the primary locus of contemporary popular culture – and yeah, I still mean TV when I say that – presents us with drug-dealing suburban moms, mob bosses, serial killers or crooks on the run and then asks us to care about their stories and their situations? Because these aren’t the usual tales of redemption; far from it, these characters seem to go from bad to worse.
I’m hesitant to venture a guess, but to me this feels like a way of aestheticising a kind of ‘moral resignation’. Yes, this may be yawn-inducing, but in the absence of a unified moral code, what is there to do except to present ambiguous situations and then let the viewer ambivalently orient themselves in relation to the on screen action? Isn’t that simply a concentrated version of verisimilitude in which the relationship, rather than the object, of representation becomes reflective of the socio-ideological context that produces art? That in order to reflect reality, one has to put the viewer in an uncomfortable space that not only acknowledges the asbsence of moral norms but also the constant subjective flux of one’s relationship to that thing we still loosely call ‘the moral’?
Or, conversely, is there nothing to this other than the latest trend or marketing ploy? Hit the comments if you want to disagree, add a point or just tell me to stop blogging with a glass of red wine next to my keyboard…
Wax Scrawls: Utopias, Fishing Monkeys and lots of Meh.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 11, 2008
Fittingly, this post on words that come to stand for entire arguments comes from the always great Tumblr, Daily Meh.
Speaking of Daily Meh, it’s also the source for this very funny utopian version of Google News. My favourite bit is something totally minor: the entertainment section that says “Serenity sequel tops box office six weeks running”.
J.K. Rowling’s Haravard commencement speech, in which she discusses imagination in a manner akin to how Heidegger talked about poetry – i.e. that it is ‘projective saying’. [via]
What do you do when Twitter‘s down? You go to Twiddict. (get it? It’s a mix of Twitter and Addict…) For people like me, who are momentarily convinced their tweets are absolute gold – only to be saved by the fact that I can’t update – this is sure to lead to embarrassment. [via]
For the first time, scientists actually witness bacterial evolution in a lab, i.e. the development of a rare, complex trait through chance events. Pretty amazing stuff. Oh and while we’re on the science tip, here’s some news about monkeys who have figured out how to fish. No, seriously. You know it’s only a matter of time before they make guns, right?
Kevin Kelly ruins a perfectly good idea (“the communal version of genius”) by using Brian Eno’s absolutely terrible term for it, ‘Scenius‘. Bleh.
Stephen Hawking, in an affirmation that genius can come from anywhere, is, and I quote, “setting off on a hunt for Africa’s intellectual talent“. Awesome idea. Poor fucking phrasing.
Instead of taking sides in the “Clint vs. Spike” director scuffle, Salon instead ends up thinking about how they might make each other’s movies. (Also, I say 25th Hour is Lee’s best film. Anyone else?)
And finally, Blaise Alleyne (who I am seriously impressed with) has another great post, this time in response to some more Nick Carr curmudgeonliness, “Is Google is Making us Stupid?“
Apple Keynotes as Cultural Keystones
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 10, 2008
Whenever Apple launches a product, I watch the associated buzz with a sick fascination. To call the degree of attention lavished on Jobs’ keynotes unusual would be a gross understatement and, as opposed to the geek-frothing that accompanies something like video game launches, Apple announcements show up in the mainstream media with clockwork regularity. But because I am always intrigued by why things like this happen, I just wanted to take a moment to think about the fervour behind Apple announcements and, in classic Scrawled in Wax style, make some grand and totally unsubstantiated pronouncements. So:
1) Technology is culture. Naturally, I don’t mean that in a literal sense. But what I do mean is the perhaps obvious point that if an age has a marker of its concerns and its desires – truth and science for the 18th century, industry for 19th and early 20th – then technology, specifically that of ‘the screen’, is that focal point for our age.
2) If tech is a marker of culture, then Stevenotes are, for better or for worse, like the signposts of where we are going. If modern cultural desire can be located in and around consumer technology, then one way to explain why there is so much hype about these events is that we are sheep in search of a shepherd. When Jobs says this is where digital music is going, we all listen. When he first launched the iPhone, we said, ‘oh, this is where mobile communication is headed’. When he positioned the iPhone as a platform rather than a product, we got a sense of how the entire digital economy will shift into competing silos of tools and applications made for a specific ecosystem.
But more importantly than all these industry-specific trends, Apple keynotes seem to be taken as heralding the arrival of a long-predicted future. Take Mobile Me: while very cool it is not an original idea (it is essentially the same thing as Microsoft’s Live Mesh except that it, ya’ know, works). But with Apple, I think the key is that rather than having to go out and integrate a product or service into your own life, they provide a complete ecosystem that you have to – no, want to – integrate yourself into. As the representative of the future in the present, Apple become your ticket to tomorrow. But also, take Jobs comment about eBook readers (“The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”) and you get a sense of the problem with supply and demand economics being the only determinant factors in what amount to cultural trends.
3) If Apple keynotes are cultural signposts, then we are entering a new phase of commodity fetishism in which the product is valorised as saviour. ‘Commodity fetishism’ is a term used to describe a situation when a product is believed to have an inherent value, rather than one ascribed to it by culture and or the labour it took to create it. But the term fetish is also useful because it relates to desire and the unconscious, and this is something that is conspicuously absent from discussions around Apple. It is perhaps trite, but there is a reason that Apple products are so consistently described as ‘sexy’; imbued with desirable contemporary characteristics (sleekness, minimalism, connectedness and, um, crazyfuturehotness), Apple products become objects of desire (i.e a fetish) that capture something about what I suppose you could call the ‘cultural libido’. And in a moment when tech is the signpost of culture, and Apple the signpost of tech, then the big question is: what does this concentration of desire reveal about the current era? It’s too large a question for me, but if you want to take a stab at it in the comments, I’d appreciate hearing some ideas.
