I know I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for the unboxing column or post. Unboxing, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon of documenting taking a new, usually technological product out of its box, paying close attention to the packaging and conveying the feeling of ‘getting new gear’.
It’s the sort of thing dying for a good, insightful piece about the contemporary fetishisation of tech, and the blurring of identity, branding and desire. Alas, so far, we’ve all come up a bit short. I even know the perfect person to write it: a close friend, whose dissertation includes the ideal mix of the psychoanalysis of Lacan, the material bent of Marxism and the ‘hope’ of Ernst Bloch – but, alas, I can’t seem to convince him.
Of course, all that said, you know who really shouldn’t write a column on unboxing? Russell Smith. At least, that’s the impression I get reading his infuriating and exasperatingly stupid column this week.
I could tell you what the column is about. But then, I’m sure that without even reading the piece, you’ve already guessed its approach: it’s about boys and their toys and how sad it all is. It’s trite, supercilious fluff and takes the classic newspaper columnist approach and decries how ‘everything has gone wrong’ and how we should all shake our heads because, and I quote “oh, come on, every single thing about this is horribly sad.”
Rather than trying to understand the unboxing phenomenon (sorry, throwing out the word ‘fetish’ doesn’t count), Smith simply seeks to pass judgement. Instead of dealing with some of the reasons that cause people to so grossly idolise objects, so lubriciously love their stuff, Smith simply jumps to the part where he essentially tells you that he is not like this.
But not only is it bad writing. By jumping to evaluation, Smith is simply seeking to assert his position of intellectual authority. And while all analytic writing tries to do that on some level, there’s a distinction between clarifying and condescending, between smart, empathetic critique and simplistic condemnation. If you don’t explain why someone should hate something, instead relying on an assumed set of values that prioritises ‘that which came before’, you’re not a writer – you’re just an ass. You focus on judgment and miss any sort of actual analysis.
You might even delineate the distinction by trying to describe his column:
- Descriptive: Russell Smith is a contemporary culture columnist who has written on ‘unboxing’.
- Analytic: Russell Smith’s approach to unboxing reveals that he is invested in maintaining the privilege of ‘the writer’ and ‘the intellectual’ against the increasingly vocal, technophillic masses.
- Evaluative: Russell Smith is a fuckwad.
See how that works? The really useful part is the one in the middle – and it’s the part that Smith missed.
Why am I so worked up about this? Well for one, it highlights the all-too-common approach of non-techie media to ‘geek culture’. Too often, they attempt to understand cultural phenomena outside of the context of late capitalism, postmodernism etc., appealing to their readers’ most basic sense of ‘what is good and right and true’ – here meaning anything from ‘don’t play with toys’ to ‘go and read a book already!’ – to condemn a practice that requires a far more nuanced critique.
But it’s also another attempt to construct a relationship between print and authority, cementing a link between whose opinion counts and the medium it appears on. If the web has disrupted the concept of expertise, then columns decrying the brevity of Twitter, the narcissism of Foursquare, the emptiness of video games etc. are attempts to reassert the link between authoritative publications and authoritative voices. Smith’s column is an example of the very worst, precisely because it fails at doing analysis better than it appears elsewhere, displaying how simplistic analysis and kneejerk commentary have become the domain of print rather than the web.
To be clear, I think unboxing is a strange thing, something that should be criticised, if not occasionally vilified. But what Smith misses is that the loving affection given to the physical object is as much a historical reaction to digitization as it is an insidious effect of capitalist fetishism. Publicly salivating over your new iPhone may be a slightly sick, perverse attempt to recoup wonder; at the same time, it might also be the modern equivalent to ‘the smell of books’ or ‘the feel of paper”: a physical, sensual reminder of the wonder the medium can hold.
And the unboxing of the New Liberal Arts book shows how fetishising the object, when not co-opted by the dehumanising effects of capitalism, can actually bring one into a community, connecting one to others. It’s Penumbra’s fellowship, made manifest.
But, of course, we cannot claim that there is some good in all this newness; we cannot strive to find the hope in the slightly sad, intensely materialistic videos of geeks. We have to find a way to condemn.We have to find a way to instill fear. We have to find a way to reassure our readers that the things they believe still hold true.
After all, we have dead trees to sell.
#1 by Matt on November 2, 2009 - 5:38 pm
Nav,
Interesting response to Smith. I like Smith — I think his decade-worth of column writing in a national, general interest paper has been mostly interesting and engaging and often revels in bring strange Internet memes/phenomenon to people who wouldn’t know about these things (I hadn’t heard about unboxing until Smith’s Thursday column), and I also like his fiction — so my initial reaction is that you are being too hard on him.
I agree with you that a really good critique or engagement with a current cultural event should display some kind of empathy. This is a good point, and this sort of critical empathy will for sure lead to more subtle and interesting thinking/writing. But other than on this point, you don’t seem to really disagree with Smith. You agree that vilification is a possible and potentially useful reaction to unboxing.
So your main point seems to be that you Smith is participating in some kind of dichotomous online/paper tension and is battling it out for the sake of asserting the authority of traditional print media. This is a bit of a stretch and strangely antagonistic. Do you know that Smith co-founded and runs an online men’s fashion/style “magazine” site for men? And although he is published in a newspaper, he is often celebrating technology and online culture. He is also a columnist, not a journalist, so is much closer in type to a blogger (I would argue).
You state that his piece is “another attempt to construct a relationship between print and authority” — is this simply because he is criticizing an online phenomenon? You probably don’t intend this (but why else vilify print so adamantly, why the the final sardonic line?) but your post seems to insist that only blogs and other online forms have the authority to discuss the Internet. The idea that there is more empathy/sympathy found online than in print or other traditional media is ludicrous (all message boards, comment streams, twitter, facebook, tumblr seem to be filled with hate, anger, and similar).
I feel like I must be completely outside the conversation you are having. Columnists write things that I disagree with every day, but I wonder what is different about this for you. How is one example of poor analysis about the authority of print over electronic? Is it the constraints of the genre that you have a problem with (700 words, appeal to a very general audience, no complicated arguments/analyses)?
Also, how often/when is fetishizing the object not co-opted by capitalism, since this is all happening under capitalism? Although discussing commodities and their consumption, Smith’s use of “fetish” seemed more like Freud’s than Marx’s, which was one thing that annoyed me, though I doubt Marx could have imagined unboxing. The congealed social relations in the commodity are certainly fetishized here (made invisible), but there’s so much more going on. I really don’t know enough about unboxing though.
Curious.
m.
#2 by Nav on November 3, 2009 - 3:46 pm
Thanks, Matt, for a very reasonable, even-handed response. You’re quite right – this post was over the top, and sorta’ endemic of the kind of angry, knee-jerk ‘analysis’ I was trying to criticise. To be honest, it was motivated a bit by a general dislike of Russell Smith’s work; I find his analysis of most web phenomena to be lacking the kind of subtlety and insight that someone of Smith’s intelligence should be striving for, and for that, I often question his motivations (as much as, somewhere in my stupid brain, I sympathise with him).
I guess I was a bit exasperated at what the column was trying to achieve. Fetishising consumer goods is generally a bad thing. Such an argument could have been made 20 years ago, or even 50 years ago. And even that, given the paucity of smarts in my own writing, I’m probably the last person who should condemn a bad column, I can’t help but wonder: what was the point of this other that to repeat that ‘this is wrong’?
Ultimately, Smith seems to argue unboxing is strange because is displays a lack of imagination and a sad, misplaced affection for things – something any of our students could have also said. What I’m curious about is the place of the object and our relation to it when things that were formerly physical become digital. What happens when there is a shift in our material connection to the ‘containers of culture’ (or metaphors of containment)? To say “oh, come on, everything about this is just sad” seemed as conventional and expected as a Margaret Wente column. I guess I wanted something that made me say “huh – I’d never thought of that before”.
It is unfair on my part, as I wanted something else. I’m probably the wrong audience for this column. But I think Smith jumped too quickly to the evaluative declaration, and to me, that fits into a pattern of many established print publications attempting to assess online happenings through what at times feels like a hierarchy of political and cultural investments (i.e. the primacy of the material, print, the printed word, longevity, narrative, linear thinking, long-form prose… etc etc.)
So that’s where my half-assed ‘cementing a link between authoritative voices and authoritative publications’ came from. I certainly don’t think only bloggers/web-heads should talk about the web. I just wish Smith would do it with a little more nuance, particularly because it feels he often simply writes to confirm his readers’ apprehensions. If in the digital age, newspapers can still be places to aggregate and collect talent and smartness, why not offer analysis that goes beyond what anyone could have said?
So sure, I think unboxing is sometimes creepy and sad. But, as I said, I think it’s also a historical reaction, in multiple ways, and glossing over that seems intellectually lazy to me (again, pot, kettle etc.). I guess my concern is that the fetish isn’t inherently evil; as you suggest, it’s what social relations it invokes. Is it about possession and ownership of something that inevitably gets bound up in the exchange of commodities? Or is about the veneration of a moment or a community or something else? Material objects always connect us to something. But what?
All that said, it’s clear that I just don’t really like Smith and am a bit bored of bookish, literary types decrying everything they see online. It’s often a fair reaction, but I’m just tired of it, especially because, half the time, people who are writing for free simply because they want to are saying smarter, more interesting things.