Human Motorola

Human Motorola

Finally, a profound change in the perception of work and the working body became incorporated in a single metaphor—the frequently invoked ‘human motor,’ a striking image that illuminates an underlying affinity between physiology and technology. This image originated in an equally new perception of the universe as an industrial dynamo, or motor, the accomplishment of the thermodynamic physics of the nineteenth century
[Rabinbach, 24].



The work performed by any mechanism, from the fingers of the hand, to the gears of an engine, or the motion of the planets, was essentially the same. With this semantic shift in the meaning of ‘work,’ all labor was reduced to its physical properties, devoid of context and inherent purpose. Work was universalized [Rabinbach, 47].

At all moments of the machinated body, it is important not to amputate the prosthetics attaching the 19th century automated working body (proto-cyborg, integrated production line) to today’s info-compa(u)table body (modern cyborg, the cube farm). Capital’s liquid form follows the malleability of matter (technology) from the conversion of heat into use: the steam engine, the steel factory, conductive copper wire, the cooling units of heat-densified fiberoptic traffic. [Kazys Varnelis, Centripetal Cities...] The myth of a post-industrial body is that information technology has rendered us immaterial and invisible; we just need magnifying glasses, or perhaps laser pointers. ‘Traditional’ automation has moved offshore, the same shores that allow us to put the post in our industrial complex. In the ever consolidating information economy, American cyborg workers, whether in front of academic Apples or Applebee’s restaurant touch-screens, “[Our] engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of a post-industrial society” (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto 154) and their sacrifices are nimble-fingers in microelectronic sweatshops.


[Designed in California. Assembled in China]

HACK THIS BOYS, or, Slightly Digressive Research on Electronic Circulation, or, The Latest Control Revolution

(NOTE: the following is convolute material from Agorachronotistics—as yet this remains in a fragmentary form and should not be quoted from.)

Two tendentious questions requiring further research:
1. Have media theorists, globalization theorists, and recent Marxist writers (Hardt and Negri, for instance) underappreciated the role played by electronic movements of finance capital within the global economy?
2. Do ideology critics tend to pay too much attention to consumption and not enough attention to circulation (or, how come no one reads Capital, vol. 2, or, how come our Brother Blog seems so hung up on retail)?

A DERIVATIVE DÉRIVE, or, A DÉRIVE THROUGH DERIVATIVES

The credit card is the only kind of electronic money taken into account by Marshall McLuhan in his chapter on “Money” in Understanding Media. McLuhan acknowledges that money is a kind of language, and he places extraordinary emphasis on its role in producing and sustaining the symbolic order within media cultures. But he does not anticipate the widespread use of electronic technologies for circulating wealth—everything from ATMs, direct payment and payroll, electronic retail, or (most influentially in geopolitical financial terms) stock, currency, and derivative trading.

As the anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee remark in their compellingly readable Financial Deriviatives and the Globalization of Risk, the vast majority of wealth now exists in electronic form. The internet enables not only news, pornography, and useful information. It is also the foremost of the communications technologies that have fundamentally reshaped the global circulation of capital:

The conditions of connectivity, which permit someone, living almost anywhere, to download medical information to help diagnosis for a relative in need of medical care, to read a report on human rights and political detainees that the state would better like unread, or to correspond regularly with a friend living overseas, are also the conditions of encompassment and domination by circulatory capital and the infrastructure of the metropole generally. (47)

Derivatives, in other words, are a direct result of a globally integrated network; they are in fact a vast network unto themselves, constituting the “planet’s largest market” (46). Lee and LiPuma ask us to

Consider that according to the crystals of economic history, [the $100 trillion] derivatives market is approximately the same as total global manufacturing product for the last millennium. Or that deposits of that magnitude must be electronic, notional, and virtual because the amounts being circulated exceed the total quantity of the world’s currencies. (47-48)

Lee and LiPuma derive the figure of $100 trillion from the International Bank of Settlements 2000 report. In the interim, the derivative market has more than quintupled in size to $516 trillion. This would compare to a US annual gross domestic product of $15 trillion and a total US money supply also of roughly $15 trillion. (An accessible non-scholarly synopsis of the derivatives market is available at marketwatch.com current derivatives market) Perhaps physical money has lost much of its power, and is now merely a fetish by comparison to the electronic means by which wealthy individuals and corporations transfer money and finance capital. McLuhan calls paper money the “poor man’s credit card,” but the credit card is merely an instrument of individual borrowing. Individuals are hardly relevant to this largest of all markets: derivatives are primarily the province of large corporations and hedge funds. They transcend national boundaries, and they elude direct investment by all but the most intrepid (or wealthy) of individuals. McLuhan notes tamely that

Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the electronic age it has lost none of its power. (133)

McLuhan doesn’t consider whether the money he speaks of could take an electronic form, or if the acceleration of circulation enabled by electronic transfers of wealth might influence society. Indeed, one can hardly blame McLuhan: derivatives did not exist in 1964.

Not surprisingly, the non-specialist faces daunting challenges in trying to account for the influence of derivatives on the global economy. Lee and LiPuma argue that is in part because derivatives by their nature resist representation:

…the culture of derivatives posits itself as a space lying beyond the power of representation, one that is discernible only through quantification, grasped objectively as the necessity (emanating from the thing itself) of reducing all event structures to forms of differential equations, and subjectively as a kind of mathematical intuition embodied (as a quasi-genetic endowment) in those who master the financial practices. This culture of finance appears in academic and inside publications as well as newspapers and electronic media. It also appears in the organization, day-to-day operation, and distribution of money and power at investment banks (and nonbank banks), electronic trading sites, and hedge funds. Ironically, its own social determination and specific historical character lie in its unconscious refusal to recognize the socio-historical construction of the (derivative) object or (participating) subjects. (65)

The electronic movement of money and power is in some sense completely visible (detailed global financial transaction statistics are freely available at the International Bank of Settlements website; their annual report in some ways reads like a gross parody of the UN Human Development Report). And in another sense the electronic movements of money and power are completely invisible—in that the electronic transaction is always a fetish, i.e. it takes place electronically between infinite nodes; it naturalizes its own existence; and it largely divorces itself from the actual means of production. It seems at least indisputable that Lee and LiPuma are right when they suggest that

The culture of circulation of derivatives, especially those that regulate exchange rates and capital flows, structurally reproduces existing forms of global asymmetry and, more importantly perhaps, introduces a new form of structuring and structural asymmetry that owes its coherence to a set of ideologically impregnated conceptual schemes. (173)

Deleuze and Guatari make a similar point in stronger terms when describing the overwhelming influence of markets on the current global order. Perhaps they should have the last word:

In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There’s no universal state, precisely because there’s a universal market of which states are the centers, the trading floors. But the market’s not universalizing, homogenizing, it’s an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for human rights shouldn’t lead us to extol the “joys” of liberal capitalism of which they’re an integral part. There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery" (Negotiations 78).

PS

Or perhaps D&G shouldn’t have the last word:

PPS
Please don’t ask me to define a derivative. As many times as I’ve memorized Lee and LiPuma’s definition of a derivative as “the generic name for any security whose value is tied to an underlier,” I still find the derivative to verge on the indescribable—to verge on the banal, or the hopelessly general. The derivative is the post-script which ignores the letter which has come before the signature. The post-script lies beyond writing, after the labor of writing has been done. The derivative is underivable from experience; it is a sign within a language without etymology. The postscript is the post-crypt of the labor of communication, where the letter dies as afterthought, its signature effaced—now a dead letter, part of a postal crypt. There are potentially as many varieties of derivatives in cyberspace as there are varieties of human beings in cyberspace. Or, as Lee and LiPuma put it, “there are as many kinds of derivatives as there are forms of connectivity” (192).

Sunday, March 16, 2008 5:19 p.m.

Kindlebild 1.0

Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” is not an inventory of books—instead it is an inventory of activities involving the buying and selling, handling and arranging, valuing and remembering of books as physical objects. A scholar or serious reader is now likely, even without a Kindle, to buy the majority of her books online, and to have no tactile interaction with books during the process of buying them. The Kindle completes the process of the consolidation of the sale and distribution of books. New and used, Amazon dominates by ease of use. The efficiencies of scale at Amazon must be monumental; the Kindle increases those efficiencies, now that publishers will in effect deal with a Wal-Mart of bookselling, which will control the book trade at the wholesale as well as the retail level. Transmission costs will be reduced to a nearly insignificant amount. Paper and the fuel to deliver books will be saved. Amazon currently packs books clumsily and wastes immense amounts of cardboard in shipping. The labor hours of bookstore workers will be saved, as will the labor of postal delivery.

Perhaps in terms of efficiency there is no argument against books as kindling. To resist the electronic book is probably a futile form of nostalgia. Even so, the Kindle, like most cutting-edge technologies, is merely a temporary incarnation of a larger set of ongoing operations. There will be competition. Perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Sony will come up with a better electronic reader. The Kindle is an expensive technology, primarily because its content is proprietary. As in the case of the iPod, this probably won’t be an obstacle to its success. The most important question will be the ownership of content. Kindle users pay Amazon directly even for books which are out of copyright. Why pay to read a newspaper when one can read it for free on any laptop? When will someone hack the Kindle, and enable it to access free content? Or does wireless transmission preclude this possibility? Wireless networks, after all, are pay-as-you-go. With rare exceptions (bootlegged wi-fi and pirated music), there are no free rides in the technology world. Cell phones are cheap; cell plans are not. The Kindle, like the Blackberry, is effectively an installment plan technology. By its own logic of efficiency, the Kindle is likely to put itself out of business.

As for the physical codex, it will doubtless always survive, but perhaps in smaller numbers. The increasing prevalence of electronic reproduction (from JSTOR to Googlebooks) will likely raise the cost of the physical codex. The codex was arguably the single greatest tool in the spread of literacy and social change over the past six centuries. Even if the Kindle will distribute information more efficiently, so far there is little evidence that it will distribute that information more interestingly, more equitably, or more convincingly.

Saturday, February 23, 2008 2:27 p.m.

PS

BREAKING NEWS: THE VACCINE AGAINST FATIGUE PERFECTED, FOUND IN PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND: 01/23/2008

RE Caloric Calculation and college jogging: from The Consumer Society


III. Adderallabor [Work on Progress]

n+1, a biannual (not to be confused with the recent biennial, although somehow related...) literary journal from Brooklyn, has apparently come the closest out of any journal in print to re-instate the legitimacy of Wilhelm Weichardt's "antikenotoxin" fatigue vaccine synthesized in 1904. The German alchemist's fatigue vaccine was officially discredited in 1914 after European physiologists and the Austro-Hungarian army found Weichardt's evidence wildly exaggerated. Yet, like so many revelations of pseudo-science, the search for the fountain of energy significantly bumped up a notch (followed by injecting subjects with caffeine and cocaine) after Weichardt's experimentation. As should be common knowledge, but has found new disguises, “fatigue” is one diagnoses of many derived from the ideal of a 19th century worker maintaining optimum energy conservation for maximum production within an expanding concept of the hourly work day[1].

Historians James Beninger and Anson Rabinbach, in the tradition of Marx, witness the dialectical tendency of entropic digressions after periods wherein the material relations of a society undergo intense rapidization and dispersal through technological revolutions in the way societies produce and process information. The crash of Industrialization's pathbreaking momentum was expressed through thermodynamic terminology as “entropy” by scientists, while pathologized as “fatigue” by physiologists, labor-scientists, and capitalists in order to control the effects of an exhausted work force. Such a well-managed response to tired societies kept a pace of (over)production supplying and expanding Industrial-State economies, managing integrated distant markets, often state-unification or colonial projects, and fueling the frontier-market horizon. As was appropriate to the type of labor involved in industrial societies, the calculation of fatigue and its attempted correction were concentrated on the proletarian body[2]. In a further defense of work, the psychophysical diagnoses of the fatigued upper classes were written as evidence and consequence of their decadent and idle lifestyles, in effect, their absence of labor. Whether you were working too long or too little, it wasn't enough. While the bourgeoisie had their coffee and tea, biomedical remedial research on the anti-work plague turned to chemists before labor lawyers, desperate for a drug to restore proletarian workers’ automated muscles.

Weichardt's first experiments were ironically conducted in the schoolroom where students excelled on their math performance, cutting time in half, focusing more, and getting better answers. Yet the "antikenotoxin" gas could not restore over-worked muscles that were repeating the same activity all day, probably due to the fact that the relaxed muscles absorbed the stress of the worked muscles, producing kenotoxins all the while. The study was debunked for the physical worker and soldier while refined stimulants in the form of caffeine and cocaine were experimented with as a possible antikenotoxic simulant. Yet coffee and tea, the main proprietors of caffeine, as well as cocaine were only available to the elite due to their commodity status as exotic import. The upper classes, who mainly engaged in intellectual production created a fetish of stimulation for the unstimulated, non-laboring 'worker.' Perhaps on a more insidious level, Weichardt's study enabled the scientific precedence for experimentation of psychoactive stimulants on schoolchildren in order to measure their performance[3].

Adderall as modern fatigue vaccine for the intellectual laborer.
"Kickstart my Heart," the n+1 news brief from young Brown University scholar, is obviously one hip class warrior experimenting with exhaustion through intellectual expenditure as pleasure principle. Adderall is, depending on whether the prescribed version is Extended Release (XR) or standard, respectively either multiple strands of amphetamines set to absorb at different times to sustain the effects, or pure amphetamine. The pill is purported to boost the ADD, ADHD, or Depressed patient’s attention span, productivity, memory, mood, time management, and overall energy. While popularly marketed and consumed by children and adolescents, and widely covered in privileged health insurances plans, the black market of the pink pill goes for one dollar per milligram on Wall Street, and depending upon the University, a few bucks on campus.

Adderall provides the scholar not always increased productivity, but the amphetamine high of desiring the drive of labor and connectivity: increasing your discursive capabilities, providing unparalleled focus, and capability of data-processing and storage akin to a flashdrive. The n+1 Adderall Diaries attest to the frivolity of theoretical labor, while reaffirming the 24-hour work ideology produced by capitalism’s requirement of surplus-labor in order to exponentially increase production, a pathological condition of capital as old as the concept of work itself[4]. The 24-hour work-day of the intellectual laborer subsidizes the task of reabsorbing consumption into production, integrating the waking hours into a seamless circulation of information—our hottest commodity these days.

Work
If I have to do something that requires a lot of thought or planning, I put it off for as long as I can.	1 2 3 4
I have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project.	1 2 3 4
My mind sometimes wanders or "drifts away" when I'm reading.	1 2 3 4
Despite all my effort and preparation, my performance is not consistent.	1 2 3 4
I find myself easily distracted by noise or activity around me.	1 2 3 4

The overloading of information follows the overloading of stimulation: heart races, reads faster, types quicker, sleeps less, works longer.... crashes harder. Amphetamine stimulation follows the tragedy of borrowed energy. The anxiety-crash after "pulling an all-nighter," or mixing exercise and amphetamines resembles the panic in the scientific community following the discovery of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. The law of “entropy” as Rudolf Clausius identified in 1865, revealed the loss of energy in heat when work moves from a warmer body moved to a colder body. Since all motors, whether human or not, must regulate their energy so that they do not exhaust in over-heating:

“Countering the limitless energy of the conservation theory, the second law of thermodynamics raised the prospect of the cataclysmic ‘heat death’ of the universe, the gradual dissipation of energy into an icy, lifeless void[5]."

The reliance upon borrowed energy deprives the body of reproducing its own energy—alike to the parasitic reality of a fever when the body cannot heat itself—racing towards a heat-death, cardiac arrest, exhaustion occur in the form of physical collapse or mental blackout. Yet, due to the relatively physically-inert character of intellectual labor, the sustenance of borrowed energy can last a lot longer... Nervous energy works more electrically than mechanically.

The Control Revolution introduces the origins of the Information Society through tracing the evolution of information as control mechanism for industrialized production to information as the labor and commodity itself. The model of "society as a processing system, one that sustains itself by extracting matter and energy from the environment and distributing them among its members,” is an image of living systems in a productive exchange between resources and their conversions. ‘Society as processing system,’ in an Information Age becomes the feeding ground of capital, dominating information control in order to safeguard the reproduction of itself[6]. Adderall inserts itself as a smooth-operator in repairing the lines of fried nerve-wires, re-integrating isolated units of inefficient production, and connecting information processors to the grid at the moment of their conception. Pre-K for some in this country means 20mg of amphetamine with their Cheerios every morning.

"Living organisms, for example, convert energy originally from the sun into forms more useful to the processes of life: body heat, chemical energy for metabolism, electrical energy to fire nerve impulses, mechanical energy to contract muscles and move about (luminescent organisms can even convert the energy back into light)[7]."

Adderall's epidemic arises at a new phase in the Control Revolution, one where we are dealing with a crisis of information-traffic, nervous stimulation-overload, and increasing mediation of our daily work and leisure lives through information circulation. Our mental ecologies are witnessing psychophysical statistics similar to the creation of fatigue and neurasthenia pathologies of the 19th and early 20th century of the over/underworked body. We too are overheating: Depression, Anxiety, Tourettes, OCD, ADD, ADHD, Alzheimers, Shaking Leg Syndrome... are all medical fictions and lived realities of processing information in an ever accelerating society (reflective in our obsession with online social networking and our exhausted dollar). Adderall’s ab/use on the college campus signifies the crisis of assimilating into a production-line where the meeting of deadlines is only a symbolic gesture in the timelessness of intellectual labor as a ‘lifelong pursuit of knowledge.’

Family
I sometimes completely forget about special occasions or scheduled family events.	1 2 3 4
I tend to "tune out" in the middle of conversations.	1 2 3 4
I have difficulty managing finances: bank accounts, bill-paying, etc.	1 2 3 4
I put things down at home and then can't seem to find them.	1 2 3 4
I just can't seem to unwind or relax, even when I have the time.	1 2 3 4

In 1883, the US Government authorized the division of the U.S. portion of the continent into five separate time-zones in order to better regulate distribution and communication, particularly making time for railway and telegraph coordination. So too does Adderall further divide the intellectual laborer’s workday into a to-do list grid, making easier the crossing off of tasks and finished products by integrating the time of their production[8]. As Molly testifies in “Kickstart My Heart,” one not need separate exercise and studying, or the worker’s reproduction through maintaining health in the midst of a relatively un-muscular line of work. As for sleeping on Adderall, the student finds that every professor with a deadline makes a cameo in their dreams. Ignoring the solar clock around ‘crunch time,’ is not a choice but a mandate, signified by the cruel mantra of finals: “sleep when you’re dead.”

Pastoral idleness inhibits the headspace of the information-superhighway, the pace of life of electro-academia: always awake, on the go, with a cup of coffee and now, with a little blue or pink pill…never stop moving, exchanging, networking, connecting. The recent surge in Blackberry and Ipod devices acquired by college students of America testifies to this addiction to information consumption, social networking, and super-efficient processing. In an era when every worker has homework, the combined planner, phone, computer Blackberry and Iphone are the perfect connectors to scheduling in social hours when free-time must be calculable and results determined.

Social Life
I make decisions too quickly, without thinking, and then regret it later.	1 2 3 4
I feel impatient when I have to wait (e.g., in line or when stopped at a red light).	1 2 3 4
I sometimes talk too much when I'm around others.	1 2 3 4
I fidget or squirm with my hands and feet when I have to sit still for a long time.	1 2 3 4
I have trouble managing conflicts or making compromises.	1 2 3 4

The demands on intellectual labor for data-processing and storage is self-selective in academia, yet the institutional work-ethic of venture-capitalism trickles-down through the Academy where continuous publication, professing, grading and counseling are qualifiers of job security. Overtime, overproduction, and overwork constituted the temporal and physical base of the proletarian worker, whose bodily sacrifice used to subsidize the leisure of the capitalist classes. Now, in an Information Economy the cross-class pathological compulsion towards a 24-hour work-day, strives to engender a culture where every “type” of laborer may have a personalized subsidy for the never-ending work ahead of them.

The image of Molly on a treadmill, on adderall, negative caloric expenditure, reading Spivak.


[1] Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Faitgue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
[2] While many other pathologies were at stake in this discourse, fatigue may be most appropriate as a collective signifier.
[3] Rabinbach, 142-145.
[4] Rabinbach, 46-47.
[5] Rabinbach, 47
[6] Beninger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 32.
[7] Beninger, 37.
[8] Beninger, 16.




Another Possibility of Entropic Energy,
Tired of Work
Idleness, fatigue, hysteria, and psychosis—the mechanical failures expressed as essential pathologies of the woman-condition through her ‘weaker constitution,’ her poorly designed motor. Such biomechanical deficiencies constructed around the turn of the 19th century became the predominant rational etiology of the female-workers’ tendency towards entropy (perhaps produced by the over-production of blood caused by her menses.) The pseudo-science of neurasthenia (et.al) was backed by Scientists (frontiering the much-demanded bioenergetic field research) to Industrial Capitalists/Taylorists (creaming over any excuse to reduce wages while maintaining the most calculable and generalizable worker: nearly-alive, barely-dead) to Big Daddy (dying to keep her in the cave). These bimodal physical and mental pathologies haunt the female worker beyond the 19th century conception of her labor power. The epigraph of woman’s intellectual labor begins, consistently, with an excuse. From the Emilys (both, the schizophrenic sister and the spinster) to Avital, women write themselves in, through, and out of madness, weakness, and insufficiency. From the hysteric rant of the literary feminist to the compulsive suburban mother’s to-do list to the over-time punch card of the factory seamstress—the order of the laborer’s list enumerates the potential energy of her motors, while each reminder of her expenditure brings back the fear and calculation of net-loss in heat-energy, never able to re-circulate through the blood of capital. Cybernetics is ‘woman’ as the control-function of man’s production—how fast he may replicate and with what efficiency—regardless of whether we are interested in the cybernetic system of the factory, the office, or the home: “That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new” (Haraway, 1991:167). If capitalism, therefore, has no limits except its own scandal: the exhaustion it requires in the form of surplus-labor (Rabinbach, 1992:74), then ‘woman’ becomes the control-limit when her surplus-labor as head domestic unit is crippled through psychophysical pathologization, or better yet when Nature herself is exhausted in the exploitation of her limited resources… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere… The closed circuit of her reproductive motor-organ at once makes possible the production, and limits the potential energy of Man. In his disseminatory-driven competition of semen (liquid capital), woman arrives as the entropic expenditure of man’s excess-value and heat-accumulation. At once ensuring a limit and insinuating the eschatonic arrival of the ‘heat-death’ of the planet, with the threat of her dead-labor as an icy, lifeless womb.

Found Denkbild 2.0: Old news, New finds

Thursday, December 20, 2007

The PR Revolution Amazon's Kindle May Be Bringing

Do you have a Kindle yet? All the buzz about the Wii aside, the most lusted after gift this holiday season for media pros may just be Amazon's new digital content reader called the Kindle (which sold out within 5.5 hours upon first release a few weeks ago). The device may not have an Apple-esque level of sex appeal, but it does represent a huge shift in thinking that may just propel portable digital content and ebooks in particular to the kind of widespread adoption that digital music has already enjoyed. For that reason, many people are calling the Kindle the next ipod. If you are like me, you're probably fed up with hearing about how everything new is about to "revolutionize" the world of media. Let's take a little reality check. Not everything has the impact that they think they can have on the world of media. There are a lot of voices out there.

So what makes the Kindle different? More importantly, what makes it something that you need to pay attention to today? Here are four reasons why the Kindle may be bringing a PR revolution (for real):

1. It makes RSS a necessity. If you have managed to get by this far without using RSS feeds (or offering them to your content if you are a content publisher), those days will soon be over. The way that Kindle users subscribe to new content is by adding RSS feeds, similar to how you can download music or subscribe to podcasts on iTunes. This means having a web site is no longer enough. If your content is not available in RSS format, you may soon be invisible.
2. It finally integrates the reading experience. The problem right now with magazines, newspapers, blogs and books is that most exist in their own channels when it comes to reading. This means you may subscribe to RSS feeds from a newspaper and blogs, and get a magazine and still buy books ... but you have to carry all of them. With the Kindle, you can buy all or read any of these in the same place ... and even send your own documents to the Kindle so you can read them on the go. It really can be a house for all documents of any kind.
3. It is puts a premium on real time information. For most of us, the types of devices we are used to using all synch with your computer. In that sense, they are nothing more than glorified hard drives. That's all the ipod is. But the Kindle has built in EVDO wireless connectivity which means users are never left looking for a hotspot to connect and always have the latest information from their favorite media sources. Think about this for a second ... if all media can be updated real time, then editorial errors can be corrected (rather than publishing apologies), and users have an increased appetite and expectation of media that is never out of date.
4. It takes advantage of Amazon's Library. The important thing not to forget about the Kindle is that it also has immediate full access to the full library of Amazon.com ... which means just about every book. And with a direct tie-in to a user's Amazon account, you can purchase just about any book or piece of content Amazon sells instantly. From an on demand resource shelf, this is phenomenal (imagine having the AP Stylebook available at a moment's notice).

If you put all these pieces together, the interesting conclusion is that the Kindle may represent the first real product that challenges our perceptions about how people are consuming content. Once this starts to change, the way that media publishers create and distribute their content will really change ... thus creating a new environment for PR pros to operate within. Are you ready for a real time rss-based always on media landscape? If not, now's the time to start.

Note: This post is republished from the original that was written for the 360 Digital Influence Blog.

Re: Blackberrybild (Golden Oldie)

LOVE IT! THE COFFEE HOUSE ANALOGY IS TIGHTER THAN MITT ROMNEY'S SPHINCTER AS HE'S WATCHING "BIG LOVE" - WHENEVER BLACKWATER LOSES ONE OF ITS OWN, THE HARD DRIVE IN HIS BLACKBERRY IS DRAINED & DESTROYED - THIS IS CALLED "SMOKING HIS SIG"


Our tendency to garden, English-like,
around the clumps of terrible things that happen to us
fortify as much as teach calamity
how a little wild cherry and some cosmos
can sweeten the shit-laden fate.
‘Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
and the sweet catastrophe, be it sunk
in the prostate or afield in the Levantine,
hedged round by hosta and Blackberry
is for a moment or lifetime forgot.

M.I.

Blackberrybild (Golden Oldie)

It is key to the Blackberry that it leave a signature: "Sent via Blackberry from T-Mobile" or "Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry." (The iPhone operates according to the latter, more personal formula, leaving a "Sent from my iPhone" signature.) Derrida writes of the signature: "By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctuality, always evident and always singular, in the form of the signature" ("Signature, Event, Context" 328). The corporately signed message does not hang in the air; it arrives immediately as spatialized screen text, and identifies both its technology and its network. No addressee is typically named. Nor is the message typically signed specifically by its author—save perhaps by the "Address Book" of the device, which automatically links a number to an abbreviated name. Given names are effaced. The enforced signature frames the message, symbolically dividing it from the infinite mass of ever-evolving (con)text to which the device is immanently connected.

The Crackberry's addictive properties are well known. "Blackberry thumb" has become a proverbial condition. As important as its “functionality” in business applications, the Blackberry conveys the social status of being in constant communication. Like e-mail, the Blackberry probably tends in the aggregate to increase productivity. Even so, the Blackberry is a space rather than a machine—the pocket-size equivalent of an eighteenth century coffeehouse. The Blackberry transcends utility, it is a total life experience. What is said of the coffeehouse in the following sentence could be said of the Blackberry: "The coffeehouse functioned as a social setting, a place for communication and discussion, while the coffee served in it no longer played any discernible role" (Schivelbusch 62). The Blackberry is indispensable to its users—it centralizes written and oral communication, can function as a notebook and a camera, has global positioning and maps, access to the World Wide Web, access to one's finances and to most of one's other life records. The company who manufactures this Swiss Army Knife of computers is aptly named Research in Motion. It is possible to view the surface of the earth from space, to schedule a romantic rendezvous, to trade stocks, to view pornography, to listen to music, to research the catalogues of all the world's great libraries—all from this wallet-sized device, which operates wirelessly on the installment plan throughout most of the country, if not throughout most of the world.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:37 p.m.

P.S.

Sent via Blackberry from T-Mobile