Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

Due to the topic of my thesis - “Constant Connectivity in a Wireless Age: The Discursive Promotional Strategies of the BlackBerry” - I was asked several times during my interview process if I thought the iphone would wipe out the BlackBerry.

Like most other people, I was completely enamoured with the iPhone when I first used it. I stopped into an Apple store just before heading into the city to look at an apt I wanted to rent and I was able to use Google’s Street View to get a virtual tour of the neighbourhood beforehand (seriously, the price of a wash was visable at the laundromat across the street). Beyond all the gee-whiz features of the iPhone, my response to the BlackBerry vs. iPhone question was always that the BlackBerry’s features were unique enough to hold its own.

First off there’s the superior email function of the BlackBerry which is really the application that drives its use. Plus,  I don’t think the iPhone’s entertainment focus will sway the BlackBerry’s core professional-user base (the iPhone may cut into adoption of the multimedia Pearl, but that’s another story).

A few weeks back TechCrunch published a comparison review of the two products, based on the feedback of an annonymous valley venture capitalist. To summarize, “You’ll have to pry the BlackBerry from my cold, dead hands.”

iPhone v. BlackBerry: Side by Side, Two Week Comparison

With the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry 8820 coming soon to an AT&T store near you, business folks around the country will be faced with the decision of switching to the trendy new iPhone or upgrading to a more iPhonesque version of their trusty CrackBerry. To determine whether the grass really is greener on the iPhone side of the fence, we have chronicled the experience of a venture capitalist (who wishes to remain anonymous) who has been using an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800 side-by-side for the past few weeks. His conclusion: despite the overall attractiveness of the iPhone, it lacks too many vital features to replace the BlackBerry as the corporate weapon of choice.For starters, a BlackBerry set up with Microsoft Exchange Server sports intelligent push email while the iPhone does not. When an email is sent to an account on a BlackBerry, the message is downloaded immediately and an LED on the phone notifies the user that he or she has a new message. The iPhone, on the other hand, recognizes new messages at most every 15 minutes and must be checked actively to see if anything has arrived. This deficiency makes handling email on the iPhone slower and less efficient; it also translates into wasted battery power as users need to perform the extra step of opening the iPhone’s email program every time they want to check for new mail.

Perhaps even more significantly, the iPhone fails to synchronize as well as the BlackBerry. When a BlackBerry user changes a calendar event or some contact information on his or her desktop computer in Exchange, the changes automatically appear on the BlackBerry. This makes keeping track of basic business information a snap because one never has to worry about acting on outdated data or manually updating one’s handheld. In contrast, the iPhone does not synchronize calendar and contact information wirelessly, which makes it less dependable for information ultimately stored on a server.

In addition to these major drawbacks of the iPhone, our venture capitalist cites the following as reasons to prefer the BlackBerry:

• The BlackBerry 8800 possesses GPS, which makes Google Maps much more useful, especially for turn-by-turn directions
• The iPhone lacks basic cut and paste capabilities
• Despite Apple’s reputation for superior user interface design, the BlackBerry possesses keyboard shortcuts that make navigation around and between applications a breeze
• The BlackBerry’s phone quality is better than the iPhone’s
• The Safari browser is certainly more stunning than the BlackBerry’s primitive browser, but the iPhone seems to load even text-only pages more slowly than the BlackBerry over the EDGE network
• The BlackBerry possesses a general contacts application that makes contacting people by any given method more convenient
• The battery runs out faster on the iPhone simply because it is used for more tasks. This makes it less reliable for when one must take the device somewhere overnight without the opportunity to recharge.

Despite all of these criticisms of the iPhone, our venture capitalist admits that he would switch over to the iPhone if only it supported push email, calendar and contacts synchronization, and GPS. For him, the prospect of ridding his pockets of a separate device for music (an iPod nano), as well as enjoying all of the iPhone’s slick features (such as full-featured web browsing, stocks and weather apps, and its YouTube program), makes the iPhone very tempting. However, until Apple resolves these shortcomings (and perhaps Google makes its applications, especially Gmail, work as seamlessly with the iPhone as Microsoft makes Exchange work with the BlackBerry), others are going to have to pry his BlackBerry from his cold, dead hands (his words, mind you, not ours).

Week two into my new job…

Turns out the company I’m working for bills its clients in 15 min increments which means I’m tracking 8 hrs of my life/5 days a week in quarter-hour slices.

I’ve taken a cue from others in cubicle-land and now keep post-it notes on the side of my computer where I write down what I’m working on during the day. End of day comes and hopefully I’m hitting the billable requirements.

Major change from the uber-unstructured student life I’ve been living, especially the  past six months of thesis-writing. On the upside, the powers-that-be at work are interested in having me give a presentation on my thesis. This will fulfill several 15 mins.

It’s 2am… the reality of my deadlines is finally hitting me (two weeks late). In my deluded state I’m considering the possibility my thesis topic is divinely inspired.

From Marita Sturken’s Technological Visions:

“Spinning technology through the Fall of Man narrative casts us as the ignorant architects of our own undoing. In this narrative, we make our artifacts but they in turn cast us out into world in which we are not suited. The narrative of the Fall reduces the dynamic relations of people and technology to a story in which technology is the cruel, decisive actor. It was a God with ultimate power who expelled humans from the Garden of Eden. The new narratives of the Fall put technology into that position. They rationalize human passivity in the face of anxiety about technology. They give a sense of inevitability to people’s feelings of impotence in the face of our creations” (Struken et al. 2004: 23-24).

“Spin is distracting. Overheated debates about computer addiction and Internet depression keep us from confronting issues raised by contemporary technology that are resistant to the oversimplification of spin…Technology does things for use but also to us, to our ways of perceiving the world, to our relationships and sense of ourselves” (Struken et al. 2004: 23).

“The world-view of most of the industrialized world remains relentlessly modern in its valuing of science, technology, growth, and progress. Yet these modern sensibilities are integrated with an increasingly postmodern sensibility – a sense of cynicism and fatigue with modernity’s hurtling forward into the future, a world increasingly defined by the digital, the computer, and the virtual… Yet this feeling of life speeding out of control is a deeply modern one, one that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. This moment in history is thus defined specifically by the tensions of living with both the heightened qualities of modernity and the shifting worldview of postmodernism” (Struken et al. 2004: 72).

Too late to comment on these strings of writing, but I think I’ve found a conclusion.

— Speaking of ’spin’… Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84, amazed at his old age after a life-long smoking habit. After joining the army and working for the Chicago City News Bureau, he did PR for General Electric, “a job he loathed.” He published four books before be able to give up selling Saabs to support himself.

I suppose it’s stories like Dana Vachon’s that keep the hope alive for all those bloggers out there. A 28 yr. old prep-kid-turned-investment-banker-turned-blogger got a $650,000 advance to write about his insights into NYC society. The book has already been optioned to the company who produced Babel. It’s possible he provides an illuminating perspective, but not likely of the slaughterhouse 5 variety. See above for ’shifting worldview of postmodernism.’

Chpts 1-4 in at the end of the month = reading fun.

This list would have been so useful at the beginning of last year. I heart lists.

Modern Postmodern

• National/international…………………………………………………..global
• Hierarchical social structure………………………………………….network society
• Mechanical…………………………………………………………………….electronic
• Industrial………………………………………………………………………postindustrial
• Urban city…………………………………………….suburban sprawl, megalopolis
• Geographical space replaced by social space………………….nonplace
• Cartesian space……………………………………………………………..virtual space
• Standing in a crowd……………………………………………………….social isolation
• Surrounded by strangers………………………………………………mobile privatization
• Circulation of traffic in city…………………………………………….internet ‘traffic’
• City strolling, the flaneur……………………………………………….web surfing
• Time as measurable………………………………………………………time as global
• Time as linear…………………………………………………………………time shifting
• Analog clock/watch………………………………………………….digital clock/watch
• Railroad………………………………………………………………….rapid speed trains
• Telegraph………………………………………………………………………internet
• Subway…………………………………………………………………………..freeway
• Airplane………………………………………………………………………….space shuttle
• Automobile as transportation…………………………………..automobile as style
• Radio………………………………………………………………………………walkman
• Photograph……………………………………………………………………..digital image
• Typewriter……………………………………………………………………..computer
• Typewriter keyboard………………………………………………..computer mouse
• Television…………………………………………………………………..multimedia/DVD/TiVo
• Cinema……………………………………………………………………………virtual reality
• Telephone……………………………………………………………………….cell phone
• Space travel………………………………….travel inside body through fiberoptics
• The body as circulatory system……………………….the body as a genetic map
• Tuberculosis and antibiotics……………………………………..AIDS and retroviruses
• Representations………………………………………………………………simulacrum
• Autonomous subject……………multiple and fragmented subjectivities
• Wars of guns, bombs, machines…………………………………………virtual/cyberwar
• Wars as conflicts between nations……………………………………terrorism
  

Douglas Kellner, the Philosophy Chair of Education at UCLA, lectured at McGill this Thursday on the ‘Metaphors of Cyberspace’.

Kellner named four major influences in creating the internet: 1) Military 2) Big Business (IBM, Xerox, Apple) 3) University research 4) Hacker culture.

These groups have necessarily shaped the way we talk about the internet. For example, computing language is filled with militaristic terms such as “erase”, “abort”, “delete”, and “spam”. He observed that metaphors for new objects are pulled from familiar objects, such as the idea of Home, which result in relatable terms like “homepage”, “MySpace”, and “YouTube”, names that put the focus on the personal and immediate surroundings. The Work environment creates language like “desktop”, “mailboxes”, “trash”, “files” etc.

Given my research interests in BlackBerry, I was particularly intrigued by the Nature metaphor, which he argued was used to soften and blur the boundaries between nature and technology, thereby naturalizing it. Companies like Apple and Microsoft (MS fits in here because of the ’soft’, which is natural and sensuous) use the nature metaphor, as do products like BlackBerry and Mac, and terms like ‘virus’, ‘bugs’, ‘mouse’, ’surfing’, and fishing’.

Travel was another metaphor Kellner touched on, claiming the term ‘information superhighway’ was particularly problematic for Bill Gates because a highway implied a FREEway, and so, Microsoft made a move toward a different language that didn’t create an expectation of a free lunch.

And this is why metaphors matters…

Language enables what one can conceptualize. The metaphors you use limit and enable certain discourses. Kellner cited Stuart Hall who said “a metaphor is a serious thing, it informs one’s practice”, and Derrida who said “a metaphor is never innocent.” The tremendous influence metaphors can wield in public and private discussion is why it’s necessary to get out ahead of the trend and define your own terms.. There are plenty of people/companies/ideologues that have a vested interest in defining a dialogue in a certain manner and once a certain way of talking about an object has been established it’s very difficult to break the mould and view it from outside that frame of reference. The Democrats face this problem, in that they’ve been reduced (in many instances) to being a reactionary party, rather than a party that defines the issues they want to pursue.

One of the most interesting comments was a brief aside toward the end of the lecture when Kellner noted that modernity was characterized by the big businesses and infrastructure of the industrial age which have masculine overtones, and that postmodernity (if that’s what we’re still in) is characterized by smaller and more personal infrastructure of the information age which is more feminized (big frames vs. sleek laptops). Postmodernity as feminine.

After Kellner’s lecture I checked back in on a blog I keep track of and in Sept the writer had referenced a lecturer at the Industrial Designers Society of America who said the future of computing needs will be facilitated by more intuitive and human interfaces.  The same lecturer was also encouraging designers to become more “sensually sensitive” and to reconcile the design of digital interfaces with basic human cognition and intuition. Intuition, sensual, sensitive, reconciliation… is it possible the future of cyberspace is female gendered?

“The ideal life: doing only things which are indispensable.”

Six pages of Susan Sontag’s journals were published in the NYTimes Magazine this weekend. Even an NYC intellectual had a soft spot for CA:

“In Calif., a stranger is a [potential] friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise.”
Admittedly contemptuous:
“The only people who should interest themselves in an art (or several arts) are those who practice it — or have — or aspire to. The whole idea of an “audience” is wrong. The artist’s audience is his peers.”

What does this mean… about writing, blogging, peers, audiences, the blogosphere?

When asked how she felt about discovering 3/4s of the way through something that the writing was mediocre and inferior, she responds with, “I feel good and plow on to the end. I’m discharging the mediocre in myself. (My excremental image of my writing.) It’s there. I want to get rid of it. I can’t negate it by an act of will. (Or can I?) I can only allow it its voice, get it “out.” Then I can do something else.”

I must keep this in mind when writing the thesis. Moving on, so I can do something else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1