Abstract
According to Apple, there were almost 50 million iPhones sold around the world in the first quarter of 2013, the highest selling quarter since the company introduced the device in the summer of 2007. The continued growth in popularity of the iPhone underscores the rationale for this collection. While it is recognizably important as an innovation in the evolution of the mobile device—revolutionary for its distinctive design features and application distribution platform—it is equally significant as a cultural icon. Coeditors Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau play with this tension throughout the book’s four main sections (Data Archaeologies, Politics of Redistribution, The App Revolution, and Mobile Lives) to produce a volume “that investigates the iPhone as a media dispositif or apparatus: as emblematizing a radical shift in the relationships among the technological affordances, modes of address, and subject positions that once marked such ‘old media’ as television or cinema” (p. 7).
Using a broad media studies approach, the book’s 22 chapters explicate many important motifs in our collective relationship to the iPhone. One of the most dominant is the recognition that the iPhone’s touch screen is ushering in a new era of haptic sensuality with our machines. Even the cover of the book—a colourful image of a besmeared 3G-era device against a stark white background—echoes this emphasis on tactile intimacy. Authors such as Alexandra Schneider (“The iPhone as an Object of Knowledge”), Lev Manovich (“The Back of Our Devices Looks Better Than the Front of Anyone Else’s”), and Anne Balsamo (“I Phone, I Learn”) posit that this relational stance encourages unfamiliar technical behaviours such as squeezing, pinching, and cuddling that mimic the interpersonal. So much more than a telephone, the iPhone acts like a peer, directing us to see and experience new things. Kristopher L. Cannon and Jennifer M. Barker extend the sensory experience further in “Hard Candy,” wittily paralleling the iPhone with several of Willy Wonka’s confectionary creations: the iPhone is at once like lickable wallpaper in offering its users the ability to “taste decor in a rather unconventional way,” while appropriating all of the qualities of an Everlasting Gobstopper “as it morphs from one thing to the next” (p. 76).
A second key thread is the uneasy relationship between the iPhone and open access models of innovation. Many chapters mention the closed design culture of Apple, the closed infrastructure of the iPhone’s operating system, and the closed vetting protocols of the App store. Yet there are also strong assertions that the iPhone has been an innovative game changer, primarily in the development of a culture of application developers around the world. Both Barbara Flueckiger’s chapter “The iPhone Apps” and Snickars’s chapter “A Walled Garden Turned Into a Rainforest” provide excellent contributions to this debate. Flueckiger shows that while Apple’s institutional ownership of application development via its software development kit acted to formalize and standardize a hacker culture of interactivity, it also made it possible for developers to become a community of entrepreneurs. Snickars echoes this argument, noting that the iPhone App store’s lack of generativity—using Jonathan Zittrain’s (2006) language—appears not to have precluded innovation, but in some ways to encourage it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Apple’s “gated community of code” (p. 166), with its narrow and normative standards and protocols, nevertheless provided developers with a secure, predictable environment that proved undeniably “generative.” Chapters on the politics of wireless networks (Jennifer Holt’s “Platforms, Pipelines and Politics”), the popularization of Angry Birds (Mia Consalvo’s “Slingshot to Victory”), and the iPhone as book (Gerard Goggin’s “Reading (With) the iPhone”), to name a few, provide similarly orthogonal arguments for consideration.
The book closes with a coda written by sociologist Dalton Conley, which provides a poignant commentary on how the iPhone is altering how we experience solitude (or no longer do). Conley’s argument is that our ability to be constantly connected means that we may grow up never experiencing being alone. “Bye, bye solitude,” he says. “Bye bye individualism” (p. 314). Conley leaves us questioning whether the plethora of mobile affordances ushered in with the iPhone might be having larger social impacts that have yet to be noticed, let alone interrogated.
Like the iPhone itself, Moving Data provides a panoply of options for the interested reader. Detailed without falling into homage, this volume should appeal to technology historians and cultural critics alike.