A random thought about the I-Pad and I-Phone and their respective application shops[1]
Whatever else one might think about the "walled garden" approach to content and applications at Apple, at least it finally gives the lie to that assertion (beloved of excruciatingly dull cultural theorists and technofuturists wanting to put a bit of ersatz spice in their prognostications) that "porn is the driver of technological innovation".
[1]I have mentioned in the past that it's a bit twenty years ago to moan about idiosyncratic typography and neologisms in branding, but it appears that I'm in a different mood today from the mood I was in then.[2]
[2] And it's apparently quite a funny mood. "ersatz spice in their prognostications"? this is surely an unconscious parody of someone, I hope not me.
[3] By the way[4], Patient Zero of the porn-equals-progress cliche was apparently a historian called Jonathan Coopersmith. In many ways, I'm surprised and slightly disappointed that he doesn't seem to have been able to monetise it with a cash-in pop-sociology book. As is always the case, the original source material is much more interesting than the brutally oversimplified assertion it got boiled down to.
[4] I like footnotes which aren't referenced in the text. I'm afraid you're going to have to live with it.
Except that the I-Pod/Pad aren't actually technological innovations at all, they're mass-market repackaging of existing technological innovations.
ReplyDeletePorn was the main initial driver of paid-for mobile content, based on telephones that had all the functionality of an I-Phone but user interfaces designed by the kind of people who become mobile phone engineers. Luckily, the target audience for paid for mobile porn content was the kind of people who put up with interfaces designed by [etc].
The I-Phone's role was in taking paid M-Content from the ghetto of geeks and perverts to something that people might actually admit to and/or want to be seen doing...
And 'Ersatz Spice' is the best description of Christina Aguilera I've ever read.
Except that the I-Pod/Pad aren't actually technological innovations at all
ReplyDeletecasual empiricism would say that they're pretty much at the leading edge of the curve in terms of capacitative touch screen devices, and I am queasy to think about what progress in those might have been like if led by pornographers.
Eek. Yes, I'll take the 'capacitative touch screen devices' point, although 'capacitative' strikes me as a reasonably irrelevant detail given that I've been using touchscreen smartphones for the last four years (posterity-based datapoint: the only time I've ever paid for pornography was in magazine-based format on a school trip to France).
ReplyDeleteI am using "capacitative" to mean "you can do that pinch to zoom thing"[1], which I thought was meant to have been really radical when the iPhone[2] came out.
ReplyDelete[1] I do still just about know what capacitance is and even a wiki-level summary of how a capacitative touch screen works, but this is basically the only practical meaning I give to the phrase.
[2] apparently the mood has passed[3]
[3] but it has been replaced with a wicked outburst of nested footnotes
[4] fal de dee
I'm led to believe that, with a web browser, it is reasonably easy to locate free pornography on the Internet, and so the de-smuttified nature of the Appstore may not be the be-all and end-all.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, anyone who even considered taking seriously the "porn drives innovation" canard could easily have disabused him or herself by actually looking at any three random pornographic websites: the bleeding edge of design and features, they were not, are not, and will never be, for reasons that were utterly obvious and predictable to anyone who bothered to think about it for half a second. (Not least of which: even the most self-reliant Randian caricature of an engineer often still wishes to be able to honestly tell his parents who he works for.)
ReplyDeletePorn has, however, certainly driven the rollout of ever-greater bandwidth, but filing that under the heading of "innovation" requires a certain deliberate inattention to detail.
Speaking of porn, does your footnote fetish help you feel like a successful academic? I have this image of you reading your posts to an attractive woman who resembles the popular stereotype of a librarian: hair pulled back tight, perhaps in a bun, glasses, a dark dress buttoned high up the neck. She is clearly a (mildly) repressed scholar. But footnote by footnote, arousal begins to take hold, and the nested ones not referenced in the body of the piece have the strongest effect. Her hair starts to come loose, a moist sheen develops on her face, and between successive camera shots, we realize that she has loosened yet another button in an attempt to cool off, much as a man might loosen his tie when too hot. I'll leave you to finish the scene, but I think tying, or perhaps binding, the footnote fetish to a foot fetish, well... / marcel
ReplyDeleteThat's curiously brilliant, but I think that yesterday's outbreak actually reflected the fact that I started the day with two espressos and was pretty much unable to concentrate on anything else for more than ten seconds yesterday. I have experienced the European banking "stress test" as frankly all fucking stress and no fucking test.
ReplyDeleteI would also note that I was rocking the multiple footnote thing in blog posts before I read David Foster Wallace's essay collection; the original idea was as a defence strategy against what was at the time a particularly awful collection of prigs and bores in CT comments - the idea being that instead of reading something and then posting a stern lecture to me in comments, they would feel obliged to check I hadn't taken it back in a footnote, and would then get lost in a maze of poorly organised cross-references and bad jokes.
"capacitative" isn't the important detail, the magic word for "pinch to zoom" is "multi-touch", that is the ability of (a) the device to recognise multiple contact points and (b) the software stack to make sense of them, rather than just convert them into mouse clicks.
ReplyDeleteThe main reason the iPhone was successful was the customer-focused and usability-focused design. Up until then, the main driver of phone design was the carrier's desire to squeeze as much money as possible from the user for as little bandwidth use as possible. You can see this in the previous Apple/Motorola phone design, the ROKR, which had arbitary limits (e.g. no more than 100 music tracks allowed) and sank without trace in the market.
Pete is from America. The reason the iPhone was successful in the US is because it was AT&T's only fight-back against the thieving monopoly bastards who run the CDMA networks (AT&T, bulwark against evil monopoly - quite. Also, CDMA networks? Whoever permitted that should be shot) and Apple took AT&T's wedge.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between the iPhone debate in America "it doesn't work on my network! Bad Apple. EVIL. Let us down, they did" and the civilised world "yes, it's a telephone, meh" is quite funny. Yes, it's a telephone. No, you can't have it, because whichever daft bastard was in charge of spectrum rights decided to ignore the rest of the world's sensible ideas and go for some crap invented in California.
I was vaguely involved with Vodafone when they did the giant overseas deal that ended up with them owning a minority stake in Verizon. At the time, they were sure that having better, erm, everything, plus a 40% stake in the company, would persuade Verizon Wireless to shift to non-insane technologies. This was incorrect.
ReplyDeleteEh? I'm a Brit.
ReplyDeleteI don't think AT&T contributed to the success of the iPhone, rather the opposite: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_att_fail/all/1
Besides, the actual telephony features are secondary to the iPhone, as can be seen from the iPad (scaled up iPhone that you can't make calls on). It's mostly about having a mobile computer with internet access through a UI that people really like.
CDMA isn't that bad technically, its main problems are (a) it's not GSM and (b) Qualcomm hold all the patents.
I have just been mildly depressed to see an advert (on a rather suspect web forum) for a new "Facetime real-time chatting with porn stars" for your iPhone.
ReplyDeleteNot sure whether this is a point for or against dd's original contention, mind.
(captcha: moperie, which is the sort of establishment where I assume depressive sorts hung out during the French revolution)
The videophone sex outgrowth of regular phone sex is a good example: Apple aren't the first people to market a phone that can make video calls, but they're the first to make it usable.
ReplyDeletethe bleeding edge of design and features, they were not, are not, and will never be, for reasons that were utterly obvious and predictable to anyone who bothered to think about it for half a second.
ReplyDeleteI'll disagree for a few reasons. First, porn sites had to get to grips (fnar) with video at a time (mid-90s) when the server technology and browser support was scrappy at best; secondly, porn had to deal with security and payment processing to protect its content and provide a degree of confidence for those prepared to pay for smut, and a degree of protection against chargebacks from guilty smut-consumers; thirdly, porn sites developed affiliate / content / revenue-sharing networks (and learned how to game search engines) in ways that are mimicked to this day.
It shows inattentiveness to detail to cite the look and feel (fnar) of porn sites, when what's underneath (fnar fnar) is much more significant.