Special Section Goes Here

The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

William Merrin

Abstract Though digital “gadgets” have become one of the most important sectors of consumer electronics, the concept itself has been largely overlooked. This article traces the history of the gadget from its nineteenth-century origins as a placeholding name to its use for a class of technical objects, through to its incorporation of electronics and its contemporary success. Building upon Jean Baudrillard’s analysis, the article explores how digital technology has changed the gadget’s nature and capacities. It argues that the digital gadget’s success lies in its hyperfunctionality, hyperludic experience, and relationship with me-dia. It analyzes the digital gadget’s role in the reorientation of the broadcast ecology around personalized media worlds and experiences, arguing that its mode of play represents an integration of the life, activities, bodies, and attention of the individual that extends beyond that achieved by broadcast media Keywords gadget; Baudrillard; digital media; technology

The machine was the emblem of industrial society. The gadget is the emblem of post-industrial society. —Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society

rom the beginning the gadget has been surrounded by an Fair of uncertainty, a slipperiness in our understanding that has benefited it in its slow rise to prominence. Appropriately for an object whose boundaries and definition are vague and whose forms and functions are varied, even the origins of the word are unclear. The story that it was derived from Gaget,

1 Cultural Politics, Volume 10, Issue 1, © 2014 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2397209

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

Gauthier and Cie’s name stamp on tourist while plastic objects with blinking LEDs copies of the Statue of Liberty, is now dis- spilled out of drawers. credited, and sources suggest instead an For all its success, this proliferation of etymological origin in the French gâchette, the gadget proved to be only the prelimi- the “catch-piece of a mechanism” (a term nary phase of the gadget’s rise. Embracing applied, for example, to parts of a firing its electronic potential it established a mechanism), or gagée, meaning a small foothold in personal entertainment and tool or instrument. The Oxford English communication, where with the con- Dictionary claims anecdotal evidence for vergence of mass media and computer the term’s use by the 1850s as a word processing at the end of the twentieth for an object whose name one cannot century it completed its passage from a remember, a use consistent with its first functionally specialized, handy gimmick to print appearance in Robert Brown’s 1886 become one of the most important catego- book Spunyarn and Spindrift, a Sailor Boy’s ries of technical object and a major force in Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China global consumer electronics. Breaking out Tea-Clipper, which reports: “Then the of the drawers and toy boxes, this new, names of all the other things on board a networked digital gadget—our tablets, ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even netbooks, phones, music players, media the sailors forget at times, and if the players, e-readers, cameras, and porta- exact name of anything they want happens ble gaming devices—became personal, to slip from their memory, they call it a mobile, and ubiquitous. Today the gadget chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, has become the center of attention. or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom— Despite its long history and contem- just pro-tem., you know” (quoted in porary success, few attempts have been Quinion 2007). made to trace its rise or theorize its form Unlike “chicken-fixing,” “timmey- and effects. Indeed, something about noggy,” or “wim-wom,” however, the the category itself eludes conceptualiza- “gadjet” was destined for greater things. tion and critique; ignored or dismissed By the early twentieth century it had for most of its life, at the moment of its changed from the frustrated expression greatest occupation of our lives it still of aphasia at an object’s recalcitrance to avoids analysis and censure. One of the a category of objects in itself, and by the few discussions of the gadget appears in postwar period it had become a profit- the work of Jean Baudrillard, who provides able element of technical and consumer a prescient vision of its cybernetic future. culture, albeit one often overlooked and In this article I want to extend this vision to 10:1 March 2014

• rarely taken seriously. Again, perhaps, explore the contemporary digital gadget. In

this suited the gadget; associated with particular, I want to argue that its success the domestic sphere and sold in novelty is related to its role in the development shops, department stores, and catalogs, of what I call “me-dia” and to its person- Politics

gadgets quietly succeeded in colonizing alized, hyperfunctional, and hyperludic everyday life, taking up residence in our nature that repeatedly calls us back and kitchen cupboards and drawers and our that constitutes a mode of physiological sheds and garages. Their incorporation of alienation and integration that is far greater Cultural electronics brought greater popularity, and than any achieved by the broadcast media.

2 toy boxes soon filled with beeping gizmos To understand this hyperludic gadget,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

however, we first need to understand from marginal curiosities to the partner or something of the peculiar and unwritten director of people’s labor. Most accounts history of these timmey-noggies, wim- of the period emphasize the scale of the woms, and thingamajigs. technologies. Although the textile mules, mills, and gins, the systems of powered The “Anonymous History” of the Gadget, wheels, belts, and shafts, and the steam or How Humans Came to Dream of engines all depended on a complex system Magnetic Sleep of parts (that, by the late eighteenth cen- Although expressions of frustration at tury, had to be precision-made in machine items whose name has momentarily shops), it was the whole assemblage—the escaped the user must always have machine—that became recognized as occurred, there is nevertheless something the key social and productive force of the significant about the origin of the word industrial age. When engineer Isambard gadjet. Its anecdotal use by the 1850s, Kingdom Brunel discussed the Great East- its etymological origins, and Brown’s ern, the iron steamship that was the larg- exhausted declaration about the number of est in the world on its launch in 1858, he things aboard a modern ship suggest that referred to it repeatedly as “a machine”— the key issue was the increasing quantity as a single entity and whole (Harvie, and complexity of objects: problems inti- Martin, and Scharf 1970: 48–51). Though mately connected to the industrial society. early inventions had an air of novelty, it Already in 1829, Thomas Carlyle could be was large-scale “machinery” that came to found lamenting “the mechanical age,” dominate life, attention, and criticism. that “age of machinery” in which “noth- By the early 1850s, machinery’s ing is now done directly, or by hand; all dominance was beginning to change. is by rule and calculated contrivance. For The effect of an advancing industrial and the simplest operation, some helps and nascent consumer culture was a pro­ accompaniments, some cunning abbreviat- liferation of technical objects—of commod- ing process is in readiness. Our old modes ities, things, tools, entertainments, and of exertion are all discredited and thrown scientific and philosophical instruments— aside.” His examples are near hysteric; and it’s no coincidence that the word even the brood hen is replaced by chick- gadjet emerges at this time. At exactly the ens hatched by steam, he claims, while moment when social critics were attack- mechanical devices mince our cabbages ing the subsumption of the human body and cast us “into magnetic sleep” (Carlyle beneath the weight of industrial technol- 2004 [1829]). ogy as “an appendage of the machine” The Industrial Revolution saw a and one of its parts (Marx and Engels 1987 significant and cumulative development in [1848]: 87), nautical slang similarly arose cs i

technical objects (Headrick 2009). From to express the overwhelming of the human t i the mid-eighteenth century on there was mind and its expressive faculty by the o l P

an increase in invention and its technical sheer multiplication of technical forms and application, an increase in the quantity functions. If industrial technology trans- of technologies in use, a growing com- formed the overwhelming of the body into plexity of technologies, and an increas- an alienation of the mind, the proliferation ing penetration by them in the lives of of technical objects reversed the process, Cultural

ordinary people as technologies moved transforming the alienation of the mind—of 3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

the mental image of the thing—into an traveled the natural world, cataloging its alienation of the body, of the capacity even complexity, the exhibition offered the to frame one’s own speech. revelation of another emerging, competing, Perhaps the best evidence of this and evolving ecology: the world of things. proliferation is found in that epochal cele- Critics and satirists alike recognized the bration of the industrial object, “the Great power of these new life-forms. Karl Marx’s Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All description of commodity fetishism makes Nations.” Held in London in 1851, it con- clear the phantasmal, even demonic, life tained over one hundred thousand objects and power of the commodity and the ideas from fourteen thousand exhibitors, forcing evolved in its little “wooden brain” (1983 its organizing committee into a remarkable [1867]: 76), while Samuel Butler’s 1863 feat of classification. With the human cen- article “Darwin among the Machines” sus only a few decades old in the United (2009 [1863]) only half jokingly suggested Kingdom and with the 1841 census being that the evolutionary gains of contempo- the first to actually record the names of rary machinery constituted the germs of everyone in the household, the committee a future intelligent life that would enslave produced the first census of the industrial humanity itself. population—of those objects inhabiting the Although it was the giant displays of workshops, factories, studios, and shops working machinery and the monumental of the nation—classifying the products of fifteen-ton block of coal that proved most industry into a thirty-part taxonomy divided popular with the exhibition’s public, we can into four overall categories. It would take already find scuttling among its exhibits four large volumes of the official catalog the early forms of the gadget. Though to list them all, and contemporary visitors the term was only just being coined, its were bewildered by the number of things future forms were becoming identifiable. to see. One James Ward, for example, Richards even asserts that the exhibition described his “state of mental helpless- “contained more gadgets than any other ness” upon entering the exhibition (quoted type of article” (1990: 33), and although in Auerbach 1999: 95); there was too his definition—“a mechanical device so much for the mind to cope with. specialized as to be practically useless” Under the glass of Joseph Paxton’s (1990: 33)—is a personal one, the claim great greenhouse—inspired by the leaves has some merit. The catalog itself consti- of the Victoria amazonica—the object tutes a textual, visual pornography of the flowered for public display. As Thomas functional, technical object and is full of Richards suggests, at the beginning descriptions of each item and illustrations 10:1 March 2014

• of the decade that would see Charles of the most exciting offerings. Perhaps the

Darwin propose the interlinked evolution- most famous and spectacular of these in ary development of all life on earth the its form and hyperspecialized redundancy Great Exhibition’s “dense vegetation of was the “sportsman’s knife” by Rodgers Politics

things” (Richards 1990: 25) celebrated the and Sons of Sheffield, pictured deliriously flora and fauna of the world’s workshops spouting its eighty-plus blades and instru- within a “phylogeny of manufacture” ments like a remarkable, lethal species that advanced “a prescient vision of the of plant life (Royal Commission 1851: pl. Cultural evolutionary development of commod- 335). In plates and descriptions like these

4 ities” (1990: 25, 27). While scientists the publication prefigures those catalogs

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

of useless items pushed by salespersons (see Vries 1968). By the late nineteenth through mail slots until recent times. century, therefore, the group of objects the The Crystal Palace exhibited a world “gadget” would encompass had already of commodities, but few at the time pos- emerged, moving from the experimental sessed its objects. Though “stuffed with greenhouse of the Great Exhibition to everyday goods for the middle classes” become a profitable and well-advertised, if (Auerbach 1999: 121), this world was still distinctly odd, sector of consumer culture. only the promise of a domestic consumer Domestic media entertainments also revolution to come. Alongside the technical partook of the air of gadgetry. Within issues of perfecting their form and their three months of David Brewster’s gift to mass production remained the problem Queen Victoria of his stereoscope at the of distribution. The rise of department Great Exhibition, a quarter million viewers stores in the second half of the nineteenth had been sold in England and France. The century constituted an important solution, pleasures of the stereograph’s 3-D trans- but so too did developments in catalog formation would thrill generations until the shopping. In America, Sears, Roebuck and early twentieth century; the experience Company offered its first mail-order cata- was perhaps never better described than log in 1888, earning it the nickname, by the by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1861 as “a early twentieth century, “the consumer’s dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a kind bible.” By 1895 its 532 pages contained of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave every conceivable household item, while the body behind us and sail away into one its 1908 update included the ready-to- strange scene after another like disembod- assemble house to put them in. ied spirits” (quoted in Merrin 2005: 163). Gadget sales were helped by the By the century’s end the Victorian parlor late nineteenth-century transformation of and child’s bedroom were alive with the advertising, with the inclusion of visual technical phantasmagorias of the kaleido- images, more eye-catching typogra- scope, zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakisto- phy, and stronger manufacturer claims. scope, and praxinoscope and the fantastic The pages of late-Victorian newspapers projected scenes of the boxed children’s present one with a remarkable series of magic lanterns. unlikely novelties, with the well-off able to It took until World War I for the choose from remarkable objects such as terminology to catch up with this world a “baby care taker and exerciser” (1876); of devices. It was then that gadget began “Wood’s automatic revolving heel rubber- to lose its seafaring use to stand instead pad” (1880); “patent revolving bed- for a class of objects. Rudyard Kipling had tables” (1880); “a new food guard” (1882); briefly referred to “steam gadgets” in his “Dr. Scott’s electric hair brush” (1883); 1904 book Traffics and Discoveries (2007 cs i

“self-pouring tea-pots” (1888); “Harness’s [1904]: 90), but it was in his December t i eye-battery” (1886) as well as his “electro­ 1914 Daily Telegraph article “Canadians in o l P

pathic belt” (1891) and “electric corset” Camp” that he most clearly identified the (1892); through to “Vigor’s horse-action gadget, writing of the engineers: “They saddler” (1895); “the Leopold skirt grip” have installed decent cooking ranges and (1895); “Carr’s patent ladder tape” (1896); gas, and the men have already made them- “Clarke’s patent pyramid food-warmer” selves all sorts of handy little labour-saving Cultural

(1897); and “Claxton’s ear-cap” (1898) gadgets” (2009 [1914]). These gadgets 5

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

were clearly associated with invention and dissemination was aided by the ongoing novelty—as Vivian Drake, a British Royal mechanization of the household (see Gie- Flying Corps pilot, reported in his 1918 dion 1975 [1948]: 512–627), the invention memoir Above the Battle: “Our ennui was of new materials such as plastics, cheaper occasionally relieved by new gadgets— manufacturing methods, and the democra- ‘gadget’ is the Flying Corps slang for inven- tization of industrial consumer culture after tion! Some gadgets were good, some World War I. Although domestic gadgetry comic and some extraordinary” (2009 was successful, there remained a deep- [1918]: 191). rooted suspicion of its novelty and sec- Here begins the classic era of the ond-class status compared with the more gadget. Now the proliferating objects of spectacular triumphs of consumer produc- varied name and use were enclosed within tion. Kitchen gadgets suffered from their its all-encompassing category. No longer association with novelty, with the home, a placeholding name, “the gadget” was with the kitchen, and with the housewife. elevated to a mode of technical being, a What grabbed the popular imagination specific branch of mechanical object of in “the machine age” wasn’t the electric hyperspecialized functionality. Its precise can opener but instead the public achieve- definition, however, remained slippery in ments of technological modernity: the its range of applications and crossover factory system and assembly production; with other categories. At its best it was skyscrapers, power stations, and elec- associated with labor-saving, invention, tric dams; and aircraft, ocean liners, and and innovation—suggesting a trouble- modern railroads. The automobile, not the free life, realized through the creation of electric lamp stove, became the aspira- new devices to remove the problems tional symbol of mass consumption in the and annoyances of daily life and labor. At 1920s and 1930s. its worst it was associated with inflated But domestic developments had their claims, unclear needs, dubious provenance own significance. Following Le Corbus- or amateurish origin, suspect lasting value, ier’s famous 1923 dictum, there was an and cheap gimmickry and novelty. Hence increasing tendency to reconceptualize “the gadget” came to represent both the house as a machine. Here the house- the leading wave of technical invention wife was repositioned as the manager of (and the promised future of its perfected, the household, delegating tasks to her everyday evolution) and something new labor-saving workers, kitchen gad- darker—sidetracks and dead ends off that gets. Though the famous eating machine evolutionary line. Like the “sportsman’s in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern 10:1 March 2014

• knife,” these were potentially pathological Times satirized Taylorist ideas of worker

and excrescent products, objects whose efficiency, it pointed toward real develop­ hyperdevotion to specialized functionality ments in domestic automation and the led to excessive forms caught in their own gadgetry of food preparation. Ivor Jepson’s Politics

hyperrealization of solutions to invented “Sunbeam Mixmaster,” first appearing on problems and condemned to obsolescence the shelves in 1930, for example, would from their own uselessness. become one of the most famous appli- These tensions mark the dissemi- ances of the century, helping establish Cultural nation of the gadget through everyday the kitchen as the home of the modern

6 life over the following decades. This gadget.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

The US magazine Popular Science American thought and action more Monthly provides an insight into the gad- deeply . . . than is commonly understood” get’s domestic progress. It carried regular (1981: 112). Banham describes the gizmo as photo features on the “latest aids for the “a characteristic class of U.S. products— housewife” (April 1931), illustrated with perhaps the most characteristic,” offer- happy women posing with their latest ing a definition—“a small, self-contained devices. The March 1922 edition, for unit of high performance in relation to example, included a feature on “household its size and cost, whose function is to brighteners” such as a pistol gas lighter transform some undifferentiated set of and foldable juice filter, while the October circumstances to a condition nearer human 1927 edition included a table-mounted desires” (1981: 110)—whose abstraction string bean slicer, a handheld drapery and succeeds in highlighting again the prob- upholstery vacuum cleaner, a miniature lems of the category and its etymological electric range, a pea sheller, and a grape- and material history. fruit core remover. The 1930s saw the Apart from Banham’s emphasis upon greatest range of new gadgets, with the the gadget’s role in the American pio- magazine showcasing an electric perma- neer and domestic experiences and his nent wave machine and electric handheld observation that the “social usefulness” food mixer (April 1931); an egg opener and of gadgets has changed as they have separator and a hand-powered vegetable come to rely on a supporting technological slicer (March 1933); a self-opening table, infrastructure requiring expert knowledge portable potato baker, and waterproof heat- (1981: 108, 112), his analysis is limited. ing pad (April 1933); a portable gas-torch Recognizing his own inability to solve its fire lighter, a magnet can opener, individ- conundrum, Banham’s most telling remark ual teapots, a mop cleaner, a milk-bottle is that twenty years after Giedion “the pitcher attachment, combination serving subject still lacks a radical theorist who will trays, and a closed onion slicer (February range freely over departmental barriers 1934); disappearing electric cords, an elec- and disciplinary interfaces and come back tric air-compressor cream whip, an electric with a comprehensive historical account of buffet warmer, a safety wringer, and an the rise of portable gadgetry, and deduce electric air cooler (July 1934) (see Modern from it some informed projections of the Mechanix 2013). good or evil future it affords” (1981: 114). The popular prejudice against such Almost half a century later we’re still wait- objects led Sigfried Giedion to attempt an ing for that account. Few since have even “anonymous history” of everyday tech- noticed the category, let alone theorized nology in his book Mechanization Takes the category. Marshall McLuhan includes Command (1975 [1948]: 2–4). It was this a chapter titled “The Gadget Lover” in cs i

project that inspired Reyner Banham’s Understanding Media (1994: 41–47) but, t i discussion of overlooked objects of design, in his inimitable way, makes no mention o l P

The Architecture of a Well-Tempered of gadgets in it. All of this makes Baudril- Environment (1969). Banham had provided lard’s discussions of the gadget in his first one of the first attempts to grasp the gad- two books, The System of Objects (1996 get, or “gizmo,” in his short article “The [1968]) and The Consumer Society (1998 Great Gizmo” (1965), a discussion of an [1970]), especially valuable. Cultural

object that has, Banham says, “coloured 7

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

“Everything Is Becoming Gadgetry” meaning highlights his problem of dis- Baudrillard’s The System of Objects is a tinguishing these two categories (1996 classic of structuralist, interpretive semiol- [1968 ]: 114 ). ogy, drawing on Roland Barthes’s (1973a, If, like Banham, Baudrillard struggles 1973b, 1992) Saussurean analysis of this to define the gadget, he has, at least, new consumer sign world, but developing noticed its rise and proliferation: “It is from it a broader social theory of consump- frightening to consider just how many tion. Consumption in this sense is “an things fall into the category of gizmos, activity consisting of the systematic manip- just how many of our objects are covered ulation of signs”—of the idealistic manip- by this empty concept.” Today, he says, ulation and combination of sign-objects “there extends a panoply of wondrous organized into a system governed by a accessories culminating in the immense “code” of signification (Baudrillard 1996 industrial output of everyday objects— [1968]: 200). For all the high theory of gadgets or gizmos.” This excess of objects The System of Objects, Baudrillard echoes overwhelms our linguistic and cognitive Giedion in his emphasis upon the every- faculties, he argues; “our civilization has day and the domestic sphere, especially more and more objects and fewer and objects such as lighting, clocks, mirrors, fewer names for them” such that it is colors, and materials. Like the committee “impossible to classify the whole range of the Great Exhibition, he succeeds in of obsessional polyfunctionality” (Baudril- reducing the world of consumer manu- lard 1996 [1968]: 114–15). Importantly, facture to four categories: the functional, language is again implicated; the “gadjet” the nonfunctional, the metafunctional or that originated with the proliferation of dysfunctional, and the socio-ideological technical objects became a category of systems of objects. objects whose contemporary expansion The gadget finds its place in the meta- now exceeds our naming capacities. functional system, with Baudrillard tracing The gadget, however, is special for its origins to the baroque, whose “demi- Baudrillard. Though the gizmo is function- urgic formalism,” he says, foreshadows ally limited, its “imaginary” is “universal,” on the artistic plane “all the themes and he argues, signifying not just its own oper- myths of our technological civilization.” ation but “the total operation of the world.” The gadget has a similar excessive quality, The gadget and gizmo suggest that for Baudrillard argues: at its farthest remove every need there is a technical object that from objective use-value it is “completely can solve it; hence their real referent is taken over by the imaginary,” pursuing an a world “reinvented in accordance with 10:1 March 2014

• “obsessional” functionality and becom- the technical reality principle” (Baudril- ing either so specifically functional as to lard 1996 [1968]: 116). What the gadget be “absolutely useless” or so polyfunc- reveals is an entire world that appears to tional as to answer no need other than its us in its operationality as something trans- Politics

own functioning (1996 [1968]: 113–14). formed by, functioning through, and as Whereas the “gadget” comes close to solvable by technical objects. As such the uselessness, Baudrillard says that the gadget may be the key technical object. “gizmo” does at least have an operational But Baudrillard’s value lies not just in Cultural value—the fact remains that it works— this theorization of the gadget but also in

8 though his admission of its indeterminate his anticipation of its future development.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

Noting the change in our objects from an “the technical object” with its array of “animistic” structure that bears witness to functions such as “the typewriter which our presence and bodies to an “energetic” can write in 13 different character sets” or structure and technical objects that “evoke “the IBM dictation machine.” The gadget a virtual energy, and are thus less recepta- emerges, he argues, when the technical cles of our presence than vehicles of our object is “consigned to mental practices of dynamic self-image,” Baudrillard sees a a magical type or to modish social prac- further stage of development: tices” (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 112), that is, with the production of needs that are in Modes of the imaginary follow modes of the mind. Thus it is the addition of func- technological evolution, and it is therefore to be tions in the technical object that tip it into expected that the next mode of technical effi- gadgetry. ciency will give rise to a new imaginary mode. The gadget exemplifies the contem- At present its traits are difficult to discern, but porary technical consumer object in other perhaps, in the wake of the animistic and ener- ways. Explicitly intended “for secondary getic modes, we shall need to turn our attention functions,” the gadget is part of the logic to the structures of a cybernetic imaginary of fashion and prestige, or a fetishistic mode whose central myth will no longer be logic, Baudrillard says, one, he adds, that that of an absolute organicism, nor that of an “is the dominant tendency for all objects absolute functionalism, but instead that of an today” (1998 [1970]: 112). At the leading absolute interrelatedness of the world. (1996 edge of the semiotic process, the gad- [1968 ]: 118 ) get “is part of a systematic logic which lays hold of the whole of daily life in the Though he says little more about this spectacular mode,” casting “a suspicion development, it would prove to be a of artificiality, fakery and uselessness . . . key insight into the gadget’s future form over the whole environment of human and and use. social relations” (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: Baudrillard returns to the gadget in 112). Despite this tendency, Baudrillard The Consumer Society, though with its is ambivalent about its hold. While the tendency to merge with other objects gadget is an “impoverished” form, it there is a problem still of its definition. also partakes of “the exaltedness of the His solution is to reverse the problem, new”—that “sublime period of the object” to see all other objects as converging on in which it may attain “the intensity, if the gadget form. The gadget is “the truth not the quality, of the emotion of love” of the object in consumer society,” he (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 113). Here, in argues, as its “functional uselessness” the fascination of its newness, the gadget is echoed by all other consumer objects achieves the same “mode of intense rela- cs i

since their own “objective function” has tion” as the child experiences in his or her t i disappeared in favor of their “sign func- toys (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 113). o l P

tion.” Hence today “anything can become Baudrillard foregrounds here the a gadget and everything potentially is one” attraction of the gadget and our relation- (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 112). His exam- ship with it. The gadget is defined, he ples of the gadget now expand, moving says, “by the way we act with it,” which beyond the obviously useless like the is not utilitarian or symbolic “but ludic”: Cultural

polished cylinder paperweight to include “It is the ludic which increasingly governs 9

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

our relations to objects, persons, culture, and Baudrillard never entirely succeeds leisure and, at times, work, and also poli- in pinning down this “empty concept.” tics. It is the ludic which is becoming the Nevertheless, his analysis is one of the dominant tone of our daily habitus, to the best we have, and there is an awareness extent indeed that everything—objects, in it that there is more at stake than we goods, relationships, services—is becom- might assume, that these overlooked and ing gadgetry or gimmickry” (Baudrillard ridiculed objects might hold a clue as to 1998 [1970]: 113–14). The ludic, Baudrillard the direction and future of our technical says, is a “particular type of investment” consumer culture. consisting of “a play with combinations, a combinatorial modulation: a play on the Go, Go, Gadget! technical variants or potentialities of As Kipling indicates, by World War I gad- the object” (1998 [1970]: 114). The ludic, get was associated with innovation and therefore, is a specific mode of behav- novelty. The use of the term by military ior, one fascinated “by the operation engineers and the flying corps is impor- of machines, by childlike discovery and tant, however, in highlighting another path manipulation, by vague or passionate curi- of the gadget’s development: government osity for the ‘play’ of mechanisms, the and military research. It’s no coincidence play of colours, the play of variants”: “This that when the scientists on the Manhattan is the very soul of passionate play, but Project needed a code name for their new diffuse and generalized and hence less creation to hide its identity while empha- cogent, emptied of its pathos and become sizing its novelty they hit upon the term. mere curiosity—something between Hence, with the first bomb test on July 16, indifference and fascination, which might 1945, “the gadget” inaugurated the be defined by its opposition to passion” atomic age. (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 114). If passion The exigencies of World War II and is a concrete relationship and total invest- the Cold War spurred numerous techni- ment, our “ludic curiosity” in contrast is cal innovations. The military funding of merely an interest in “the play of ele- computing and network research would ments.” It remains a relationship of semi- lay the basis for our digital gadgets, but otic consumption rather than of symbolic the military also funded the development passion—in the abstract manipulation of of miniaturized devices for the intelligence the object’s functions and its fashionable community. These high-tech scientific gad- prestige. As Baudrillard concludes, “Con- gets would capture the public imagi­nation sumption is combinatorial investment: it is in the 1960s with the success of the 10:1 March 2014

• exclusive of passion” (1998 [1970]: 114). spy genre. Though Ian Fleming’s James

Baudrillard’s discussion of the gadget Bond novels contained few gadgets, the is curious. He is one of the few thinkers to popularity of the customized briefcase, recognize its rise and significance, yet it is garrote watch, and dagger shoe in the Politics

also one of the few objects to elude him. 1963 film From Russia with Love ensured The System of Objects and The Consumer that they were foregrounded in 1964’s Society are notable for the acuity of their Goldfinger and the rest of the franchise. targets and analyses and the continued Television took up the genre with shows Cultural relevance of their ideas; however, their such as Get Smart, which was broadcast treatment of the gadget is less coherent, in 1965–70 and satirized the gadget craze 10

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

(hiding phones in shoes, a car cigarette saw numerous devices whose usability lighter, a steering-wheel, and even a full- gave them the air of gadgetry—such as sized phone). Get Smart would influence the Phonemate Model 400 answering the popular children’s cartoon Inspector machine (1971), Sony’s LV-1901 Betamax Gadget, aired in 1983–86, with its leading VCR (1975), and the TPS-L2 “Walkman” actor, Don Adams, also voicing the titular (1979)—but the key development was the cyborg detective whose exclamation “Go, invention of the cheap microprocessor with go, Gadget!” prefaced the appearance of the Intel 4004 in 1971. Its most important a range of tools from his body. The future effect was in aiding the emergence of the of man, it suggested, was to be cosubstan- home computer in the late 1970s, but in tial with gadgetry. the years prior to this development it was Science also inspired a number of real gadgets and toys that sparked the domes- gadgets in the postwar period. In 1946 Bell tic digital revolution. Laboratories’ Miles V. Sullivan patented an With falling prices and increasing “activated amusement device”—a glass power, integrated circuits were placed in heat engine marketed by Tico Laboratories a range of objects, spurring developments in the late 1940s as “the bobble bird.” in toys, telephony, music, gaming, video, This “drinking bird” toy, endlessly dipping home appliances, and consumer objects. its beak into water, sold in huge numbers Texas Instruments’ SR-10 electronic calcu- and became a popular cultural phenome- lator and the Hamilton Pulsar LED watch— non. Another scientifically inspired device both from 1972—were pioneering digital was the “Newton’s cradle,” created and gadgets, while Polaroid’s SX-70 camera marketed by Simon Prebble in 1967. from the same year also included chips. Beginning the craze for “executive toys,” Home video gaming also preceded home it helped ensure the gadget’s invasion of computing with the (pre-microprocessor work space with its distractions. Con- but still digital) Magnavox Odyssey temporary science fiction offered its own appearing in 1972 and Sears’s Pong in view of a future eased by gadgets, from 1975. By 1978 chips had invaded the toy the flip-top communicator in the 1966–69 box with Texas Instruments’ “Speak- series Star Trek that would inspire mobile and-Spell” and Milton Bradley’s “Simon” phone design (Cooper 2009) to the iPad- memory game, while the Magnavox Model style devices used in the 1968 film 2001: 800 Discovision videodisc player appeared A Space Odyssey and the 1973–79 British the same year. series The Tomorrow People that would The 1980s saw further developments later be used to challenge Apple patents in digital gadgets, including the first laptop, (Farrell 2011). Epson’s HX-20 (1981); compact disc (CD) By the 1970s, however, the public players such as Sony’s CDP-101 (1982); cs i

didn’t need to look to action films or sci-fi Sony’s “Watchman” portable TV (1982) t i for gadgets since futuristic devices began and “Discman” portable CD player (1984); o l P

to enter the home. We forget now, but mobile phones such as the Motorola it was the gadget that began the age of DynaTAC 8000X (1983); electronic organiz- popular digital technology, for within a few ers such as the Sharp OZ-7000 (1988); and years of Baudrillard’s claim of a com- popular handheld gaming devices such as ing cybernetic phase gadgets began to the Nintendo Game Boy (1989). It was the Cultural incorporate cheap electronics. The 1970s 1990s, however, that saw the explosion of 11

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

digital gadgets as part of a broader trans- (1999) to Animagic’s Fluffy-Go-Walkies formation in home computing, networking, (2010) wandered across carpets freshly and digital media. The year 1994 saw vacuumed by iRobot’s Roomba Intelligent the first widely marketed webcam, the Floorvac (2002). Connectix QuickCam; 1998 saw one of the Again, we can’t escape the problem first MP3 players, the Diamond Multimedia of definition. All these objects take their RIO PMP300, and Panasonic’s portable place within other histories—of technol- DVD player, the DVD-L10. Early personal ogy, invention, calculation, tools, toys, digital assistants, or PDAs, appeared, communication, and entertainment—and such as the Apple Newton MessagePad each could be categorized in different (1994) and the PalmPilot 1000 (1996), and ways, yet they are all, in some way, essen- the TiVo HDR 110 was released in 1999. tially gadgets. So what does this word Beginning in the mid-1990s, mobile teleph- mean today? The early twentieth-century ony tipped, aided by the first clamshell, concept of a simple class of mechanical, the Motorola StarTAC in 1996, while digital hyperfunctional object associated with cameras and video cameras became com- novelty and amateurishness can’t capture mercially successful. the contemporary range of digital objects, Through the 2000s, new develop­ the richness of their uses, or their cultural ments fed off each other. Improved success. The gadget’s life and place within connectivity and speed and increasing society is clearly different from what it was capabilities turned devices into multi- a century ago. Though not entirely satisfac- media, networked technologies, while tory, Baudrillard’s work provides a useful devices increasingly meshed together starting point for understanding what this with new online Web 2.0 services, further life and place might be. driving consumer take-up. Phones soon By the early millennium, Baudril- had cameras and video as standard, and lard’s claim that “everything is becoming some designs, such as the Motorola Razr gadgetry” seemed justifiable. With an V3, became essential fashion accesso- emerging world of always-on connections, ries. They also got smarter, with Internet his claim of a new cybernetic imaginary capability. The Blackberry smartphone was based on the “absolute interrelatedness released in 2002; music players tipped of the world” also appeared prescient. with the third-generation iPod (2003); the The interconnection of people through the Nintendo DS appeared in 2004; the iPhone Internet and mobile devices is obvious, but and iPod Touch appeared in 2007; cheaper it is built upon a primary interconnection cameras such as Pure Digital Technologies’ of technologies, with digitalization allow- 10:1 March 2014

• Flip (2007) expanded the video market; ing the incorporation of all prior analogue

e-readers began to take off with the Kindle forms as data, the passage of this data (2007); the “netbook” appeared with the across networks, and its easy transfer Asus Eee PC 700 (2007); tablet comput- between devices. Hence digital technol- Politics

ing took off with the iPad (2010); and the ogy makes not only people and places Nintendo 3DS was released in 2011. New but all information and content accessible, gaming experiences emerged such as the interrelated, and intercommunicable. The Wii’s gestural system (2006) and the Xbox stand-alone gadget is thus valueless. The Cultural 360 Kinect motion-capture system (2010). energetic gadget’s total operationality of Meanwhile, robot toys, from Sony’s Aibo the world, as Baudrillard suggests, has 12

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

been superseded by the cybernetic gadget empowered media consumption but didn’t and the total interrelatedness and availabil- significantly democratize production or ity of the world. distribution. The full flowering of the broad- This digital transformation has brought cast system in the late nineteenth and a sea change in the gadget’s social status. early twentieth centuries consolidated this Gadgets have lost their air of amateur- situation, with only “big media” companies ishness and poor reputation to become and corporations having the capital, organi- one of the most important categories of zational capacity, and ability to mass- consumer electronics, produced by some produce and mass-distribute content of the most successful technology com- for mass consumption (Gillmor 2004). panies in the world. For all that, they have Individual communication remained limited managed to retain their novelty status, to amateur technologies and forms (e.g., with their ever-expanding range of photocopied fanzines and local newslet- features becoming their key selling point. ters) and personal media such as letters, Hence gadgets today exist in a “perpet- telegraphy, and telephony, each of which ual beta” (O’Reilly 2005); tested in the suffered from significant limitations. Cultur- marketplace and regularly updated with ally, there was little interest in peer produc- new iterations and features, they achieve a tion; only professional content had value. permanent and now positive “newness.” Digital technologies changed this situation. Leaving behind cupboards, toy boxes, Networked computing, mobile technolo- and executive desks, the digital gadget gies, democratized productive tools (includ- has become the epitome of high tech, ing publishing and editing software, digital the aspirational consumer object, and cameras, and video cameras), broadband perhaps the definitive contemporary form and Wi-Fi networks, and online Web 2.0 of the spectacular society. “The specta- platforms helped create an epochal shift in cle,” Guy Debord writes, “is the moment the social structure of communication. when the commodity has attained the This shift was the creation of total occupation of social life,” and the “me-dia”—the explosion of individual, products of One Infinite Loop, Cuper- horizontal, mediated interpersonal and tino, California, especially—unveiled in public communication. It has propelled us much-anticipated launches to fawning from a top-down, one-to-many “broad- media, reviewed by awestruck technorati, cast era” dominated by “big media” to a queued for on release day, and unboxed “postbroadcast era” characterized by the on YouTube—appear to achieve precisely ability of individuals to produce and dis- this occupation. “The world one sees is its seminate their own content and connect world,” Debord adds, a comment perfectly to and share others’, all outside of tradi- summarizing the refractive lens offered by tional informational structures. Me-dia is a cs i

the digital gadget (1992: para. 42). Ptolemaic revolution in communication; it t i Central to digital gadgets’ success represents the reorientation of information o l P

has been their role in the rise of “me-dia” around individuals, empowering them as (Merrin 2008; forthcoming). Historically, both producers and distributors and also the majority of the population has had as the creators and managers of their very little ability to produce and share own ecology of experiences and content. information. The print revolution expanded Me-dia thus incorporates and subsumes Cultural the volume of information available and traditional media, which now takes its 13

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

place within a personalized media world handbags they transform everyday life into arranged according to our own interests, their own connected sphere, extending decisions, attention, and choices. Hence their influence into every realm. In addi- the structural shift in communication is tion, while the classic gadget was defined matched by a shift in value as our own by its hyperspecialized functionality, the creations, messages, comments, images, digital gadget is defined by its hyperfunc- and shared links become more important tionality. Beyond telephony, e-mails, and to us than anything produced by the mass texting, the smartphone allows me to media. Today mainstream media content read books, newspapers, and magazines; is ignored in favor of, or serves as the watch videos, TV, and films; access social background to and inspiration for, our own networking sites; follow the news; stream communications. A comment or “like” on or play music; listen to the radio; access our social media profile is of more interest any images and information; and purchase and value to us at any moment than the goods online. Meanwhile, apps enable me current output of entire media industries. to take a hearing or vision test; monitor If me-dia remains a form of alienation, my fitness, diet, or workout; test my urine; it is a subtle one. Whereas for Marx the track my bowel movements; use a stetho- industrial workers’ productions confronted scope; get surf reports; follow weather them as something external and “alien” to patterns; track aircraft flights; make a will; them (1981: 64), our me-dia productions measure my sexual performance; play confront us instead as intimately tied to virtual farts; launch a rim-shot effect to us. They appear not as the “estrange- accompany my jokes; wave a virtual lighter ment” and loss of the self but precisely at concerts; and drink a virtual pint. as its expression, as the external site Whereas the pathology of the clas- and privileged holder of our personal life sic gadget lay in its devotion to its own and secrets and the means of our most functionality in order to serve the user— intimate realization. The digital gadget smoothing the user’s labor or giving him or is thus not merely an informational and her the pleasure of its performance—the communicational device; it is central to digital gadget smoothly offers us a range our sense of self. No longer a peripheral of functions and pleasures, but in doing so technological form, its assimilation into it transfers its pathology to us. The obses- our personal life and its expression thrusts sion now lies not with the device but with it into the center of the technological and us, in our desire to return continuously social environment. to the object, to pick it up, check it, and Digital technology has led to other recheck it. Seeing someone pick up their 10:1 March 2014

• changes in the gadget’s nature and capac- phone compels us to mimic them, and we

ities. Whereas classic-era gadgets were panic when we can’t find it. The gadget targeted at specific users (e.g., women or that once had a suspicion of uselessness executives) and specific places (e.g., the now overwhelms us with its usefulness. Politics

kitchen or garage), digital gadgets move We can never exhaust its functions; easily between family members (the work instead, its functions and use exhaust us. tablet, for example, quickly becomes No longer left on shelves or buried the child’s toy) and between parts of the in drawers, gadgets no longer languish. Cultural house. Indeed, this mobility is central Instead, we can’t let them be; we are to their success; carried in pockets and repeatedly drawn back. Like the child 14

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

Sigmund Freud describes in “Beyond the fondle” (Isaacson 2011: 387). As Maya Lin Pleasure Principle” (2010 [1922]) whose argues, though Jobs embraced a Zen-like play with a wooden reel wound with simplicity his objects were not cold but string (throwing it out and pulling it back) “fun”: “He’s passionate and super-serious transforms the trauma of parental absence about design, but at the same time there’s into a game in which repetition offers a sense of play” (quoted in Isaacson 2011: reassurance, so we too conjure away the 370). Apple’s retail stores expressed the trauma of being alone with the obsessive same philosophy in eschewing lines of repetition of our gadget play. Superficially, shelving and sales counters in favor of cus- at least, the gadget appears superior to tomers simply playing with the products the child’s reel since answered messages (Isaacson 2011: 370). and texts appear to bring us the presence Arguably, these products originated of another, but in reality the reel’s satisfac- in play. The iPad owes much to Alan Kay’s tion eludes us. In contrast to the wooden idea for a touch-tablet “Dynabook.” Kay’s reel that can be pulled back, we have essay “A Personal Computer for Children no control over the gadget’s response; of All Ages” (1972) opens with a picture of unlike in “reel time,” the real-time gadget two children playing with their connected continually tantalizes us with the possibility Dynabooks and emphasizes throughout of another message in the seconds since the idea of a tablet for playful exploration we last checked. The impossibility of the and creative learning. It was a lesson cybernetic loop ever being finally com- Apple learned. As Michael Noer points out, pleted and closed only makes us aware of Jobs’s iPad is “a powerful computer that our powerlessness, emptiness, and lack an illiterate six-year-old can use without of control. instruction” (quoted in Isaacson 2011: As Baudrillard suggests, this hyper- 498); it really is a computer “for children of functionality and usefulness highlights all ages” to play with. Kay and Adele Gold- the importance of the “ludic” dimen- berg, in their essay “Personal Dynamic sion. The subject of “play” has attracted Media,” even described the emerging considerable attention, especially in the desktop-PC system as “an interim Dyna- emerging field of video-game studies (see book” (2003 [1977]: 393), implying that Frasca 1999), but Baudrillard’s position the entire PC paradigm was a detour to the is instead McLuhanist, emphasizing not realization of these tablets for play. game content and experience but the play Baudrillard, naturally, is less impressed with the form itself. Though early hack- with digital media’s creative potential, ers enjoyed playing with machines (Levy seeing all computer interaction as the 2010), historically most people have found working through of preprogrammed computer interaction difficult and confus- capacities—“an automatic run-through of cs i

ing. More than any company, Apple made all the possibilities” (2002: 178). Even the t i digital technologies easy and pleasurable, Internet only simulates a space of freedom o l P

with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad espe- and discovery, he says, in offering “a mul- cially helping redefine the gadget and its tiple, but conventional, space, in which the experience. An important part of design for operator interacts with known elements, Steve Jobs was playing with the proposed pre-existent sites, established codes. object: “Jobs liked to be shown physical Nothing exists beyond these search param- Cultural objects that he could feel, inspect, and eters” (Baudrillard 2002: 179). Baudrillard 15

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

is right that our play with gadgets is “a phone or Internet service provider, with play with combinations,” but his vision of the approved operating system and digital their limitations is now less convincing. store owner, with the companies that pro- This is because the once ludic gadget is duce the content or apps one downloads, now hyperludic. Whereas one played with with analytic companies embedded in this the classic gadget to observe it perform content, and with the platforms, websites, and complete its single function, the and online services that one accesses and hyperfunctional digital gadget is designed that record one’s interactions, clicks, and for endless functioning. We can never activities. This system of “vertical integra- exhaust our play with gadgets or complete tion” goes far beyond anything produced their performance. The mobile phone is a in the broadcast era, including all aspects perpetual thumb-motion machine, trapping of the individual and his or her use. us in a Moebian cybernetic loop of endless This integration also includes our responses and replies. bodies and habits, our physical pleasure Why this matters is because Baudril- in and absorption by the hyperfunctional lard sees play as functioning as a mode of and hyperludic. Digital gadgets demand integration. His analysis of consumption to be held, manipulated, and explored; followed, respectively, Barthes, Thorstein scroll wheels, home buttons, and touch Veblen, and Herbert Marcuse to see it, screens pull us in, and touches, taps, simultaneously, as a system of communi- double taps, pinches, zooms, rotations, cation, of social hierarchy and distinction, swipes, swooshes, and flicks now consti- and of social control (Baudrillard 1998 tute a new gestural grammar. The gadgets [1970]: 60–61, 94). In The Consumer produce this grammar, standardizing new Society, Baudrillard rejects the idea of con- bodily gestures, rhythms, and habits, and sumption as a free, private, individual act companies have even tried to patent these. fulfilling anthropological needs, seeing it Apple’s patent 7844915, filed in 2007, instead as “an active, collective behaviour: covered touch-screen document scrolling it is something enforced, a morality, an including the “pinch to zoom” gesture, institution. It is a whole system of values, while its patent 7479949, filed in 2008, with all that expression implies in terms covered a range of multitouch gestures of group integration and social control (Apple 2009, 2010). Both were ruled functions” (1998 [1970]: 81). Hence invalid in preliminary decisions in Decem- consumption is a “mode of socialization,” ber 2012, not because our bodily gestures integrating the individual and establishing can’t be privately owned and integrated his or her conformity to the system and its but because, in being covered by prior 10:1 March 2014

• code (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 81). patents, they already are.

The digital gadget most obviously For the Baudrillard of The System functions as a means of integration as a of Objects even freedom can serve key category of consumer electronics. as a cover for incorporation. The semiotic Politics

But unlike earlier consumer relationships system, for example, liberates us from that involved no knowledge or relationship earlier, more weighty symbolic systems beyond the point of sale, digital gadgets to transform us into “an active engineer incorporate the user in a series of ongo- of atmosphere,” free to play with and Cultural ing and monitored relationships—with combine signs (Baudrillard 1996 [1968]: the technology company, with one’s own 26). Hence, in pulling us even more into 16

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

its code, mastery of the semiotic is also a of exchange itself.” Hence the media mastery by the semiotic. So today’s users actually fabricate a “non-communication” are freed from broadcast-era mass media (Baudrillard 1981 [1972]: 169). Baudrillard’s to become active engineers—operators rejection of all technological mediation was and managers—of their own gadgets, an extreme position in the broadcast era, devoting themselves to recharging them, but it is even more counterintuitive in a dig- checking them, and deleting, clearing, and ital era where me-dia brings us closer than updating them. This management consti- ever, creating friendships and communities tutes, therefore, an ongoing labor, while and linking us at every moment to one our activities also constitute another mode another. Baudrillard, however, is uncom- of “free,” “immaterial,” or “digital labor” as promising: the mobile phone user “talking every click and swipe, every app we use or away to no one,” he says, represents “a page we browse, produces data about us living insult to the passers-by” (2003: 24). and hence value for private companies (Ter- The “incrustation of the network in your ranova 2003; Scholz 2012). If the classic-era head” leads, he says, to a state of living gadget, therefore, was “labor-saving,” the death (Baudrillard 2003: 82, 24). For digital gadget is labor-producing. Baudrillard, therefore, our digital gadgets Thus we can see that our play is only extend noncommunication. not only less empowered than we might While the reach of mass media into assume—in being designed into our tech- the lives of individuals was once limited, nologies and integrating us with them— we now carry our own personal means of but it also forms a central part of the digital noncommunication everywhere. In their business model, integrating us into a phys- instant availability, the time and attention iological-informational economics. As John they take, the physical incorporation they Armitage argues, the logic of hypercapital- produce, and our connected disconnection ist digital media cannot tolerate nonpartic- from the world, digital gadgets massively ipation in its system: “The hypermodern extend the mass media’s abolition of real attitude is constituted in such a way that it experience, relations, and communication. cannot endure any people who have never Increasingly, on a physical level, our bodies been online or even any who decide to and minds are simply elsewhere. Digital stay among the disappeared” (2013). In gadgets’ attraction also lies in flattering this “doctrine of compulsory appearance,” us. Whereas the mass media treated us all must appear, take their place, be net- as part of a mass audience, in revolving worked and available, and be physiologi- around ourselves—our posts, mes- cally and informationally integrated into the sages, responses, notifications, opinions, teletechnological system. thoughts, activities, interests, and This physiological dimension is central relationships—our me-dia rightly treats cs i

to Baudrillard’s critique of media. In his us as the most important element in our t i essay “Requiem for the Media,” Baudril- own media ecologies. Our digital gadgets o l P

lard argues that “media ideology operates make this flattering world ubiquitous and at the level of form” in the “separation” permanently available for our play and of humanity that media produce. “In their perusal. form and very operation . . . media induce Though McLuhan’s chapter “The a social relation,” he says, one involving Gadget Lover” in Understanding Media Cultural “the abstraction, separation and abolition fails to mention the gadget, its subtitle, 17

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

“Narcissus as Narcosis,” is important but it is likely that our problems with the (1994: 41). McLuhan’s theme is about real will continue (Lacey 2013). how we “become fascinated” by our own extended images, fail to recognize our- Conclusion selves, and, like Narcissus, fall prey to the We can see a trajectory of “the gadget,” narcotizing effects of our extensions to from a placeholding name to a specialized, become their “servo-mechanism” (1994: functional class of consumer objects 41, 46). Our gadgets perfect exactly this to a contemporary digital, hyperludic, narcotization: head down, thumb tapping hyperfunctional form that achieves a new and swiping, we become oblivious to centrality in consumer culture; in informa- everything else. The defining media image tion, communication, and entertainment; of the twenty-first century may well be the and in our own personal lives. In doing January 2011 shopping-mall closed-circuit so, it also achieves a mode of individual television (CCTV) footage of Cathy Cruz integration exceeding earlier forms of Marrero walking straight into a fountain industrial machinery and broadcast while on her phone (YouTube 2011). media, all of which could be left behind Though, to date, little remarked upon, or included in spaces and spheres of our gadgets are remaking our relationship life outside of their direct influence. Dis- with the world, often with dangerous or cussing the early history of computing, fatal consequences. Accidents from driving J. G. Ballard suggested that computers while on the phone or texting (illegal in the would one day “mount a more subtle United Kingdom since December 2003) take-over bid,” fulfilling his warning that have cost numerous lives (see, e.g., BBC “the totalitarian systems of the future will 2013), while the effects of “texting while be subservient and ingratiating” (1998: walking” are increasingly recognized. A 50). The personal, digital, me-dia gadget 2012 US report estimates that over eleven realizes exactly this direction, holding hundred people were treated in hospital us closer, traveling everywhere with us, emergency departments after accidents and integrating us more thoroughly than with handheld electronic devices (Glatter before. And it shows little sign of stopping: 2012). Footage of these incidents has new, wearable devices such as Google become a popular entertainment on You- Glass and smartwatches threaten to Tube. In April 2012 a TV station helicopter extend this personal integration and our following a wild bear on the loose in a Los physiological and mental alienation. Thus Angeles suburb filmed a man on the phone the “gadjet” that originated as the apha- walking straight up to it before fleeing sic expression of our mind, producing an 10:1 March 2014

• in panic (YouTube 2012a); in July 2012, alienation of our mouths as we struggled

in Philadelphia, a man on his phone was to find the words we wanted, ends with filmed walking off a train platform onto the the integration and enclosure of our minds tracks (YouTube 2012b); while in January and the numbing and narcotization of our Politics

2013 a UK woman was caught on CCTV entire bodies. As Baudrillard suggests, and walking into a canal in Birmingham while as Marrero demonstrates, this is a world of texting (YouTube 2013). The May 2013 public “zombies” cast into an electromag- launch of a new app, “CrashAlert,” using netic sleep (2003: 24). Cultural the phone’s camera to scan for coming obstacles, might be of some help here, 18

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The RISE of the GADGET and HYPERLUDIC ME-DIA

References BBC. 2013. “M62 Crash Deaths Caused by Lorry Apple. 2009. “Touch Screen Device, Method, and Driver as He Read Text.” BBC News Online, Graphical User Interface for Determining August 29, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england Commands by Applying Heuristics.” US -humber-23876320. Patent 7479949, www.google.co.uk/patents Butler, Samuel. 2009 [1863]. “The Book of Machines.” /US7479949. In Erewhon, www.hoboes.com/FireBlade Apple. 2010. “Application Programming Interfaces for /Fiction/Butler/Erewhon/erewhon23. Scrolling Operations.” US Patent 7844915, www Carlyle, Thomas. 2004 [1829]. “Signs of the Times.” .google.co.uk/patents/US7844915. The Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org Armitage, John. 2013. “A Google Home Inspector /authors/carlyle/signs1.html. Calls: On the Rise of the Doctrine of Compulsory Cooper, Martin. 2009. “How William Shatner Appearance.” CTheory, March 14, www.ctheory Changed the World—Martin Cooper, Mobile .net/articles.aspx?id=718. Phone Inventor.” YouTube video, Handel Auerbach, Jeffrey. 1999. The Great Exhibition of Productions, December 8, www.youtube.com 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT: Yale /watch?v=wN-_VA5HFwM. University Press. Debord, Guy. 1992. Society of the Spectacle, and Other Ballard, J. G. 1998. “Impressions of Speed.” In Films. Edited and translated by Richard Parry. Speed—Visions of an Accelerated Age, edited London: Rebel. by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz, 32–55. Drake, Vivian. 2009 [1918]. Above the Battle. London: Photographers’ Gallery. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar. Banham, Reyner. 1965. “The Great Gizmo.” Industrial Farrell, Nick. 2011. “Stanley Kubrick Invented the iPad Design 12: 48–59. Reprinted in Banham 1981, in 1968.” TechEye, August 24, news.techeye 108–14. .net/hardware/stanley-kubrick-invented Banham, Reyner. 1969. The Architecture of a Well- -the-ipad-in-1968. Tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Frasca, Gonzalo. 1999. “Ludology Meets Narratology: Chicago Press. Similitude and Differences between (Video) Banham, Reyner. 1981. Design by Choice. Edited by Games and Narrative.” Ludology.org, www Penny Sparke. London: Academy Editions. .ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm. Barthes, Roland. 1973a. Elements of Semiology. Freud, Sigmund. 2010 [1922]. “Beyond the Pleasure Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Principle.” Sec. 2. Bartleby.com, www.bartleby New York: Hill and Wang. .com/276/2.html. Barthes, Roland. 1973b. Mythologies. Translated by Giedion, Sigfried. 1975 [1948]. Mechanization Takes Annette Lavers. London: Paladin. Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Barthes, Roland. 1992. The Fashion System. Translated New York: Norton. by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. Gillmor, Dan. 2004. We the Media: Grassroots Berkeley: University of California Press. Journalism by the People, for the People. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981 [1972]. “Requiem for the Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Media.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy Glatter, Robert. 2012. “Texting While Walking? Think of the Sign, translated by Charles Levin, 164–84. Twice.” Forbes, July 31, www.forbes.com/sites St. Louis: Telos. /robertglatter/2012/07/31/texting-while cs Baudrillard, Jean. 1996 [1968]. The System of Objects. -walking-think-twice. i t Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso. Harvie, Christopher, Graham Martin, and Aaron Scharf. i

Baudrillard, Jean. 1998 [1970]. The Consumer Society: 1970. Industrialisation and Culture, 1830–1914. o l P

Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Macmillan. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Headrick, Daniel R. 2009. Technology: A World History. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. Screened Out. Translated by Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steve Jobs

Chris Turner. London: Verso. Isaacson, Walter. 2011. . New York: Little, Cultural Baudrillard, Jean. 2003. Cool Memories IV, 1995–2000. Brown.

Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. 19

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 William Merrin

Kay, Alan. 1972. “A Personal Computer for Children of O’Reilly, Tim. 2005. “What Is Web 2.0.” O’Reilly, All Ages.” In Proceedings of the ACM National September 30, oreilly.com/web2/archive Conference. New York: ACM, www.mprove.de /what-is-web-20.html. /diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf. Quinion, Michael. 2007. “Gadget.” World Wide Words, Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. 2003 [1977]. “Personal www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gad1.htm. Dynamic Media.” In The New Media Reader, edited Richards, Thomas. 1990. The Commodity Culture of by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 391–404. Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, www.newmediareader 1851–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University .com/book_samples/nmr-26–kay.pdf. Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 2007 [1904]. Traffics and Discoveries. Royal Commission. 1851. Official Descriptive and Middlesex, UK: Echo Library. Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Kipling, Rudyard. 2009 [1914]. “Canadians in Camp.” In Works of Industry of All Nations. Vol. 4. London: The New Army in Training, edited by Roger Ayers, Spicer Brothers Wholesale Stationers; www.kipling.org.uk/rg_newarmy_chapter4.htm. W. Clowes and Sons, Printers. Lacey, Anna. 2013. “Avoiding the Pitfalls of Walking Scholz, Trebor. 2012. Digital Labor: The Internet as and Texting.” BBC News Online, May 25, www Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. .bbc.co.uk/news/health-22631731. Terranova, Tiziana. 2003. “Free Labor: Producing Levy, Steven. 2010. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Culture for the Digital Economy.” Electronic Book Revolution. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Review, June 20, www.electronicbookreview Marx, Karl. 1981. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts .com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary. of 1844. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Vries, Leonard de. 1968. Victorian Advertisements. Marx, Karl. 1983 [1867]. Capital. Vol. 1. London: London: John Murray. Lawrence and Wishart. YouTube. 2011. “Woman Falls into Fountain at Mall Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1987 [1884]. The While Texting and Walking.” Uploaded by Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth, UK: ExtremesDotCom, January 11, www.youtube Penguin. .com/watch?v=jPW8xmI4w6U. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The YouTube. 2012a. “Guy Walks into Giant Bear While Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Texting.” Uploaded by videozonk3r, April 12, Merrin, William. 2005. “Skylights onto Infinity: The www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCAntD1–DIk. World in a Stereoscope.” In Visual Delights— YouTube. 2012b. “Man Talking on His Cell Phone Walks Two: Exhibition and Reception, edited by Vanessa off Train Platform and onto Subway Tracks in Toulmin and Simon Popple, 161–74. Eastleigh, Philadelphia.” Uploaded by newsudontsee, July UK: John Libbey. 30, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JuGdVPrBmY. Merrin, William. 2008. “Media Studies 2.0: My YouTube. 2013. “Woman Busy Texting Walks Straight Thoughts.” Media Studies 2.0 Forum (blog), into Canal.” Uploaded by hi5viralnews2, January 4, twopointzeroforum.blogspot.co.uk. January 25, www.youtube.com/watch?v Merrin, William. Forthcoming. Media Studies 2.0. =W7USzSGvoRE. London: Routledge. 10:1 March 2014

• Modern Mechanix. 2013. Popular Science Monthly. Modern Mechanix: Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today (blog), blog.modernmechanix.com /publication/?pubname=PopularScience. Politics

William Merrin is an associate professor in media studies at Swansea University, in Wales, with research interests in media theory, digital media, and culture and media history. He is Cultural the author of Baudrillard and the Media (2005), coeditor of Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (2008), and author of Media Studies 2.0 (forthcoming). 20

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/10/1/1/245519/0100001.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021