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Towards Blackberry Capitalism?

Milwaukee.
The next session at AoIR 2009 starts with Andrew Herman, who introduces the idea of 'Blackberry capitalism'. He notes the shift towards wireless Internet use in recent years; most US Internet users now access the Net wirelessly, for example, and trends are similar in many other countries. There is no distinction in much of the data between wireless and mobile uses, however; mobile Internet use entails some very different practices from mere wifi access. Mobile communication has similarly changed away from mere mobile telephony, of course; the possibilities of mobile communication have extended well beyond talking and texting, but don't simply converge with wireless Internet usage practices.

Recently, there's been substantial coverage of Barack Obama's reliance on his Blackberry, and of his struggle with the US secret service and related agencies to be allowed to keep the device in spite of security concerns. This documents the crucial role of devices like the Blackberry. All technologies are embedded and animated by social imaginaries, which are not simply ideas about the social world.

The mobile Internet is marketed as a friendly space which is easily accessed through mobile devices; users are promised to be able to make the most of their time no matter where they are. The ads offering this are elements of social imaginaries; with one click, a utopia of fullness and satisfaction awaits. (Hmm, there's a blues band playing outside - it's hard to hear Andrew...)

How do the materialities of the mobile Internet manifest themselves in the everyday experiences of its users? There is the promise of the Internet of Things, where human-to-human engagement is supplemented with the human-to-thing and thing-to-thing engagement it also enables. In line with Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined communities, which describes the emergence of print capitalism, is it fruitful to imagine the emergence of Blackberry capitalism; what entities and institutions comprise the empire of networked information capitalism?

In print capitalism, the printed newspaper establishes an extraordinary mass ceremony where millions share a daily communion of experiencing the same news at almost exactly the same time; this creates the remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern communities. Reading the daily newspaper is the modern equivalent of saying the daily prayer - through this process, people become monoglot and become aware of the millions who share their nation and language.

Today, we can observe the digital 'movement spaces' which constitute the daily reality of online life; what is happening in this daily communion of users is experientially different from the daily communion of newspaper readers, however: here, there is continuous calculation at every point of movement through the information space, extracting and analysing patterns in the actions of the millions of users inhabiting the space. Here, there is no stable or enclose space, but the surfaces and interfaces of multiple screens which provide access into this space - a qualculative movement-space, as Nigel Thrift has called it.

3G mobile devices give rise to flow architectures, which situate users in a constantly calculated flow of information and movement. An example for this, Andrew notes, are cases of flash trading (by hyperfast computer programmes which can predict the flows of market shares in fractions of seconds and make automated high-frequency stock market trades).

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