It is accurate to see ‘iWorld’ and Google as special instances of intimacy, where aesthetic experience is part of what is being bought and sold, part of what is being exchanged, and to a degree co-created. Platform technologies like those that underpin Apps create massive distribution systems where individuals ‘pull’ the product that interests them with little or no ‘friction’ (as sales’ people call the resistance to buying).
It contributes to the intense personalisation of experience – I have the only iPAD in the world (well, actually one of only 30, 40, 50 million, whatever….) But I mean the only one just like this one – with this wallpaper, this selection of Apps, this signature to it. The design of the products in this version of the world are often described in perversely intimate ways – in terms of – fetishism as extensions of the self – like good prosthetics.
When Steve Jobs died, some of the obituaries eulogised how he insisted that the ‘insides’ of Apple products matching the aesthetic of the outsides – not only because of what the insides did, but because of how much a part of the aesthetic depended on imagining beautiful insides and beautiful outsides. This is almost a technological version of courtly love, where my beloved is a paragon in all respects, inside and out. Part of what is being ‘produced’ is an experience of what it has been like to produce. To me, this so resembles a discourse between lovers.
One could see this as a mere ‘side effect’ – and it is; but in a way that suggests that side effects are far from unintended. I am being seduced by my experience of being involved in my own seduction. Intimacy is an emergent property of innovation; innovation is an emergent property of intimacy.
Slingshot