Tag: Technology

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Quotations

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form.

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget
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Links Writing

A Populist Critique of “Ladyphones”

Casey Johnston, over at Ars Technica, has a two-pager complaining about how tech companies design and market so-called “Ladyphones.” It’s a quick read that picks up on earlier critiques about how certain colours, and reduced technical capabilities, are associated with derogatory gender perceptions.

That said, there are at least two elements of her piece that fall short to my mind: her analysis of the BlackBerry Pearl and of the LG Windows Phone.

Johnston argues that the BlackBerry Pearl was a device marketed for women, and emphasizes the device’s high costs and pink colouration in the UK as an example of trying to extract more money from a female demographic than would be extracted from a male demographic. She also cites the Pearl’s bizarre keyboard format and limited technical specifications to further reinforce her thesis that manufactures sell second-rate products to the female market.

As someone who owned an original Pearl 8100 I don’t know how fair her critique of RIM’s product is. Pearls were RIM’s attempt to get into the consumer market generally, with the position that a full-sized keyboard was intimidating and offsetting to male and female consumers alike. Moreover, the sizes of RIM’s other smartphones at the time – designed pre-iPhone, let’s not forget! – were offsetting to most regular, non-business, consumers.

The Pearl tried to find a balance between size, consumer market expectations, and traditional BlackBerry functionality. It was also comparatively cheaper than most other smartphones at the time (and, I would note, cheaper than the popular Motorola RAZER phones), though RIM and its carrier partners haven’t necessarily reduced the costs of the phone appropriately in all regional markets. Original colours lacked pink entirely: you could buy them in black or red. New colouring – and targeting – towards particular market segments is arguably more the result of an expanded smartphone market than anything else.

I would note than Johnston is far more generous towards RIM’s marketing and branding departments than, well, any other journalist that I’ve previously read. Her assumption that RIM was so forward thinking as to brand a consumer device ‘Pearl’ to target women is massively overestimating RIM’s (traditionally very, very, very, very poor) marketing and branding departments. Finally, the technical specs of RIM’s devices are criticized from all corners, regardless of the colour or class of device (i.e. Pearl, Curve, Torch, Bold, etc), and regardless of whether the device is targeted at professional, prosumer, or consumer markets.

The other issue with the article is her analysis of the LG Windows Phone. What she’s dead right on: LG ‘partnered’ with Jill Sander to inflate the device’s cost and try to make it appeal to a certain market segment. Yep, that’s attempting to sell a device to consumers interested in or intrigued by Sander’s line of products. Where Johnston is wrong, however, is in her effort to equate low-speced Windows Phones with high cost phones.

Unlike Android and iPhone, Microsoft’s mobile phones almost universally have poor technical specifications compared to the competition. That said, Microsoft has tweaked their devices such that the specifications really don’t matter: you get excellent performance in spite of the device using older tech. As such, I don’t really think that the technical critique rings terribly true – women aren’t expected to purchase crappy Windows phones any differently then men are – though I certainly agree around the ‘branding’ of the LG device to unnecessarily inflate costs and attract a dominantly female market.

Anyways: go read the piece and develop your own opinion. Despite my two bones to pick with her evidence I think that the thesis holds and is well supported. She’s created a piece that’s short and critical, if not as deep or as powerful a critique as I’d have liked. Hopefully we see more tech sites – and mainstream news sources! – similarly take companies to task for their attempts to sell second-rate, unnecessarily gendered, products to women.

Categories
Quotations

2012.3.17

Though Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires may anoint themselves the saints of American capitalism, they’re beginning to resemble something else entirely: robber barons. Behind the hoodies and flip-flops lurk businesspeople as rapacious as the black-suited and top-hatted industrialists of the late 19th century. Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley’s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils.

Rob Cox at Reuter. Go read his whole essay, “Silicon Valley’s underserved moral exceptionalism”
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Writing

parislemon: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I agree with parislemon’s general take on the targeting of Apple and labour: Apple isn’t alone, and we can’t ignore the role of local government in (not) regulating the state of affairs at Foxconn (or other large manufacturing) plants. This said, language like the following in unacceptable and intentionally uncritical:

 While this report brings such an issue to the forefront, similar pieces and stories surface quite frequently, actually. Guess what changes? Nothing. It’s shitty to say, but it’s the truth. And we all know it.

The fact of the matter is that we live in a world that demands amazing technology delivered to us at low costs and at great speed. That world leads to Foxconn.

We say we care about the means by which the results are reached when we read stories such as this one. But then we forget. Or we chose not to remember. We buy things and we’re happy that they’re affordable. And then we buy more things. And more. With huge smiles on our faces. Without a care in the world.

In the above quotation, Siegler obfuscates the real role that our governments could have in shaping the supply chain. Imagine: if there were a requirement  that certain imported products (e.g. electronics) had to be certified to meet standardized ethical and human rights requirements. Would that increase the price of goods/prevent some from coming to market, initially? Certainly. As a result Chinese (and other foreign national) companies would dramatically increase labor standards because it would no longer be a competitive advantage to have such incredibly low standards. Prices would stabilize and we could buy iPhones, Blackberry devices, and the rest without sleepless nights.

What must happen, however, is that the West must see beyond itself. Citizens must recognize that they can shape the world, and refuse to just give up on the basis that change would threaten the existing, ethically bankrupt, neo-liberal economic practices that surround our lives. If the EU and North America refused to import ethically suspect electronics and gave significant preferential advantage to companies that were ethical in the production and disposal of goods, then significant change could occur.

It is our choice to adopt, or refuse, to enforce basic human rights in the economic supply chain. Technology – it’s production, usage, and disposal – is rife with ethical quandaries. We have to serious address them if we are to remedy intolerable behaviours the companies like Foxconn perpetuate.

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Links Writing

Is Silicon Valley too smart for its own good?

While Agrawal’s article argues that those in Silicon Valley are developing for people who’re as saturated as they are, I think that he’s really missing what makes the Valley what it is. For decades, we’ve seen interesting ideas and products come out of California that are absolute flops. They’re not flops because the products are necessarily bad but  because the deliverables don’t identify a real problem or offer a real solution. That’s not a bad thing, and critiques along grounds of ‘flops’ (and crafting products for the future, rather than the past) misses what’s important about the Valley’s function as a thought incubator: ideas are crafted and honed, underlying principles and technical challenges are ironed out, and eventually some bits and pieces of “failed” ideas and products tend to be integrated into the future’s successful product lines.

Innovative development, much like scholarly work, is often intellectually exciting and vibrant while lacking a direct market output. It’s because we can test, experiment, and play that cool things ultimately come out of the ether. If we demand that most, or all, of Silicon Valley’s (and academia’s) projects meet existing problems, and avoid dreamlike solutions to undefined issues, we’re going to see a lot less interesting and novel things that (seemingly) pop out of nowhere.