This is the second post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Post by Ben Aslinger, Bentley University

Much will be said of Michele Hilmes’ internationally known and known to rock a microphone scholarship, but in honor of her commitment to advising and mentorship, I’d like to focus on how Michele’s intellectual curiosity and willingness to mentor a diverse array of projects has helped so many of us find our academic voices, establish our careers, and refine the goals of professorial life. Without a doubt, Michele has trained a veritable army of media studies scholars, whose institutional affiliations and academic interests span the globe as well as a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary pursuits.

In this post, I focus on three moments from my own interactions with Michele. About halfway through my dissertation, I walked into Michele’s office in a panic. I had been reading a lot of work in queer popular music studies and queer musicology, and everyone was referencing Adorno. “Do I need to read Adorno’s corpus to finish this dissertation chapter?,” I asked with more than a little anxiousness. Without missing a beat, Michele responded, “No.” I knew that Michele did not mean that Adorno’s work wasn’t valuable. She saved me from going down a rabbit hole, a detour that would have taken me a month or more and that might have added little to the dissertation chapter that needed to be finished. And pulling someone back from the rabbit hole is what good advisors as well as colleagues and friends do.

Another moment. Dropping off a dissertation chapter at her condo, Michele invited me in for a cup of coffee. Over conversation, she related an anecdote about a recent tenure case she had reviewed. She never revealed the name or any other details, ever being the ethical professor; she simply stated, “Everybody thinks that you have to write that much. You don’t have to write that much. You just have to write enough to get tenure and to get full.” This past year, those words have come back to me, as I and so many of my friends struggle to articulate for ourselves what a sustainable academic career is and how to be happier in our scholarly pursuits even as the neoliberal corporate university seems to demand ever more of us.

A final, recurrent moment. In response to some of our graduate school disidentifications with the label “media historian,” Michele persistently reminded us that regardless of the labels that might be attached to us as scholars or that we might attach to ourselves, that we are all historians. The continual reminder to historicize stays with me even though many of the texts and phenomena I study are contemporary.

Our doctoral experiences are obviously individual and idiosyncratic, so I invite Michele’s numerous advisees to chime in below with their memories to provide further evidence of how Michele provided us a model of mentorship that was compassionate, dedicated, and demanding and that modeled intellectual promiscuity and curiosity in the best sense. And knowing that mentorship isn’t confined to the department, in the spirit of “Honoring Hilmes,” I invite those outside the Madison orbit to share their stories too!

Below are our respective takeaways from our time in Seattle.

Ben Aslinger: Nancy Baym talked about her ongoing interview research with musicians on how musicians manage their social media presences (and absences). Baym emphasized that musicians must navigate why, how, and where to be present, given the proliferation of online music services and social networking sites. David Phillips profiled the emergence of a Quantified Self community and the potential implications of data being used not only in the hacker spirit of obtaining self-knowledge but also for repression and surveillance. Rosa Mikeal Martey presented ongoing collaborative research on gaming practices and identifications in Second Life, where she and her collaborators constructed a game in order to do virtual world ethnographic work. Tama Leaver posed a series of provocative questions about digital media presence, profiling the ethics and problems of parents creating social media traces (and thus digital identities) for their children (how much should parents share on online social networks, microblogging sites, and photo services?) and how digital identities are handled after death. Tom Boellstorff’s keynote featured a provocative discussion about how to treat the gap between the digital and the physical.  He drew interesting connections between his work on Second Life and his previous work on gay men and women in Indonesia. Alex Leavitt and Rosa Mikeal Martey’s presentations raised questions regarding how we balance our work as scholars with the work of archiving and preserving our objects of study. Is it our responsibility to save our objects of study? What new tools, software programs, and skills do we need to learn in order to preserve an object for study or keep our object of study around long enough for us to complete a research project? And through it all, there was the kissing booth, an experiment in presence, absence, viewership, and subjectivity designed by Theresa Senft.

Sean Duncan: One of the most interesting gaming-related sessions was scheduled at the very end of the conference, featuring four papers on the topic of sexual identity in digital games (including one of the authors of this piece, Ben Aslinger of Bentley University, also featuring Todd Harper of the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Lee Sherlock of Michigan State University, and Kevin Rutherford of Miami University).  In it, issues of sexual identity and game studies were addressed from four quite complementary perspectives — Aslinger through an engagement with the question of what a queer game studies might look like, Harper through the development of A Closed World, a game project that he led at GAMBIT, Sherlock through fannish practices around World of Warcraft, and Rutherford through the analysis of game mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas that yield the gay male character option as the optimal one.  Through each of these talks, issues of sexual identity were addressed theoretically, through design, through investigation of fan practices, and through a look at the procedural rhetoric of a game.  As the beginnings of a queer game studies seems to be taking hold, it was heartening to see these scholars attempt to address not just how fans express sexual identity through their gameplay, but each tied these forms of engagement in some fashion to design, either the design of games to explicitly engage players with these perspectives (as in Aslinger’s discussion of Stonewall Brawl and Harper’s discussion of A Closed World) or the ways that game design and game mechanics are implicated in popular, commercial games (such as Sherlock’s discussion of World of Warcraft and Rutherford’s analysis of Fallout: New Vegas).  As the connections between internet studies and game studies deepens, it’s a positive step to see us moving beyond an inordinate focus on synchronous virtual worlds such as massively-multiplayer online games to a broader consideration of the variety of games, their designers’ intents, and the means by which they are engaged upon via the internet.

Liz Ellcessor: On Monday, before the official start of IR12, I attended the conference’s doctoral colloquium. With over 30 Ph.D. students from a variety of disciplines, the colloquium took the form of small group meetings, in which 3-5 students were matched with mentors on the basis of shared interests or methodologies. These senior internet scholars led dedicated discussions of each group member’s project, drew connections between projects, prompted reflection, and offered advice and support. Obviously, experiences within small groups varied, but in wrapping up the day, organizer Elizabeth Buchanan observed that the groups all engaged with challenges regarding interdisciplinary work, work-life balance, and the ethics of research in an era in which expectations of privacy may be shifting for both scholars and our research participants.

Some of these concerns regarding methods of Internet research were also addressed in Wednesday’s Theoretical Reassessments panel. Ron Rice and Ryan Fuller began the session with an analysis of the prevalence of various concepts and theoretical found in article titles and abstracts related to online media in the past several years. Some concepts declined in popularity, such as “Web 2.0,” while others grew, including research using uses and gratifications theories. In concluding, the authors suggested that the field could benefit from more theoretical work on credibility, participatory media, relationship management and cultural differences. Similar data analysis from Matthew Allen addressed the discourses of Web 2.0. Using Leximancer as a tool to analyze a vast corpus of data and locate the key terms and relationships, which centered on “share” and “use,” he theorized that these uses of language ultimately produced a preferred “user” subject position, analogous to preferred reading positions, from which to engage with Web 2.0 media and technologies. Alex Halavais conducted a “genealogy of badges,” describing the religious and military traditions from which badges emerged, and the blurring of their uses as signifiers of authority or identity and items of commerce. This “baggage of badges” carries over into their use in new media forms, whether in games, FourSquare, or the current MacArthur badges for learning competition. Finally, Annette Markham focused on the difficulty of protecting the privacy of human subjects when doing Internet research in the current, searchable, web environment. She argued in favor of fabrication, pointing out that research composites, fictional narratives, and fabricated conversations can be used ethically as a means of camouflaging particular online identities and communities while still drawing upon real themes and concerns identified through research.

I’m glad that Antenna is starting a work-life column series, and I’m excited about what this series can do to help us understand the personal and professional joys and struggles that academics who inhabit different identities and have different lifestyles face. I’m especially hopeful that these columns can help demolish some stereotypes and assumptions we hold about how easy or hard other academics have it. I’ve already learned from Jason Mittell more about what my colleagues with children face as they navigate academic life.

This piece attempts to synthesize my own personal experiences with stories from colleagues who will remain anonymous. It is not meant to be, nor should it be taken, as an autobiographical account of my experience, but rather as a set of anecdotes that challenge the stereotypes that single academics can write all the time (or any time we want), are free from family responsibility, and somehow have it “easier” than other academics.

When you’re on the job market, you worry a lot about where you’ll end up. You don’t want to be the only single person in the village, and you’re afraid that even if you end up loving your job in a small town that you’ll feel personally trapped (or at the least that you chose your professional life over your personal life). And if you’re single and LGBT, you worry about being the only “gay in the village.”

When you move to a job in a new town, you move alone. Sure, you have friends that will help you put items in your ABF Relocube or moving van and hopefully someone to help you move things into your new place of residence, but when all is said and done, you are alone. If you live alone, and chances are you will at least for your first year in a new town, you’ll come home to an empty apartment, which can be sometimes be really eerie, haunting, and depressing after a really long day at your university.

Achieving a work-life balance is hard. It’s easy to become a workaholic if there’s no one to force you not to be one.

I know that married couples, partners, and roommates frequently divide chores, but there’s just you, so you are responsible for cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, boxing lunch, finishing that lesson plan, answering those student emails, and polishing up that journal article that you’ve been meaning to send out. Maybe that’s why there are dust bunnies in the corner of my living room that are starting to look like life-size rabbits.

Single academics have to create support systems from scratch every time they relocate. Establishing a new community of friends and a social network in your town becomes a full-time job, especially if you are lucky enough to be in a tenure track or tenured position. You are in the process of making a life and a home, and while you know you’ll be happiest if you adjust to your new surroundings quickly, making your new town home can seem an arduous process.  You may feel that you have to accept every invitation to dinner, drinks, parties, picnics, and the movies in your first year in a new town. It’s okay to say no because you’re too busy. It’s also okay to say no because you’ve crafted a night in the week where you don’t work and you don’t worry; you just sit in front of the television watching Netflix while eating pizza.

Your personal life may be largely invisible to your colleagues. I know single academics who are the primary caregivers for parents, siblings, or close relatives who live hundreds of miles away, or who have deep ties, duties, and commitments to people who are not visible like partners and children when teaching schedules, committee assignments, and other departmental duties are divided up. It can be harder to speak up for yourself when the reasons behind particular schedule requests or needs are not visible on the left ring finger or pictures on your office desk.

There are other scenarios I could share, but I’d like Antenna’s readers to chime in with their stories. I don’t think anyone has it “easy,” and I think this series can show us how we have it “hard” in different ways so that we can be more savvy and sympathetic colleagues.

Every account of a conference is individualized, and this post adds another perspective to blog posts such as those written by Saul Tannenbaum from a citizen journalist perspective and Nick Montfort’s recap of the “Computer Histories” panel.

Below, I focus on some of the presentations that made me think deeply about moments of media transition.

Chuck Tryon discussed the marketing of premium VOD services and digital lockers that are depicted in marketing campaigns as contributing to family harmony and individual empowerment. I was especially interested in his analysis of the Ultraviolet digital locker that allows consumers to buy “enduring access.” Tryon noted that Ultraviolet seems to be targeted to families; in marketing discourses it is treated as a service that allows/creates “family harmony,” but Tryon noted that advertising messages may reinforce gender roles surrounding spectatorship while potentially “promoting individualized consumption.”

Jennifer Holt’s paper on “regulatory hangover” (when technology outpaces regulation) looked back to the FCC’s Computer 1 Inquiry in 1966 in a move to historicize convergence in policy discourses and insist that “convergence” or “new media” policy needs to be central to the FCC’s contemporary mission. Holt insisted that national agencies such as the FCC need a new framework for multiple platforms for voice and data services. Her discussion of the importance of thinking about the regulatory challenges of platforms and pipelines and her analysis of “dumb pipes/smart devices” was especially insightful.

The panel I was on featured great papers by Nina Huntemann (who talked about playtesting, quality assurance, and usability studies in the gaming industry), Mia Consalvo (who analyzed the discursive frameworks that are being built around social games by designers and major industry players), and Randall Nichols (who reminded game studies scholars to take consoles and the cycles of hardware development more seriously).

Pilar Lacasa’s use of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Sims-based machinima to teach Spanish schoolchildren about the language of images struck me as a really innovative way to teach media literacy.

Clara Fernandez-Vara’s presentation on the potential advantages and problems of relying on emulators to preserve and play games designed for past consoles and older hardware systems raised questions about how we construct and write gaming histories. I was particularly struck by her discussion of what we do with peripherals such as the Nintendo light gun used on games such as Duck Hunt that only work on CRT screens. Peripherals are integral to the embodied experience of play, but what happens when peripherals don’t work on new screen technologies? What are the limits of what emulators can do to archive and preserve games and the gaming experience?

Jaroslav Svelch discussed how Army sponsored youth computer clubs in Czechoslovakia helped create gaming cultures during the 1980s. Svelch’s discussion of how Indiana Jones was rescripted as a freedom fighter behind the Iron Curtain and of how text adventure games traveled within the nation was fascinating.

These are just a few of the fascinating talks that were presented this past weekend on the MIT campus.

Last week, Viacom announced that it was planning to sell Harmonix and had already classified the Cambridge-based development studio as a “discontinued operation.”  When Viacom’s MTV Games purchased Harmonix four years ago, the conglomerate was hoping to expand into console gaming.  Executives also likely bought into the then-popular myth that the gaming industry was recession proof.  Viacom’s announcement last week indicated that the hoped-for expansion into gaming did not go as smoothly as executives had hoped.

As I walked by the door to Harmonix on my way to buy pork chops, I thought about all the reports.  In my opinion Harmonix is one of the most innovative gaming firms around these days.  It seemed odd that Viacom would put Harmonix up for sale before Dance Central really had a chance to make a splash (the game was just introduced on November 4).

What kept bouncing around my brain was the quote that echoed through many trade press accounts: CEO Philippe Dauman’s statement that “the console games business requires expertise we don’t have.”  Dauman’s statement illustrates that firms who buy in to the games business (allegedly to target those 18- to 49-year-old men whose hands are stuck to the controller controlling an avatar more often than their eyes are glued to the television screen watching sitcoms) may have little idea of what to do once they have brought studios into the fold of their media empires.

Do conglomerates have the “expertise” to do games right?  Thinking beyond music, dance, and rhythm action games, conglomerates may believe that games may be excellent opportunities for extending intellectual properties or venues for the extension of transmedia franchises.  Regardless of whether game firms are parts of the conglomerate or independent contractors, conglomerates (and divisions) must balance the desire to protect their intellectual property by imposing rules on how characters and narratives may be appropriated and exploited and allowing game designers and game divisions to translate intellectual properties from filmic/televisual experiences to ludic experiences.  Is this balancing act too complex for conglomerates?

Development for multiple consoles, the relationship between retail sales and sales of DLC, and the fact that games only really exist as texts once they are played add layers of complexity to producing, marketing, and distributing a game that are simply not present in the film or television industry.

Despite the industrial rhetoric of convergence and synergy, are the cultural logics of television and gaming too divergent?  Can media conglomerates firmly entrenched in the logic of broadcasting, cable, film, and publishing ever really understand what makes game companies tick?  Or, are the production and economic logics of what makes something fun to play and interesting to watch too distinct?  Can conglomerates be successful at both the televisual and the ludic?  Or must they choose, as Viacom seems to have done?  Is the ludic beyond the pale, so to speak, and does this pose a problem for media firms in what independent game designer Eric Zimmerman has called the “ludic century?”

The Flow Conference Reception. Photo credit: Myles McNutt

Given that Erin so eloquently captured the buzz of the scholarly conversations this weekend and the freneticism of media scholars running between the AT+T conference center and various Tex-Mex restaurants, I’m going to focus on some of the roundtables that I found most intellectually stimulating.

Max Dawson’s roundtable “Putting the TV Back Into TV Studies” invited us to reconsider how we deal with media technologies.  Daniel Chamberlain asked us to think more about the infrastructures and networks necessary for media transmission.  All of the panelists raised issues faced by media researchers as we examine how sociohistorical contexts, industrial imperatives, and textuality interface with communication technologies that allow and disallow particular uses, viewing/listening experiences, and distribution policies.  Together, the panelists asked us to consider how to take the structuring power of media technologies seriously without being labeled as technological determinists.

I found Jeff Scheible’s remarks on the “Left Behind” roundtable fascinating.  Scheible’s exploration of where videotapes go when rental stores close their doors and his insistence that we understand “left behind” media in both spatial and temporal terms call attention to a focus on newness that may blind media scholars to the persistence of older forms of media experience.   Daniel Kimball’s discussion of how old media influence new media policy via the case study of Internet radio policy illustrated the need to think about the regulatory power of media systems in decline.  His point that Internet radio must fall below a “threshold of interactivity” in order to be called radio provided an ironic twist to the panel.

On my roundtable (“Managing Media Production in the Age of Convergence”), I was impressed by Erin Hill’s comments about the methodological issues she has encountered in chronicling low status “women’s” jobs in the studio system and the contemporary period.  Micky Lee’s discussion of macro- and micro-level labor issues surrounding Google Books, Peter Alilunas’ exploration of the industrial history of the porn business, and Brett Boessen’s points regarding the messiness of the term “fan-made” and how we should teach our students to read producers’ social media posts in critical ways point to the continued importance of interrogating convergence and how we can use the signifier of convergence to historicize media production.

The participants on the roundtable “Tuning in to the Fine Print: Law and Social Change in Media” asked us to consider the policy positions taken by guilds and unions (Miranda Banks), possibilities for vernacular policy construction (Bill Kirkpatrick and Liz Ellcessor), the need to make policy arguments in economic terms (Lucas Logan), the need to consider industrial policy alongside legislation and judicial decisions (Carly Kocurek), and the need to historicize policies surrounding journalism (Jamie Lund).

Finally, the participants on the “‘Featuring Music From’: Song, Sound, and Remix” roundtable addressed how television and games offer “interesting provocations” for sound studies scholars (Lisa Coulthard), how the presence of radio in games structures the audiovisual experience of gameplay (Racquel Gonzales), how viral videos such as the “Bed Intruders” phenomenon invite both economic and political analysis (David Gurney), how the “allusive qualities” of popular songs are used in teen television (Faye Woods), how the changing role of the music supervisor asks us to write more histories of the recording industry (Kyle Barnett), how classic network system series used popular music (Lindsay Giggey), and how the Wu-Tang Clan’s body of work asks us to consider “polytextual clusters and mise-en-synergy” (Andrew deWaard).

It was a great weekend filled with robust conversations about the future of media studies, the sounds of the Texas “ya’ll,” and migas.

What strikes me most about the series is that it deals with visual space but that audio space is mostly absent.  Throughout the series, the glee club has struggled to obtain auditorium rehearsal time.  The members have struggled with the structural limitations of the choir room as a practice venue and Sue Sylvester’s efforts to remove any claim the club has on the use of school space.  In one of the most interesting moments of “Home,” Mercedes does a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” replacing Aguilera’s use of the second-person pronoun with I/we.  The performance number mixes Cheerios and glee club members in the same space – the center of the gym – that has only been occupied up to this point by the Cheerios and school athletes.

Outside of basic sound design rules dealing with the intelligibility of dialogue, editing, and mixing, techniques for achieving and communicating reverberation, distance, and space have little importance in the series.  Occasionally, as in the roller rink scene last night where Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” plays over the sound system, the actual recordings of songs are used for atmospheric effect.  However, these diegetic songs are often supplanted by the diegetically motivated (but clearly lip-synched) songs that are the hallmark of the series.  These numbers are clearly overproduced, largely erasing the “grain of the voice” from the picture.  Regardless of the performance space (interior, exterior, living room, auditorium, choir room, school hallway, gymnasium), environmental acoustics never play an integral role.   Of course, the desire to sell soundtrack CDs and the difficulties of actually doing real live vocal performance while shooting sequences militate against truly authentic performances.  But these economic and industrial exigencies don’t preclude post-production negotiations that could lead to moments of audiovisual play similar to those in Murphy’s Nip/Tuck.

It has been interesting to hear voices with more vocal power (Chenoweth, Menzel, and Lynch) and not just the young adult voices of the glee club members.  Personally, knowing that musical theater stars such as Chenoweth, Morrison, and Menzel can belt it out for real reduces the gap between the recording and the televisual performance.  As reactions to the show illustrate, however, the creators need to wrestle with how to balance screen time and song time between the adult and teen characters.

Arguing that he came out in part for his children, Martin described himself as a “fortunate homosexual man,” refusing to indulge in the drama or theatrics that we have gotten accustomed to when it comes to celebrity coming out announcements.  Martin’s coming out narrative, while merely a blip on most gossip and news sites, raises some interesting issues regarding contemporary gay visibility.  On the one hand, in a post-Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and Ellen world where pop stars such as Elton John and George Michael have been out for years, Martin’s announcement hardly raises any eyebrows.

On the other hand, Martin’s coming out as a Puerto Rican gay man and as a major Latino star is a big deal. Jarrett Barrios, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, writes, “Gay is no longer an abstract idea, or worse, a stereotype. Now, it’s the kid from Menudo you’ve known since you were a teenager.”  Billboard’s M. Ty Comer writes,“Earlier this month, Univision host Don Francisco asked another Latin artist, Eduardo Antonio, to address rumors about his sexuality. The singer responded, ‘When Ricky Martin, a man whom I admire very much, says whether he’s gay or not, that’s when I will tell you.’” Reacting to the potential implications of Martin’s decision, Michael Roston states, “I’m hoping that forces of fear who attempt to divide communities of color along the lines of those who support and those who oppose gay rights will find less and less traction for their regressive messages.”  Seen in this light, Martin’s move is a small step towards ensuring greater queer visibility for gay men and women of color.

Flashing back to all the speculation about Martin’s sexuality was a big deal, however, I find myself wondering why so many of us were so convinced that Martin was gay.   Why is the claim of privacy automatically interpreted as a sign of gayness?  Why do we continue to search for signs of gayness as if they were given, static, or immutable?  If Fred Astaire was alive today, would we all assume that he was gay because he could dance?  Or, would we (and by we I mean both gay men today and society at large) be enlightened enough to realize that a man who can two-step doesn’t necessarily have a closet he needs to step out of?

On the heels of the popularity of the Rube Goldberg video for “This Too Shall Pass,” OK Go announced that it was leaving an already beleaguered EMI to establish its own label Paracadute Recordings.  Quickly a story emerged treating OK Go as the musical David fighting the evil Goliath of EMI.  This story is largely true, as EMI’s ridiculous stance on video embedding evidenced a fundamental misunderstanding of web promotion and the social value created by allowing users to spread music videos in an age where the music video as a genre of cultural production is in desperate need of reinvention.

However, OK Go is no diminutive David, having already cut its teeth producing videos such as “Here It Goes Again” and managing its own publishing, merchandising, and touring rights.  On January 18, 2010, lead singer Damian Kulash posted an open letter to OK Go’s fans, explaining the band’s fight with EMI over embedding and geoblocking.  Additionally, OK Go circumvented EMI’s backwards social media policies and obtained sponsorship from State Farm for the second video for “This Too Shall Pass.”

Perhaps part of the problem is that the members of OK Go are better videomakers than music makers.  Peter Kafka writes, “If EMI’s executives allowed themselves to speak candidly, they would likely point out that while OK Go made great videos, it didn’t seem to make music that many people wanted to buy.  Soundscan says the band has sold all of 500,000 albums in the U.S., both in physical and digital form, in its three-album tenure at EMI. That’s 488,608, to be exact. Plus another 25,000 single tracks.  That’s not awful. But it’s not the kind of sales that would inspire a big label to spend big money promoting an act. Even when the industry’s business model was still intact.”  Rachel Bailey writes, “Chicago treadmill champions OK Go are better known for their playful, viral-friendly music video for ‘Here It Goes Again’ than for creating hit singles.”  Perhaps Bailey and Kafka’s statements show that visibility, critical acclaim, and monetary success (of course, success is relative and subject to definition) are not necessarily connected in the value chain and that these connections need to be re-imagined and constructed from scratch in the new music economy.

The question of how value will be defined and the relationship of economic value to social, cultural, and participatory value remains.  If value is multifaceted, then how do creators connect the dots between its various forms in what, after all, is an industry?

Less than minutes after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad yesterday, users inundated Twitter and Facebook with references to a MadTV sketch from 2007 and a host of messages that openly critiqued Apple’s ridiculous name for the device.  While many users noted the possible erasure of women from the naming of the iPad (and dare we say the design process), this flash resurgence of a humorous and satirical technofeminism drew attention back to connections between computing technologies, corporealities, and body politics.  I can only imagine the wry grin on Donna Haraway’s face.

While much of yesterday’s Internet conversation centered on whether the iPad is a game changer for TV, gaming, publishing, and future of ebooks, I want to address the potentially unnerving aspects of how Apple constructed the user yesterday and point out that while Apple may be a global company, its users are definitely not.

Apple wants us to take touch for granted.  The demo mostly shows the hands of white male users engaging with the device.  True, there is a shot or two of a woman sitting beside a man using the iPad, but the demo is dominated by the voices of white male experts on the design process and images of the hands of middle-class white male users in casual dress.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBFjDQfv9uU

At the same time that hands are marked by the politics of touch, hands are connected to  the self consciousness or unconsciousness of touch.  As Dan Savage notes in The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant, “For same-sex couples, taking a lover’s hand is almost never an unself-conscious choice.  You have to think about where you are, whether you’re safe, and you have to look.”  Whether public, semi-public, or private, Savage notes the ways in which some of us find it hard to touch without thinking even as Apple (and other firms) potentially privatize touch and seek to make touch unremarkable.

Josh Bernoff points out that new devices are increasingly splintering the Internet into what may become an increasing number of walled gardens policed by what Walter Mossberg referred to years ago as the “Soviet ministries” of wireless Internet and telephony.  The rise of the Splinternet affects not only the conventions of design and the openness of the Internet’s infrastructure but also calls attention to the fact that the placement of new devices in a small number of global hands increasingly breaks up America and the world into ever finer niches.  If web design aesthetics have been dominated by Anglo-American discourses of professionalization and quality and the whitefacing of mainstream interface design, we must ask ourselves: are the futures of ubiquitous and gestural computing white handed?