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The Problem of Information Overload As a Sign of Prosperity

Palm has just been purchased by HP, a development that likely owes little to the peculiar television ads that ran in 2009 for the Palm Pre.

Palm Pre (2009)

As Kevin Hamilton writes, the ads emphasized the addict-like, ever awkward and distracted life of young smartphone users in making the argument that with these new phones, users could more easily achieve “flow.” But the effect was delectably creepy:

Among the standout features of the phone’s design was the operating system feature dubbed Synergy. This timely innovation marries one’s various contact lists and calendars across multiple social media platforms to create a single dashboard to access them all. One technology writer and market strategist described it as “the ability to integrate personal and business information into one cohesive view,” and compliments the Pre for “showing off how mobile is the intersection between business and personal lives.”

This, and the phone's multitasking capability, is clearly the feature that Palm decided to push in its expensive rollout marketing campaign.

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“Flow” (2009)

This portable interface promises power through mobility – while the subject, whom the script names "Anima" barely lifts a finger. The mobility promised is one of potential for movement between disparate social spheres, a promise of ease where the flaneurs of earlier modernities experienced only shock.

The problem of experiencing awkward social confluences is itself a sign of economic mobility. The need for smooth flow between social spaces in this case indicates not a changed polis as it did for Baudelaire or Benjamin, but rather an increase in one's potential for movement – a change not in one's shared environment but in an one's prospects for moving through disparate environments. So the campaign needed to emphasize more than mere power through movement – the Pre's marketers needed to display a sense of mastery over any space, and even a proclivity toward mastering new spaces. To this end, the language of flow, repetition, and rhythm pervade the whole campaign. It's not insignificant that the Pre's function as buffer or lubricant for social mobility is visualized here through other bodies. The dancers "re-arrange themselves" for the main character, symbolizing in small part the actual people in her networks, and in large part the data streamed through her device. Anima's fluent interface performance seems all the more powerful in contrast to the gargantuan task of choreographing such a huge group of dancers. Thus power is not only granted through the promise of mobility, but through picturing mobility as a relational phenomenon. Like the first violinist of a large orchestra, Anima's autonomous movements seem all the more expert through contrast with the huge coordination behind her. By employing a whole military consort in the production of this ad – and it is a group of students from a Beijing martial arts academy – the piece inadvertently also visualizes the ways in which digital mobilities depend on whole other networks of differing mobilities, people required to move in more and less regimented ways to produce the user's expanded realm. I'm thinking here at least of the manufacturing and infrastructure laborers who support the networked consumer electronics industry – who probably, like the dancers here, differ from Anima in their skin color. But I'm also thinking of the global infrastructure necessary to any movement outside the proximal opportunities into which one is born.

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In other words, the rhetoric around the Pre’s interface contains the promise of ease, the smooth navigation of life’s technological bumps – but only to users who are economically mobile, people who move. “To desire this interface is to desire not just a solution to a problem,” writes Hamilton, “but perhaps to desire a problem that itself carries social and economic status. This was a significant marketing innovation, about as good as one could hope for in the battle with Apple. (And I should add – I totally bought it, I’ve been wanting one of these devices from the get-go.)”

To desire a problem sounds like the apotheosis of a certain kind of technological pathology, a problem in and of itself that can only be solved by a fetish. That is, a problem that needs a problem so that it can stop wanting a problem.

See what I did there? Now you’re basically rich. [Spoken in robotic female human voice.] You’re welcome.

Here are three more Palm Pre ads:

“Green Lights” (2009)
“Mind Reader” (2009)
“Past Lives” (2009)

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