The original inspiration for this chapter was a story about Barack Obama and his BlackBerry. In the run-up to Obama’s inauguration as the forty-fourth President of the United States (POTUS), there was considerable coverage in the global media concerning the fate of his beloved BlackBerry. One of the hallmarks of Obama’s triumphant political persona at the time was his ‘street cred’ among the digerati as a savvy Internet user. His reliance on the iconic BlackBerry mobile communications device in the conduct of his successful presidential campaign became legendary (Clifford 2009). So it was with great tribulation that the world waited while it was decided whether or not Obama could keep his BlackBerry in light of the security requirements of his new position. In the February 2, 2009, issue of Newsweek magazine it was announced that, yes indeed, “POTUS Keeps His Precious” (Bailey 2009).
At the time, BlackBerry was the dominant smartphone brand and the company which made it—the Waterloo, Ontario–based Research in Motion or RIM—was one of the most successful players in the mobile communications industry. The hegemony of the BlackBerry as mobile communications device and status object of desire was so complete that it compelled one chronicler of its rise to dub its dominion “BlackBerry Planet” (Sweeny 2009). Like Gollum’s beloved One Ring in the Lord of the Rings, POTUS’s “precious” operated as a sublime technological object of desire and transcendent power (Mosco 2005; Nye 1996). But rather than binding all of Middle Earth in fealty to the holder of the One Ring, the BlackBerry offered the technological sublime of ubiquitous connectivity of each to (potentially) all, and so it appeared at the time that Obama’s “precious” was a perfect metonym for the emergent spirit of early-twenty-first century information-based capitalism, the spirit of what the first author originally termed Black-Berry Capitalism.
How times have changed. At the time of Obama’s public agonizing about being able to keep his “Precious,” the stock of Research in Motion was trading on NASDAQ at $67, its global market share for handsets was 20 percent, and its market valuation was $22.5B. By January 2014, RIM had been rebranded as the BlackBerry corporation, its stock was trading at $9, its global market share had declined to less than 1.7 percent, and its market valuation was $3.9B.1 We have to admit that there is a certain conceit to naming a particular instantiation of a mode of production (capitalism)—one that has lasted for over five hundred years—after a device, a company and a brand. It is a conceit that is begging for comeuppance, particularly when the fortunes of all three fell dramatically and precipitously, consigning our analysis to the dustbin of dead media and corporate history. Who, for example, now remembers the Digital Electronic Corporation and their VAX mainframes that ruled computing until the late eighties? The vagaries of history not withstanding, however, we will argue in this chapter that the concept of “BlackBerry ™ Capitalism” is indeed a worthy and insightful heuristic for understanding how the materialities and imaginaries of the mobile Internet comprise a particular assemblage of a capital/ism.2 A close and critical examination of the rise, decline and continued relevance of the BlackBerry as device, corporate entity and brand will illuminate the articulations between different dimensions of the present epoch of capital/ism, a moment where capital is simultaneously digital, informational and connexionist. Besides, at the time of this writing (March 2014) Obama still cherishes and keeps his precious BlackBerry and will do so, apparently, until it is “pried from his hands” (Star Staff 2013).
The argument of this chapter unfolds in two parts. In the first part, we consider two distinct yet imbricated conceptualizations of the current configuration of capitalism: “digital capitalism” and “informational capitalism.” Each conceptualization offers valuable yet partial insight into the materialities and imaginaries of the mobile Internet in general, and what we will ultimately call the BlackBerry™ Capitalism assemblage, in particular. Yet the terms are often used interchangeably in critical media and communication studies, diminishing each one’s distinctive analytical purchase of a better understanding of capitalism. This chapter attempts to clarify the terms “digital capitalism” and “informational capitalism,” thus enhancing their critical value. In the second part of the chapter, we turn to the multiple ontologies of (the) BlackBerry—as wireless telephony, as Internet portal, as ensemble of socio-technical affordances, as material object, as corporate entity, as commodity, and as brand image—that comprise a specific assemblage that embodies and informs particular articulations of digital and informational capital/ism.
Theorists of “digital capitalism” are rooted firmly in the tradition of the political economy of communication and view the present era as constituting a “phase change in the 500-year history” of capitalism.3 From within the historical perspective of the longue durée of capitalist development, these theorists argue that the “telecommunications, media and technology” sector have “become a leading component of the spatio-temporal fix in which capital attempted to extricate itself” from its recurring systemic contradictions, most recently manifested in the from the prolonged crisis of accumulation on the late sixties and early seventies (Chakravartty and Schiller 2010, 672). The specific social and economic policies that comprise the foundation of what has been termed “actually existing neoliberalism” (Peck 2012), as well as the ideological lineaments of legitimating belief in the project of global neoliberalism itself, have been made possible by the rapid diffusion of information technology and digital telecommunication networks (Fisher 2010). The financial sector and large corporations invested heavily in digital information technologies as part of shift from Fordist to post-Fordist logics of capital accumulation in all spheres of the commodity circuit (production, circulation and consumption) on a global scale (Harvey 1990, 2010). As Chakravartty and Schiller argue, “Digital capitalism coalesced, therefore, not as a sectoral or communications centric phenomenon, but as in inclusive, economy wide project” (2010, 672). This reconfiguration of the circuit of capital is important in understanding BlackBerry capitalism, a point that will be underscored in the next section of the chapter.
Schiller (2011) identified five specific “vectors” along which ICTs helped to cast “digital capitalism” into being on a global scale. The first and perhaps most salient vector was the increasing “financialization” of advanced capitalist economies. National and international financial sectors were themselves the locus of massive amounts of investment in ICTs that provided the infrastructural basis for coordination and management of the global flow of capital as well as the development of new financial instruments of securitization that drove the financial crisis of 2008. The second vector was the military Keynesianism of the U.S. government and its enthusiastic embrace of ICTs and digital media in the development of the “network-centric warfare” paradigm. The third and fourth vectors were private corporate investment in ICTs to reduce labor costs through automation and the management of global supply chains, respectively. The fifth and final vector is what Schiller termed the “accelerated commodification” of consumer culture, which refers vaguely and generally to almost every important change and development in the media industry enabled by the Internet (2011, 927–930). One of the primary consequences of these developments from the point of view of “digital capitalism” is the concentration/consolidation of market power in fewer and fewer corporate entities in the telecommunication sector generally and in terms of mobile communications specifically.
From our point of view, the “digital capitalism” analytic is crucial to understanding the development of the mobile market (comprising hardware, software and services) as being integral to the current historical phase of capitalism. The adherents of the “digital capitalism” perspective are quite right to argue that the predominance of digital-based information and information technology in this epoch of neoliberalism does not entail a transcendence of class relations and class power as theorists of the “information society” have been wont to argue (cf. Toffler 1984; Webster 2006). Moreover, their focus on how new digital information technologies made possible the transnational coordination of a global neoliberal economic order is also absolutely correct. However, one of the limitations of conceptualizing the mobile market through the lens of “digital capitalism” is that there is scant attention paid to the specific characteristics of “the digital” as a specific form of media materiality, “information” as the content of that media, and either as being constitutive of distinctive communicative practices specific to the epoch of digital capitalism. To put the issue another way, what is needed is a consideration of the ways in which specifically digital information technologies—particularly when they are part of the mobile Internet—constitute both the process and the product of capital accumulation. In fact, after taking great pains to distinguish their analysis of digital capitalism from theories of “the information society,” Chakravartty and Schiller (2010), for example, ignore the question of what, if anything, is particular about information in digital form in our own era that might distinguish it from other (predigital) forms of information in the five-hundred-year history of capitalism.
This aporia in the analytic of digital capitalism, we believe, can be partially addressed by a turn to materialist medium theory.4 As Canadian medium theorist Harold Innis (2008) argued, the development of media forms and communicative practices has been inextricably bound up with commerce since the beginning of formalized writing practices in the ancient civilizations of the ‘fertile crescent.’ In the earliest written texts to emerge from this region, communicative practices are given material shape—articulated so that market transactions/relations could be represented, imagined, and constituted over space and in time. Innis, for example, argued that the widespread use of paper and ink at the beginning of capitalism’s five-hundred-year reign enabled the cartographic mapping of political and commercial empires, connecting the frontiers of empire with the metropolitan “backtier,” and enabling control over the flows of capital between the two. Inspired by Innis’s analysis of the spatial and temporal biases of different mediums, James Carey (2008) argued that diffusion of the assemblage of telegraphy across North America was essential in creating national and international futures markets for agricultural commodities where price became disembedded from place and traded against quanta of time.
What both instances of media development represent is a fundamental aspect of how the materialities of media forms engender(ed.) new capitalist imaginaries: the abstraction of knowledge from lived experience and its transmogrification into “information” creates the fiction of a readily exploitable “new” world ripe for the taking as empire and re-making as capital (cf. Headrick 2002; Steinberg 2005). As James Beniger (1986) argued in his now classic work The Control Revolution, “information derives from the organization of the material world” (9). Pushing this point in a Foucauldian direction, we might say that information makes the pragmatics of power of organizing the material world possible (Foucault 1980). The production, dissemination and storage of information has been central to the capitalist enterprise ever since the Renaissance.5
The value of integrating the materialism of the political economy approach with the materialism of medium theory6 is that this integration highlights both the relationship between media forms, their socio-technical affordances, and the communicative practices they enable, and how these articulations produce regimes of power-knowledge that are intrinsic to new forms of capital and its accumulation, on the other. The point here is that “information”—as a mode of control and coordination—and its media/tion is always central to the constitution of capital and the operations of capitalism.
Interestingly, it is in precisely how information is digitally constituted as a mode of coordination and control that distinguishes theories of informational capital/ism from those of digital capital/ism.7 The theories and theorists of informational capital/ism are quite heterogeneous in their conceptual rendering of this epoch of capitalism, yet they all share a common understanding of the profound changes wrought by, first, the technical character of the digital materiality of information and second, the socio-technical organization of its production and distribution, Andreas Wittel (2012), for example, argues that is the articulation of digital media forms with distributed media practices that comprise the fundamental difference between, to use Benkler’s (2006) terms, the “industrial information economy” of the twentieth century and the “network information economy” of the twenty-first century. Wittel identifies four characteristics of digital media that create a unique set of socio-technical affordances of distributed media with the possibility to reshape relationships of power:
They can re-mediate older media forms such as text, sound, image and moving images as digital code; (2) they can integrate communication and information, or communication media (the letter, the telephone) with mass media (radio, television, newspaper); (3) digital objects can endlessly be reproduced at minimum costs; (4) they don’t carry any weight, thus they can be distributed at the speed of light.
(Wittel 2012, 317)
Optimistic theorists such as Benkler (2006) and Cortada (2011) argue that the technological infrastructure of the “networked information economy”—an infrastructure that is based upon media that is digital and distributed—radically reconfigures relations of power as the production, distribution and consumption of mediated communication move from the hierarchical to the flattened, from the proprietary to the commons, and from the inflexibly mass to the flexibly peer-to-peer. The production of cultural meaning and the flow of information are decentralized to the point where the dominant institutions and forms of mass communication are increasingly displaced and marginalized
However, most critical theorists of informational capital/ism do not share Benkler’s optimism of the will of the peer-to-peer commons. Although there is no question that the development and diffusion of “Web 2.0” applications and platforms have significantly transformed the landscape of media and cultural production, there are other elements of informational capital/ism that mitigate their democratic potential. The very qualities of the digital media forms that have radically reduced the costs of production and distribution, namely, their “immateriality” as code, have engendered tendencies that enriched and empower what McKenzie Wark (2012) terms the new “vectoral class” of financiers and entrepreneurs who own and control the key Internet and social media corporations.
Crucial elements, or characteristics, of the informational capital/ism paradigm include: (1) money (including credit) is itself only nominally material but highly informational, leading to a deepening interdependency/integration between financial and ICT industries; (2) the rise in “immaterial wealth” production that is comprised of media creations and artifacts that are increasingly defined as intellectual property by media corporations as well as financial valuations of corporate brand identity constituted by goodwill; and (3) much of this “immaterial wealth” is user-generated or produced by produsers/prosumers and their “immaterial labour,” that is appropriated by corporations as intellectual property (IP).8
The creation of immaterial wealth through immaterial labor is increasingly dependent upon material assemblages. Yet because the tendency under informational capitalism is toward “immateriality,” the formal and material aspects are often overlooked or disregarded. Our task in the next section is to highlight the specificity, indeed, materiality, of the accumulation process (e.g., the process by which fixed and variable capital are organized for surplus value production and accumulation). This requires exposing the sinews (e.g., media) that materially bind together capital’s increasingly “immaterial” corpus (e.g., “the virtual corporation”).9
These sinews, however, are themselves highly capitalized (and commodified), leading to a competition among branded ICT “solutions.” This competition—to capitalize and brand the essential infrastructure of capital accumulation and thus to profit from the essential tools of “competitive advantage”—leads to regular intervals of volatility and “disruption” unleashed by the “gales of creative destruction” (Schumpeter 2008). Arguably, the rise and fall of the BlackBerry is evidence of precisely this process so central to the ideology of free and competitive markets (e.g., Neoliberalism). BlackBerry™ Capitalism therefore reflects not only a particular material assemblage articulating the use of the mobile Internet to instantiate the virtual corporation, but also highlights the competitive logic which contributes to the specifically branded nature of this assemblage.
BlackBerry Capitalism is a branded iteration of capitalism in its ‘informational’ mode, that is, it offers an ‘end-to-end’ system which seamlessly and ubiquitously networks the individual to capital’s organizational structures. In this case we can think of the progressively ‘virtual’ nature of corporations and workforce management. Thus BlackBerry offers three ways by which this networking is both materialized and itself capitalized upon: ubiquitous connectivity (UC), virtualization (via new registers of mobility) and prosumption. Moreover, these offer a means of understanding the relationship between BlackBerry Capitalism, and the forms of “social mobilization” captured by the term “informational capitalism.”
As a “media condition,” ubiquitous connectivity can be usefully analyzed in terms of how material media forms express a convergence of ubiquity, immediacy and personalization in their habitual uses, composition and commercialization. These features are characteristic of informational capitalism generally, and in BlackBerry Capitalism specifically.
Ubiquity here refers to both the perceived and actual colonization of digital media devices and, in this case, the technical capacity to remain connected at all times in devices designed to be “always on” and “always on you.” This experience is framed by the user’s perception or desire for immediacy in the production and consumption of data, and the personalization of devices themselves.
Immediacy refers to a perceived instantaneity (or simultaneity) enabled by the devices and infrastructure, tending toward real-time, networked communication and a logistical collapsing of spatial distance. Connectivity, comprised primarily of both the transmission and reception of digital data, is relatively unencumbered by spatial and temporal constraints, effectively tied to the specific location of individuals.
Personalization refers to the tendency of contemporary media to materially incorporate the identity, information and relationships of a particular user. The identity of the user is integrated into the commercial development of digital media as well as in its technical composition (e.g., SIM cards, NFC chips, unique device identifiers). Personalization of digital media also refers to the filtering (Pariser 2011) and the customization (Turow 2011) of content and services, for example, through the embedding of algorithms that learn the habits of particular users (Mager 2012).
Although each of these aspects on their own is not entirely new or unprecedented, what is new is the scale of their configuration in the myth-making activities associated with a specific media artifact (the BlackBerry) and, more broadly, as the combined appearance of a relatively new category of consumer technologies and services. Thesse comprise the assemblage of BlackBerry capitalism. Thus we focus on the BlackBerry as a case study because it offers an ideal media artifact with which to historicize both the imaginary dimensions and technological appearance of informational capitalism (see also Manzerolle 2013).
Social mobilization under informational capitalism entails the deployment of ICTs to manage the dispersion and movement of a largely “virtual” work-forces. Yet this digital labor, as materialized in the artifact itself, is representative of a particular condition of mediation linking these always-on devices with their always ready to work users. The development of BlackBerry Capitalism also relied on a concurrent “re-imagination” of the commercial enterprise itself. This new corporate imaginary emerged from a burgeoning management literature emphasizing both the “virtual” workforce and the “virtual organization.” New devices and services are required in this spatially and temporally dispersed workforce to maximize both connectivity and flexibility, fitting with the project oriented nature within the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007).
Management literature heralding the rise of the mobile workforce extended the telework discourse to stress the connectivity of workers, whether by transportation or networked ICTs (Pratt 1997). Indeed, the early proselytizing around wireless data networks and services emphasized the importance for mobile workforces (Brodsky 1990; Didner 1991; Hengel 1994; Ryan 1991). The logical conclusion of the mobile workforce is to make them available ‘anywhere and anytime.’ A 1994 article in Industry Week proclaimed the coming “anytime, anyplace workplace” encompassing “an ever more mobile workforce that is connected by technology” and “influencing the scope of work and how we get tasks done” (Verespej 1994).
Flexibility is the watchword underlying both telework and the mobile workforce, and this is what makes each such a potent example of how the imaginary of capitalism is materialized in technologies, practices and ways of thinking. Through the application of ICTs, flexibility comes to define both capital accumulation and labor management. Thus, in the myths of post-industrialism, flexibility is synonymous with connectivity. At the same time, such flexibility also conceals the pervasive managerial surveillance and control implicit in the application of telework (Fitzpatrick 2002; Huws et al. 1990; Lyon 1994; Newitz 2006).
Social mobilization under conditions of ubiquitous connectivity creates a particularly new spatio-temporal dispensation of communication and production (Herman 2013). More specifically, this can be seen in the development of social media into platforms for incorporating and capitalizing upon activities of prosumption. This entails not only the exploitation of user-driven content, but also of the valuable metadata created automatically as a result of any interaction with the platform. Prosumption is important to the broader reproduction of informational capitalism for these two interrelated reasons: it progressively mediates the expression of communicative and creative capacities of users (e.g., content), while also capitalizing on the valuable metadata that can be directly incorporated (licensed or sold) into the systems of production and distribution. Indeed, the “circuits” of capital are prospectively sutured directly into the spatio-temporal habitus of everyday life via UC as a participatory media condition.
The economic necessity of information to contemporary capitalism has contributed to the renewed popularity of the prosumer—a figure that, since its popularization by Toffler (1980), embodies the convergence of production and consumption within the purview of an empowered and autonomous user-consumer of ICTs (see Bruns 2008; Comor 2011). The prosumer, however, is in fact the techno-utopian representation of the sovereign consumer championed by neoclassical economists (Gowdy and Walton 2003). In accordance with neoliberal theory, this figure provides a digitalized version of human rationality premised on self-interest. Thus it is thus not surprising that Web 2.0 reflects a kind of neoliberal form of individualism that posits consumer sovereignty in the creation of user-generated content—a symbol of the empowerment of rational individuals over networks. Informational capitalism privileges the commercial development of the vast information supply chain that depends on the real-time participation of the prosumer-user, but also the regular supply of metadata about user behaviour for a whole range of economic actors (app developers, hardware manufacturers, telecoms and government agencies of various kinds).
The analytic significance of the BlackBerry is not intended to offer praise for its technical or commercial achievements, but instead to show how these achievements express a synthesis representing the motivations of economic actors and prevailing modes of thought as they are drawn together in and through a particular, branded instantiation of informational capitalism.
Given its waning commercial standing, it is easy to forget that the Black-Berry brand, for a time, inspired fanatical devotion, spawning various online fan, user and support groups (Michaluk 2011). The fanatical devotion to the BlackBerry brand, and its UC-enabled lifestyle, was rivaled only by those initiated into the “Cult of Mac.” As evidence, consider that in 2001 a USA Today cover story declared the BlackBerry to be “the heroin of mobile computing” (Maney 2001). Yet despite what many of the manic technology “experts” may have said, the BlackBerry’s significance is not in its singular existence as a popular product, brand or investment stock. Nor is its cultural, technica, or political-economic importance. Rather, it is in the way that these all come to be tied together in a specific socio-technical assemblage
The BlackBerry, as we have said, is an ideal artifact of analysis for engaging with the imaginary of informational capitalism. In the earliest stages, this specific brand of capitalism was defined primarily by ubiquitous email, the push-based communication of data wirelessly and “always on” functionality. The BlackBerry brand, as this chapter demonstrates, evolved to pitch ubiquitous connectivity as a part of sociality itself, an essential mediator of our identity and social networks—a sentiment given form in the 2010 BlackBerry slogan “take life with you.” The BlackBerry also affords an opportunity to see the constitution of a generally new category of devices and services built on infrastructure unique to the mobile Internet (e.g., packet-switched mobile standards like Mobitex, ARDIS networks). Thus if we line up every BlackBerry model, from first to most recent, we see expressed in them the commercial impulses that have now seemingly enveloped the entire globe: the construction of UC not simply as a condition of work consonant with the networked organization or economy, but of a new lifestyle that reflects both a series of ruptures and continuities with the cybernetic imaginary of capitalism itself. This is a story that is visually told in the physical evolution of the BlackBerry; that is, its morphology as a consumer device, outwardly expressed in a way not possessed by later technologies like the iPhone, in which one observes only relatively small outward differences among generations.10 However, the story is not only one of outer appearance, but also of internal operations, software, processing power and miniaturization. As a case study, the evolution of the BlackBerry illustrates the colonization11 of everyday life by computer processing, arguably reaching a developmental finality begun with the popular deployment of the transistor, followed by the integrated circuit and finally the microchip.
This imaginary is embedded in the recomposition of the labor force away from comparatively inflexible unions and other contractual arrangement toward more flexible (and precarious) forms of work. As myth is made real through new devices and services, BlackBerry capitalism builds on a vision of a future workforce and culture, one requiring new tools to meet and manage their professional and social needs in order to make them more flexible, manageable and productive. As such, new techniques and conceptualizations emerge as the adoption of devices spreads. BlackBerry capitalism stems from a belief in a future networked worker whose professional and social lives are inseparably intertwined.
One of the things we found was that the closer that these devices get to you physically, if it’s something that you wear, like a watch or something you put in your pocket or hold in your hand, it takes on a whole different meaning. It becomes something that becomes a part of you. It reflects your character, your personality, and you take certain attributes from that device. There’s a status involved. So what we found was that there’s going to be a large amount of customization going forward. There are going to be different styles, different models.
(Lazaridis 2008, 12)
The materiality of BlackBerry Capitalism begins most tangibly with the commodity object, the device, which is the interface, or relay, between the situated actor and capital itself as represented by a particular organization (whether commercial or noncommercial). It is the artifact of BBC that allows us to start a deeper exploration of the particular conditions of mediation that underpin both BBC specifically, but also informational capitalism more generally. It is also the interface point between the individual and broader capital (infra)structures (base stations, servers, fiber-optic cables, satellites, etc.). The device is not only the most vivid commodity object standing in for the much broader infrastructure (materiality), but it also represents a particular tool for ‘digital labor.’ Here digital labor can be construed generally as those activities that contribute to a net increase in the ‘input(s)’ of digital data into capital’s circuit of (re)production.
What is specific in the case of BlackBerry Capitalism is the emphasis on precisely the “digital” entry of information via the QWERTY keyboard operated by the thumbs. Indeed, the device was conceptualized from the outset as a platform for the production and consumption of information, navigated via the thumbs (thus creating a “thumb culture”; see Glotz et al. 2005).
Another distinguishing feature of the BlackBerry that separated it from popular rivals like the PalmPilot was the choice of interface—touch screen vs. QWERTY—which allowed the BlackBerry to emphasize email as its major functionality with peripheral PDA-like capabilities appended. Although emphasis on email fits into the pragmatic and personalized simplicity of wireless data, it was the divergent application of interface technologies that allowed for its core differentiation. The choice to use QWERTY was built on existing familiarities with then existing technology, protocol, competency and other tacit forms of knowledge. Moreover, the choice of the full QWERTY keyboard made the parallels to stationary computers clearer to consumers. In this respect the keyboard emphasizes the active and productive side of wireless communication.
In combination with the emphasis on email functionality, the choice of QWERTY is an important transitional precursor to the era of ubiquitous connectivity; an era in which users are both producers and consumers of mobile data. One can cite here McLuhan’s observation that the content of all new media is a previous medium (McLuhan 1964, 23) as portable computing, and UC with it, required QWERTY as a bridge to acceptance. The importance of QWERTY as a transitional interface built on the existing competencies of users was central to enabling and equipping people to become accustomed to consuming and producing data ubiquitously. It therefore makes sense that the keyboard for RIM would be an important piece of intellectual property as well as a key component of the BlackBerry brand identity.
As the primary data entry point for mobile devices, BlackBerry’s QWERTY maximized communicative efficiency and ease of use through its optimization of thumb typing. Fortunati (2005) has pointed out how mobile devices represent artifacts of what she calls a “thumb culture” as a distinct set of cultural practices, forms and relations stemming from the use of devices controlled by the thumbs (149–160). Although this characterization certainly reflects the prominence of text-based communication enabled by the QWERTY keyboard, “thumb culture” and “digital labor” are distinctive characteristics of the era of UC. Combined with the global popularity of texting in the wake of GSM standardization, the BlackBerry made such activity a basic element of the workday, but one whose use value was easily translatable to the social lives of users already familiar with desktop computer keyboards.
The first annual report after RIM’s initial public offering (IPO) in 1997 offered its corporate narrative for its product offerings—a narrative crafted to reflect the company’s indispensability to consumers and the telecom providers that would profit from the devices monetizing their network capacities. The message was not overly complex, reflecting the influence of ICTs on the rhythms of everyday life. Communicating to investors, employees and prospective consumers the company’s newly established corporate narrative, the report proclaims, “In a world where consumers increasingly demand to be ‘connected’ 24-hours-a-day for both business and personal purposes, the economical cost and benefits of RIM’s core two-way paging technology give it a significant competitive advantage over the limited applications of one-way products which cannot respond to or initiate messages” (RIM 1998, 4). Not only was the device positioned as one designed for UC, it also was portrayed as a device for both consuming and producing wireless data.
The next step was to develop a brand identity that reflected the unique “value proposition” (i.e., use value) offered by RIM’s new device—one meshed with the future needs of wireless telecommunications providers. After some consultation with branding experts and product designers (Colpatino 2011), the name “BlackBerry” was adopted in 1999 as a means of distinguishing the device from others existing in the market. The name, rigorously tested in focus groups by Lexicon Branding,12 was partly chosen as an ideographic reference to how the QWERTY keyboard of the device resembled the fruit, and partly chosen because linguistics research suggested the appeal of the double “B” sound to focus group participants (MacNamara 2012). The BlackBerry brand was to be all-encompassing: it was simultaneously a device, a complex technological system and a service enabling individuals (whether as professionals, entrepreneurs or as part of the larger workforce) to remain connected at all times. While the brand was associated to the physical device, BlackBerry represented, symbolically, a service that provided and personified UC (RIM 2001). Though the devices themselves were expected to evolve, growing in technical and functional sophistication over time, the basic service and its connotations could remain the same, indefinitely tied to the BlackBerry brand name.
No longer a pager per se, the newly branded BlackBerry850/9500. was released in January 1999 on multiple carrier networks in North America. One of the most important selling points was the ability to push data to users so that there was not lag time between when users are notified about a new message and when they open that message. The push-based system RIM had been working on for years became a central and defining feature of the “BlackBerry Solution,” allowing personal information to find its designated receivers regardless of where they were in space. Arguably, it is this particular technological innovation that made UC a question of perceived immediacy (since there was virtually no gap between getting the notification of new email and actually accessing that email). Indeed, the ability for the BlackBerry to be used almost anywhere in space, and then to use that location to push wireless data, set the stage not only for the mobile Internet but also for an existential condition in which bursts (and flows) of information can interrupt daily life virtually everywhere and at anytime. The slogan, “always on, always connected,” was part of an extensive public discourse on UC that shaped RIM’s corporate identity as well as the bourgeoning PDA market (Wasserman 2001).
The marketing campaign for the BlackBerry957 was the first concerted campaign led by RIM and not by carriers (RIM 2001). The campaign captured the essence of the BlackBerry brand, reinforcing a narrative that not only valorized “always on” connectivity but also depicted the device as a necessary tool suited to the Internet-age of global ICT markets—a mythos in which the speed of information was a defining characteristic, requiring new tools of adaptation. A series of ads circulated in 2000 and 2001 appearing in Canada’s The Globe and Mail are paradigmatic of this overall narrative. One advertisement depicts a man on a golf course checking his email, while another shows a woman lost at sea in a rubber dingy presumably sending a distress message with her 957. More telling still is an advertisement that depicts a man narrowly avoiding a knife thrown by some unknown assailant; the message on the BlackBerry screen simply reads “DUCK!”
Advertisements during this campaign often alluded to, and made light of, the addictive nature of wireless email. For example “It comes with an off button. No one uses it, but it comes with one”; “If you’re planning an intervention for someone addicted to one, may we suggest you use e-mail”; “You shouldn’t use it in the shower. You’d think we wouldn’t have to say that.” Each of these ads describes the BlackBerry as a device with “highly addictive wireless e-mail.”
This new field of devices and services is itself an attempt to commercialize the long-touted “mobile Internet,” which, unlike its wireline predecessor, was subject more closely to the machinations of market competition (and the negative effects of standardization, patents and incumbent telecom interests). BlackBerry capitalism is a particular development of the mobile Internet as a platform for broader wireless services to develop. Of specific importance is the development and commercialization of “push-based” communication through the use of wireless packet-switching infrastructure which allows messages to “find individuals” in time and space, enabling the potential for a state of ubiquitous connectivity. The Internet boom catalyzed further interest and investment in wireless data networks culminating in the marketing of 3G as the grand arrival of the truly mobile Internet (Edwards 1998).
At the organizational level, Castells (1996) declared the rise of the “network enterprise” as a key transformation in the overall mode of production of contemporary capitalism (187). This rhetorical emphasis on networks was echoed in the business press and by management consultants (Baker 1994; Tapscott 1996), all suggesting a fundamentally altered corporate structure more properly aligned with the visions and values of other post-industrial discourses (like telework). For corporations this meant being able to utilize the ‘sunk’ investments represented in fixed capital, contributing to more ‘flexible’ and ‘decentralized’ networked information technologies as mediators of innovation and productive efficiency. It is therefore not surprising that wireless data technologies (and with it, UC) coincided with the rhetoric of “virtualization” to describe the application of network technologies in reshaping the spatial and temporal organization of the business enterprise.
Virtualization contributed to an existing discourses surrounding tele-work a more ephemeral, yet totalizing, description of organizational forms and labor processes. This emergent understanding of virtual as having effect but not form directly preceded the era of UC. It realized this definition by extending the power of management over workers through information flows to and from workers regardless, in theory at least, of the position of employees in time and space. Perhaps more tangibly, virtualization can be used to describe new forms of commercial resources: assets (fixed costs are substituted for variable costs), employees (those that do not need to be physically located in a centralized office) and time (“resources of time seem to expand or shrink at will”) (Birchall and Lyons 1995, 18). As Morgan (1993) described, in the early years of the Internet, virtualization was seen to constitute a major shift in management’s vision of both the organization of commercial activities generally and labor specifically:
Organisations used to be places. They used to be things … But, as information technology catapults us into the reality of an Einsteinian world where old structures and forms of organization dissolve and at times become almost invisible, the old approach no longer works. Through the use of telephone, face, electronic mail, computers, video, and other information technology, people and their organizations are becoming dis-embodied. They can act as if they are completely connected while remaining far apart. They can have an instantaneous global presence. They can transcend barriers of time and space, continually creating and re-creating themselves through changing networks of interconnection based on ‘real time’ communication …the reality of our Einsteinian world is that, often, organizations don’t have to be organizations any more!
(Morgan 1993, 5, emphasis added)
The concepts of virtual work, virtual teams and virtual organizations proved popular enough with business strategists and management experts to spawn numerous “how to” manuals, guiding management professionals on how to implement virtual strategies in their own organizations. Consequently, theories of the “virtual organization” (Quinn 1992; Davidow and Malone 1992; Mowshowitz 1994; Birchall and Lyons 1995; Grenier and Metes 1995; Fukuyama et al. 1997; Jackson and Wielen 1998), “virtual work” (Jackson 1999; Watson-Manheim et al. 2002), and “virtual teams” (Ebrahim et al. 2009) have become (and remain) popular in publications addressing the business impact of new ICTs. The proposed benefits are familiar truisms for business literature: efficiency and productivity gains benefit management, while increasing flexibility and empowerment benefit workers. Paul Drucker and his followers even alluded to the “virtues of virtuality” years before this virtual thematic began to appear in management literature en masse in the 1990s (see Micklethwaith and Wooldridge 1996, 112–114; Hesselbein et al. 1997, 377–383).
The evolution of telework literature toward virtualization provided a ready climate for the introduction of wireless devices for labor management. Indeed, this is precisely what RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (and related software applications) addressed. Management experts had provided a set of problems; RIM provided the technical fix for the drive toward virtualization. The BlackBerry enterprise server was one of the first technological systems that directly facilitated the “virtual organization” by wire-lessly tethering networked connectivity to the worker (Dewar 2006). As it became an early “killer app” for the mobile Internet by, in effect, colonizing the enterprise (Harmon 2000), wireless email, was also, in effect, a “Trojan horse” (Maney 2001) socializing workers into accepting the “condition of immediacy” (Tomlinson 2007) enabled by UC.
As elite business users began to adopt BlackBerrys in growing numbers, RIM poured more effort into developing and marketing its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). While the BlackBerry was most visibly expressed as a singular handheld device, the BES was marketed as an integrated technological assemblage comprising end-user devices, network servers, back-end support, software and hardware; in sum, it was a “total package” that allowed any corporate client to implement a secure wireless strategy with relative ease and speed. The BES enabled total data and network synchronization across a mobile workforce. It allowed for a level of customization according to the client organization’s information, security and networking needs. BES therefore forged not only a large potential market for RIM to exploit, but also solidified the economic necessity of wireless strategies for competitive advantage (RIM 2000). At the end of February 2001, 2,800 companies in North America were using BES (RIM 2001, 10), and in 2003 the number of these servers that were installed by corporations globally exceeded 10,000 (RIM 2003, 4). By 2005 the number reached 42,000 (RIM 2005, 6).
Ilkka Arminen, professor and researcher at the University of Helsinki, makes a case echoing these issues in the era of UC; “Mobile communication anytime, anywhere, increases social accountability. The revival of ‘dead’ moments not only gives us extra time, but also makes us open to real-time monitoring and control. Mobile communication etiquette seems to involve the norms of ‘being always available’ and ‘reciprocating messages/calls you get’” (2009,97). This engenders, he continues, “normative pressure for availability [while it] also allows [for] an increase in accountability, a continuing monitoring of communicative parties” (Arminen 2009, 97).
The BlackBerry freed us. It freed me. It freed others that used the product because it allowed us to leave the office, go home, spend time with the family, and not feel stressed out because you might miss an opportunity, or you might not be able to help out at work when there was a problem and people needed your help. So in effect what it did was it allowed you to get something done very quickly. It allowed you to get it done accurately, and get it done within a short period of time. So you can spend more time with your family, more time with your personal pursuits.
(Lazaridis 2008, 8)
BlackBerry Capitalism is not solely dependent on “physical” goods, goods that require complex chains of production (and related costs), as well as pesky flesh-and-blood workers, creating increasingly razor-thin margins. Rather, the goal is to develop sources of revenue dependent on “intangibles” like services, rents on intellectual property or copyrights. Thus BBC reflects the tendency to package this new condition of mediation as a “branded experience”; indeed, BBC offers a branded experience of the mobile Internet, crafted to meet the new ICT needs of informational capitalism and its most privileged workers.
Given that there was no clearly established market for the BlackBerry, building a market required identifying early adopters who would not only see the value in RIM’s device and service but also help grow its prospective market. The marketing strategy for the BlackBerry first focused on seeding the device with high-profile executives, many coming from the financial industry or Silicon Valley—industries where timely messaging was deemed to be extraordinarily valuable. This strategy was intended to both build word of mouth among elite early adopters and, perhaps more importantly, lead elite users (like CIOs or IT administrators) to pressure larger institutional clients into buying BlackBerrys in bulk to equip their workforce. RIM’s executives believed that these elite professionals would clearly see the value in UC as it helped them cope with the chaotic rhythms of the global financial and high-tech markets of the late 1990s. “RIM took a grassroots approach to building brand awareness for BlackBerry. Sales people were dispatched as wireless email evangelists to educate Fortune 1000 companies about the availability of an enterprise-class solution for wireless e-mail” (Elkin 2001).
Industry-specific applications like those in finance, law or information technology led to the professionals in these industries becoming the fastest adopters of the BlackBerry (RIM 2000); that is, sectors in which activities, decisions and actions had to be made immediately for the sake of competitiveness and/or profitability. Some early applications for the 850/950 included stock monitoring and trading abilities (RIM 2000). Thus the BlackBerry’s core functionality—“always on” connectivity, push email and a QWERTY keyboard—reflected the speed and urgency of timely, round-the-clock flows of information.
While large corporations were sought because of the substantial orders they could place, RIM also targeted entrepreneurs and small-business professionals. In a feature article that appeared in both The Globe and Mail and the Boston Globe titled “Entrepreneur Grabs Latest Handheld Technology,” the popularity of the BlackBerry is explained in terms of how the device empowers such users (Healy 2000). One businessperson is quoted as saying the BlackBerry was his “greatest freedom-provider ever.” Another interviewee notes how the device is perfect for venture capitalists because it mirrors their typical “attention deficit disorder” stating the BlackBerry “has totally influenced the way I get business done” (Healy 2000). Indeed, the professional and small-to-medium business market had been an important growth sector for the early development of smartphones. An interviewee describes the importance of the BlackBerry to entrepreneurs and SMB employers and employees: “The BlackBerry is now my watch, my alarm clock, my scheduler, my timetable, my to-do list, my contact list and my internet wireless communication device” (Wintrob 2001). Perhaps more interestingly, the same person describes the wireless feature as “the closest thing to mental telepathy” (Wintrob 2001).13
In catering to a more general professional and “creative” class of workers, RIM had crafted a particular artifact that embraced and valorized this “new technological condition” (see Reeves 2007) for an extensive analysis of RIM’s promotional discourses). As Reeves (2007) writes,
the discourse of the devices [the BlackBerry] is reflective of global shift toward a “new economy” ideology that promotes an ethic of productivity and a sense of borderless fluxes. The result for the promotions of the BlackBerry … is that the connectivity it enables is presented as a means of increasing productivity. As this new ideology—or ethos—has developed, boundaries [between work and social life] have become increasingly blurred.
Promotional strategy and imagery congealed into a very specific identity for the BlackBerry involving the integration of work and social life. For corporate and business customers, the BlackBerry represented a tool for making the communicative and creative capacities of labor more productive and efficient. For the individual consumer, it was a tool of adaptation to a new technological condition—a condition in which the flows of work and leisure resembled the global flows of information and capital.
The BlackBerry’s brand identity stressed the device’s ability to remain connected at all times, and to link this ability to an economic and cultural necessity: that competitive advantage, efficiency, productivity and even social life itself depended on the individual remaining connected and being able to articulate one’s communicative capacities in this way. BlackBerry’s brand was precisely about providing this increasingly important ability—constant connectivity—to individual users, organizations and institutions. As such, the brand was a crucial predecessor to the coming age in which the prosumer was no longer a discrete market segment, but a functional social actor, “always on,”14 performing the role of postindustrial archetype: the prosumer.
RIM’s brand messaging and product offerings embraced the prosumer (as both producer/consumer and ‘professional user’) as its ideal user. RIM’s strategy involved reconceptualizing UC—through its devices, services, marketing and investor relations—into a fully connected lifestyle adapted to the new era of empowerment and freedom described by Web 2.0 proponents. A central component of RIM’s strategy involved positioning its brand in experiential terms to demonstrate the benefits, and indeed the necessity, of a fully connected lifestyle. RIM’s specific goal was to generalize the significance of UC for all as a means of embracing and articulating the archetype of the prosumer (Hamblen 2008).
To accomplish this, RIM began leveraging the iconic aspects of the Black-Berry’s brand identity—captured by its first slogan, “always on, always connected”—into a far-reaching message about a radically new social milieu accessible through its devices and services. To do this, RIM developed a new marketing strategy and new consumer-friendly products that tied its identity to the most important elements of Web 2.0. Always on, always connected became as much a social necessity for the Web 2.0 prosumers as it was a business necessity for the virtual organization.
At the height of the Web 2.0 euphoria in 2006, RIM introduced what would become a multi-pronged strategy focusing on the affective qualities of the “BlackBerry experience.” This new focus offered an evolved brand narrative bridging work and social life, new devices developed expressly for Web 2.0 prosumers (including added or enhanced media functions) and an emphasis on social networking as a core capability. While appeals to business users focused primarily on access to time-sensitive email, beginning in 2006 a new narrative stressed the affective dimensions of UC: “Love what you do,” “Take life with you,” “Master your everyday,” “Life on Black-Berry.” The themes of “love” and “everyday life” are repeatedly deployed in RIM’s marketing and advertising beginning at this time.15
This broadened narrative shift was also communicated to investors and business analysts in RIM’s annual reports, and these constituted what is perhaps the most concise expression of the BlackBerry’s expanded brand identity. For purposes of contrast, consider these relatively bland opening lines from the 2006 Annual Report (fiscal 2005), the year before the aforementioned transformation:
The flagship product of Research In Motion Limited, BlackBerry is a leading wireless connectivity solution, providing access to a wide range of applications on a variety of wireless devices around the world. It combines award winning devices, software and services to keep mobile professionals globally connected to the people, data and resources that drive their day.
(RIM 2006)
These lines are highly descriptive, factual, and explain clearly the “value proposition” for potential users and customers looking to implement RIM’s devices and services as tools of productivity. The BlackBerry is described primarily as a practical wireless business “solution.”
The 2007 annual report, however, opens with these telling lines:
Wireless access to email and other information is no longer a luxury reserved for top executives. People everywhere are leading increasingly unwired lifestyles, dynamically balancing careers and rich personal lives. They need to be able to go where life takes them without losing touch with the people and information that matter most. They need a mobility solution that can blend innovation, usability and style…Wireless connectivity is liberating and people who live busy lives want that freedom.
(RIM 2007, emphasis added)
Extending the lifestyle narrative, the 2008 annual report emphasizes UC as a primary selling point to consumers, opening the report with the promise of connecting you to “everything you love in life” (RIM 2008, 2) including social networks, entertainment and leisure activities. The 2008 report goes on to innumerate the various ways the BlackBerry has intervened in everyday life as a necessity, delivering a crucial message to potential consumers and investors alike: RIM is not just about business users, but instead is about a radically new way of life premised on UC in which work life and social life are seamlessly interwoven. This is a particularly important component of the BlackBerry’s new expanded identity as it attempts to overcome the potential work-related stigma typically associated with the brand. The 2009 report detailed sections outlining the lifestyle characteristics of the new devices and features, proclaiming that the BlackBerry would “connect to your favorite entertainment,” “connect to your social networks,” and “connect to your interests” (RIM 2009).
The focus on experiential and affective qualities is an essential part of contemporary marketing and advertising (Arvidsson 2006) and has been a historically important part of wireless telecommunications marketing (Goggin 2006). Focus on experience is arguably more important for wireless services in part because the key medium, the electromagnetic spectrum, is itself experientially intangible. Branding mobile phones and devices as tools of everyday life requires a heavy dose of affect. As Adam Arvidsson writes, “In the case of mobile phones, branding means first of all, the inclusion of customer’s everyday life” and in so doing “to construct various forms of branded communities” (Arvidsson 2006, 116, 118).
What is on offer is a service that provides us ubiquitous access to our social lives, positioning it as a basic necessity akin to food and shelter. There is also a political-economic necessity for the wireless industry itself; “As a source of revenue thus shifts from network and call charges to the provision of services and ‘content,’ the brand also comes to function for investors as a direct indicator of potential future Customer Lifetime Value” (Arvidsson 2006, 116).
With this point in mind, RIM’s emphasis on the BlackBerry as a lifestyle necessity refocuses the brand not simply as a specific device but toward the entire BlackBerry brand as an essential service. For RIM, the Black-Berry brand becomes a locus for emotional and affective labor associated with social connectivity. Consequently, the participation (prosumption) of users—particularly younger consumers—becomes a means of adding value to the brand itself as a function of the network effects (Benkler 2006)—or perhaps network “affects”—that see the value increase as more people are added to such communities. The more users that are committed to the connectivity offered by BlackBerry, the greater its social and economic value. In this regard, the attraction of younger consumers becomes essential.
In 2009, the relative success of the BlackBerry as a global brand “ambassador” for UC was demonstrable, not only in RIM’s devices, services and marketing campaigns, but in the economic data summarized in its annual report (RIM 2009). Indeed, 2009 was the tipping point for RIM and the BlackBerry as the smartphone market came to be increasingly dominated by Apple’s iPhone and the various Android-based handsets. This tipping point, however, is indicative of the broader maturation of UC as a basic staple of everyday life, even in places (like on the African continent) where traditional consumer technologies had been ignored due to insufficient demand, high cost or lack of infrastructure (Arnquist 2009; Evans 2012; Wright 2008).
RIM’s decline has fueled intense commentary since the launch of the iPhone. Rarely a day goes by without another obituary for RIM and the BlackBerry. The resignation of co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie in 2012 further signaled the dramatic changes both in the company and its specific claim to a branded experience of UC. Whether these assessments are based on sound economic analysis, hysteria born from the “animal spirits” of a chaotic marketplace, or the need to provide regular content for business and technology blogs is debatable. Regardless of the reason, the signs of decline are palpable, though champions of the BlackBerry brand persist, and sales continue to grow in many developing markets (Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia are still areas of growth for the BlackBerry). RIM, now rebranded as BlackBerry to create consistency between its product lines and corporate operations, attempted to reboot its brand of devices by launching an entirely new operating system and app development platform, BB10. The result was a spectacular failure and the future of the company and its devices is very much uncertain (cf. Silcoff et al. 2013).
Quite apart from the postmortems and prognostications concerning the company, our analytical point is that the question of RIM’s decline is intimately tied its own role in the reification of UC as a now taken-for-granted expectation. Indeed, the success of the BlackBerry as a unique branded arguably has been occluded by its experiential universalization (at least in relatively “developed” political economies). Declining handset costs, increased processing power and expanded mobile bandwidth capacity all have enabled mobile devices to develop into ubiquitous platforms for the consumption of software and services. Thus ubiquitous connectivity is no longer a selling point for the company. Instead, the BlackBerry’s success has contributed to its demise as its branded experience of ubiquitous connectivity has become embedded, and taken for granted, technical and experiential characteristic of mobile media generally. Though troubled, the company is returning to its roots by focusing on large-enterprise clients seeking secure and efficient mobile devices and services that optimize the collaborative and flexible aspects of the “virtual” organization. While the specific brands, devices and services may change, the essential features of BlackBerry ™ Capitalism are now deeply rooted in the strategies of virtualization characteristic of contemporary capitalism.
BlackBerry™ Capitalism Is Dead. Long Live BlackBerry Capitalism!
1. The source of the data for stock prices and market capitalization is http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=BBRY&a=01&b=4&c=1999&d=01&e=27&f=2014&g=m&z=66&y=0 and https://ycharts.com/companies/BBRY/chart/#/?securities=type:company,id:BBRY,include:true,,&calcs=id:market_cap,include:true,,&format=real&recessions=false&zoom=custom&startDate=1%2F1%2F2009&endDate=1%2F1%2F2014&chartView=respectively (both accessed February 27, 2014). The data for global market share in 2008 and 2014 came from www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/01/30/blackberry-must-ignore-market-share/ and www.bnn.ca/News/2013/11/12/BlackBerrys-global-market-share-falls-to-just-17.aspx, respectively (both accessed February 27, 2014). The actual peak of RIM’s valuation on the stock market was in August of 2007, when its stock price reached $236 per share with a market valuation of $69.3 billion. At its apex, the BlackBerry OS market share was 20% in 2009 (Silverman 2012)
2. In inserting the slash between “capital” and “ism” we want to give notice to the articulation between “capital” as an object and process, on the one hand, and the social structures of accumulation of capitalism as a mode of production that enable its production, distribution and consumption, on the other hand.
3. Some of the key texts in the literature on “digital capitalism” are McChesney (2004, 2008, 2013), Mosco (2005, 2009) and Schiller (1999, 2011).
4. See the introduction to this book for a more detailed discussion of materialist medium theory as well as Packer and Wiley (2011) and Parikka (2012).
5. One example would be the development of accountancy. For early-twentieth-century social theorists of capitalism such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber, the practice of double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) was fundamental to the establishment of the modern capitalist enterprise that manufactured, bought and sold different commodities across different times and places (Chiapello 2007). From the point of view of Innisian medium theory, DEB is not just an accounting practice but, more importantly, an articulation of elements both material (desks, pens, account ledgers, files, shelves, etc.) and imaginary (rules of mathematics, standards of accountancy, norms of professional accountants and actuaries, fiduciary ethics of corporate governance, etc.)—which comprise a social practice of mediated power-knowledge. Moreover, such practices give rise to cadres and elites, as Innis argued, which structure access to and control over such ensembles of power-knowledge and create monopolizations of knowledge (Innis 2007). As we shall see in the second part of this chapter, this applies as much to the Chief Information Officers of the twenty-first-century corporate entities and the “crackberry” devotees of the BlackBerry they manage, as well as to the green-eye-shaded accountants of the nineteenth century.
6. We are by no means the first to suggest such a combination. The work on digital gaming by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009) exemplifies this articulation of theoretical traditions in important ways See also their earlier work with Stephen Kline (2003).
7. Some of the key texts of the informational capital/ism perspective are Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012), Fisher (2010), Fuchs (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013), Terranova (2004), Wittel (2012) and Wark (2012).
8. There is a growing literature on the concept of “immaterial labour,” particularly in terms of how its central to the prosumerist productivity—and this corporate profitability—of social media platforms such as Facebook. For starters, see Andrejevic (2011, 2013), Cote and Pybus (2011), Fisher (2012), Peters and Bulut (2011), Scholz (2013), Terranova (2013) and an entire special issue of the journal ephemera, Burston, Dyer-Withford and Hearn (2010).
9. See the famous BusinessWeek cover story on “The Virtual Corporation” www.businessweek.com/stories/1993–02–07/the-virtual-corporation (accessed February 27, 2014). For later reflections (2013) on the “triumph” of the virtual corporation, see http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/triumph-virtual-corporation-194905193.html (accessed Febraury 27, 2014). We will discuss this further in the next section.
10. A visual history of BlackBerry devices is available at http://crackberry.com.
11. By “colonization” we mean both the proliferation of available digital devices and services as well as their seamless embedding into the rhythms of everyday life.
12. Lexicon Branding also was responsible for coming up with Intel’s “Pentium” brand as well as Apple’s “PowerBook” line of laptop computers. See www.lexiconbranding.com.
13. As John Durham Peters (1999) has lucidly documented, the mythology of unmediated communication has a long history. Radical changes in communication technologies, for example the telegraph, are often linked to a perceived supernatural augmentation of human faculties. For example, Harvard physicist and Morse biographer John Trowbridge wrote in 1899, “Wireless telegraphy is the nearest approach to telepathy that has been vouchsafed [“revealed”] to our intelligence” (quoted in Peters 1999, 104).
14. Here we use the term “always on” in a double sense: the first one already articulated as a technological condition, the second I reference a more theatrical and performative sense of being on meaning that one is in effect always performing, whether it be in service of work, or in the iterative project of the self so essential to the consumerist ethos; see Bauman (2007).
15. On the scope of RIM’s affective turn, McGuigan (2010) writes,
Most striking about this campaign is its attempt to mobilize affect. The images characterize BlackBerry devices as an archive and conduit of ‘everything we love in life.’ Ironically, the images remind us that what we really value—what gives meaning to our lives—are interactions with the people we love and care about. Perhaps this is meant to tap into guilt experienced by people forced to spend time apart from their families—as is common in the corporate world. In this sense, the products and their connective capabilities are reified, serving as proxies or facilitators for interactions that cannot occur in physical proximity, for whatever reason(s). (20)
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