I want to start this post with a story from my undergrad days: I was a Film Studies minor, and as such I was encouraged to attend a series of screenings by documentarians as a way to both broaden my mind and get some extra credit by writing up said screenings for one of my film classes. One such screening was a film called "All Rendered Truth," which is what one of the subjects of the film (a bunch of people who made art out of everyday and neglected objects, I guess they fall under the rubric "folk art" though I'm not sure if that term was in popular usage back then) said that "art" stood for, and I think it's a fantastic definition that holds up. Anyway, the two documentarians were there and took questions after the screening. One guy, notebook in hand (I'm guessing he wasn't there out of interest in the subject, any more than I might have been), asked "how did you find these artists," and the two guys described how they usually drove around, fielding phone calls or inquiring at local spots about artists in the area, and so on. Then the same guy raised his hand and repeated his question. A buddy of mine whispered under his breath, "they already answered your question, dumbass."
I bring this up not just because it's a funny story, but because I think it has a relation to the book Finding Augusta, in that the person at the center of the tale (Scott Nixon) is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle wrapped up inside another enigma (or something like that). We get some basic biographical detail (he was an insurance salesman who lived in Augusta, Georgia, and he liked to make films about the various Augustas or variations on "Augusta" that he encountered on his travels, he assembled that footage into a brief film called The Augustas but never really documented why or to what ends he did so). I keep wanting to ask not just "how did he find these Augustas" because clearly he looked at maps for the most obvious ones (like Augusta, Maine, for instance, or other Augustas throughout the country) but also "why." It's an answer that's elusive, for sure (no sled emblazoned with the word "Augusta" to be found here, just as it's heaped upon the funeral pyre of Charles Foster Kane's legacy). It's frustrating.
The book itself deals with issues both related to that frustration and seperate from it: Cooley spends some time talking about the construction of cellphones as something that "fits easily" in your hand, thus never apart from you. As anyone who's seen people bump into a street sign while checking their Twitter feed can attest (and I did see that sometimes, when I was working downtown and we'd get a break around ten in the morning and at three in the afternoon), the concept of a phone as being *not* an extension of yourself is becoming more alien now. I don't own a smartphone myself, so the QR codes for the Augusta App were useless to me (and I thought it interesting that, in a book dealing with the idea of surveillance as a tool of governance, we were being asked to add something to our phones that facilitated the surveillance by the author of this book. I'm not sure if that was the case, I defer to anyone who did add the Augusta App to their phone). But I think it's interesting how Steve Jobs (whom I've beaten up repeatedly in class and on this blog, but only because deep down I respect the fact that he changed our lives with his products, however ambiguous my feelings about those products may be) wanted the iPhone and other Apple products to avoid the "sleek, cold" designs of his competitors, when I think the case can be made that Apple products are by definition sleek and cold now. You can personalize the iPhone with a colorful case, but the basic design is sleek and white (or silver) and futuristic in a way old timey sci-fi movies imagined the future to be (aerodynamic spaceships with no "flaws" evident). I could be in the minority here, but I think Apple has gotten away from being "warm and fuzzy" in their designs. We have met the enemy, Apple might say, and they are us.
Also, the concept of the phone fitting the ideal hand, without taking into account variations or mutations (or the simple fact that not everyone's hands are the same size), is interesting to me. Does an iPhone really fit your hand well, or does it feel too small or too big? I think of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry's girlfriend has man-hands; she looks perfectly normal except for the fact that, when she tries to feed him at the restaurant or stroke his face, we cut to Bigfoot-sized paws imposing their will on his face. Also, and this may just be me, but the concept of "fitting in your hand" brought to mind the M&M slogan (hey, last week we talked about Eminem, so it's only fitting) "melts in your mouth, not in your hands." Perhaps in some way that only demented grad students might consider (raises hand, calls attention to self), the phone-in-hand concept is the inverse of that: it melts to your hand, becomes a part of you, so much so that you can't imagine living without it. Sounds bizarro, I know, but as I'm typing this I'm considering checking my phone to see if anyone's texted me (or if, more likely, my cameraphone has been operating all this time without my knowledge or initiative, taking pictures from the inside of my pants pocket that show up as black spaces), because I've got it on silent, so as to avoid disturbing anyone. However much I might have once been snarky about such ideas, the fact is that my phone is a part of me, even if I don't want it to be.
I was kinda hoping that (as with Digital Detroit and the author's references to Bob Dylan, Lester Bangs, and other tangentially-related Detroit-pop-culture ephemera) we'd get a chance to discuss James Brown, the most famous son of Augusta, Georgia, but he doesn't come up because really the book isn't actually about Augusta, or Augustas. It's about this network that we've all bought into, one that has become corporatized and overrun with services and apps that "offer" freedom but really exist to track us, our habits and search histories and buying trends and fetishes that we don't tell anyone about and so on. In a university where the email is through Google, the software provided by Adobe, and the drinking products by Coca-Cola, it's not just the web that is a corporate wasteland, beholden to signs (literally and figuratively) that we do not have agency over our own actions. Governance might very well be best when it governs least, but try telling that to either side of the aisle (for all their talk of "smaller government," the Republicans under Bush probably caused the most significant growth of bureaucracy since the Second World War. Now most of the top administration officials are yukking it up on Fox News, talking about Obama being the second coming of Hitler or something. Go figure). In the future, we're gonna have to guard our shit a little better, I guess. But don't worry, there's an app for that....
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