The Manifesto on the Manifesto

Greetings, comrade. The purpose of this Manifesto of Manifestos is to educate the working class about the importance - and dangers - of the mass media industry. Originally published before any of its contents made sense, the revived Manifesto now preaches to an audience that understands terms such as "television," "Internet," and "passive consumerism." Each section of the Work relates a tale, musing, or observation organized into numbered groups, each with a more-or-less self-descriptive title. These sections generally begin with a reference to a lost tome, generally thought to be Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, Boston, MA. Copyright 2011). So, read on, my citizens, and hear the stories of a society increasingly dependent on cheesy Communist references.

Monday, October 4, 2010

4.) The Manifesto on the Modern Miracles of Mobile Media

So, you think you’re so cool, what with your BlackBerry or iPhone or Droid? Well, it turns out that you are. These three smartphone families make up 90% of the total smartphone market. And we all know that to be cool you have to conform to arbitrary standards set by large companies. However, as it turns out, if you’ve got a BlackBerry, you may be in trouble. Research in Motion (R.I.M.), the maker of the BlackBerry, saw a decrease in market share, from 55% in the first quarter of last year to 41% a year later. iOS and Droid, however, rose from 23% to 49% in the same period. What does all this mean, you may ask? It means that the world’s gone mobile.

All right, cards on the table. I will admit that I myself… have a BlackBerry. I know, I know. We’re losing out to your iPhones and Droids. But there’s hope. I just don’t know what it is. But the good news for all mobile devices is that mobile browsing is on the rise. It may still only account for 2.8% of all browsing, but the Mobi-Web – as it’s been called since I unwittingly ripped it off from mobiweb.mobi - may very well be the next Internet Explorer. Oh, wait. I meant Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, decaying logs, or basically anything else that works remotely well. But I must hand it to Microsoft. It’s not easy to make a device to raise blood pressure and command 49% of the web browsing market at the same time.

I personally think that a much better way to view the Web is on the epitome of “I-want-it-but-I-don’t-want-to-pay-for-it” devices: Apple’s iPad. I will write more on the iPad later, but for now, just remember that it’s a 4:1 scale model of the iPod touch, which for some reason has defied any attempts to capitalize anything but the second letter. The iPad has a beautiful screen. Why would anybody want to watch a YouTube video on the cramped, lower-res display of my soon-to-be-obsolete BlackBerry Curve, ancient at a year old? (By the way, I love my BlackBerry. Get one now.) The iPad really lends itself to Web-viewing, to the extent that someone at Apple said, “Hey, you know how we can make this more expensive? Give it 3G.” And now, we can view a Web page anywhere there’s Internet access, as well as in certain parts of Vermont. With a device like that, why would anybody worth more than $5 million use anything else?

But, what does all this really mean? It means that mobile devices – Pads ‘n’ Pods included – are rapidly gaining a place in the web-browsing game. While console browsing remains steady, the handheld Net gets bigger and bigger. 2.8% may not seem like a lot, but my guess is that in just a few years, that number will be significantly higher. Almost as high as the percentage of people who risk liver failure every time they log on to their application with the same initials as “ingeniously evil” or “insidious experiment” or “ibex everlasting.” I could go on, but for now, Manifesto, OUT.


Media had converged here.

(Photo courtesy of http://blog.monty.de/?cat=7)

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