20 January 2008

There is a great irony perpetrated today and mediated by our electronic technologies. In tandem with morality pleas, calls to moral authority, and outright moral hypocrisy, there is an increasing realization of our inherent greatness - a greatness qua Nietzsche - that is our creative potentiality. Examples abound, and so I take a moment to pause and to glorify:

I) Toyota announced it will offer an improvement to its hybrid car - the Prius - upgrading its battery from a nickel-metal hydride to a lithium-ion plug-in (Micheline Maynard, "Toyota Will Offer a Plug-In by 2010," The New York Times, 14 January 2008).

II) Along the lines of hybridity, a hybrid business model is emerging, and to much success. Indeed, Mozilla is an excellent example of the hypbrid non-profit foundation with a for-profit subsidiary fostering a continued commitment to open-source (John Markoff, "Mozilla Names New Chief, but Reaffirms Open-Source Commitment," The New York Times, 8 January 2008).

III) In the remediation sphere (remediation qua Bolter and Grusin), DJ hardware and software is launching far, wide, and to great applause:

In February 2008, Swedish company, Tonium, will release the Pacemaker - DJ equipment reduced to the size of a PB&J sandwich with a 120-gigabyte hard drive and built-in mixer to layer tunes seamlessly so the music never stops (Anne Eisenberg, "For Disc Jockeys as Well as Desk Jockeys," The New York Times, 20 January 2008). In the spirit of open source, Tonium will make the Linux-based software used in the Pacemaker public so users can improve, innovate, and share the software with others.

In September 2007, Numark Inc. released iDJ2, its mobile DJ device that is a lightweight mixing console with a docking station for an iPod (ibid).

IV) In what seems the last realm of possible remediation, technology is actually remediating the grocery cart. In the second half of 2008, Microsoft in tandem with MediaCart Holdings Inc. will bring digital advertising to grocery carts and will rig them with RFID that will enable the system to identify where the cart is in the store and thus to stream particular ads depending on location in the store (The Associated Press, "Video Ads Are Planned for Grocery Carts," 14 January 2008).

V) Of course, I can not get away with a discussion of the latest in technological advancements without a turn to Apple. (Good timing to, with the recent Electronics Show in Vegas.) Along with his introduction of the self-proclaimed "world's thinnest notebook" - the MacBook Air - Steve Jobs announced the turn towards mixing media in mixed mediums through the iTunes movie rentals and the Apple TV (Ellen Lee, "Apple introduces slim notebook, online movie rental service," San Francisco Chronicle, 16 January 2008).

VI) Further along the lines of mixing mediums in mixed media, is the recent phenomena from Japan: cellphone novels - novels composed on cell phones uploaded to web servers and with luck, published in its original medium - print (Norimitsu Onishi, "Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular, " The New York Times, 20 January 2008). This phenomena has taken such popularity that five of the top ten Japanese novels of 2007 were originally cellphone novels.

Apart from these published and commercial technological innovations today, perhaps the most impressive show of potentiality rests in quantum mechanics' Bose Einstein Condensate. A truly remarkable attestation to the evolutionary challenge from past to future - from the mastery of heat to the conquest of cold - the virtual capture and utilization of absolute zero promises to enable yet unimagined discoveries. My personal interest is to see a quantum computer at work - the q-bit - zero and one simultaneously!

Materialized creativity, realized potentiality, hyphenation in presence, today...to dare to dream and to act upon that dream with successful achievement.

Above morality, beyond good and evil, Nietzsche's position is greatness indeed!