The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicked off yesterday so the Internet memes are abuzz with iPorn. Every time Steve Job’s talks, tech bloggers, like me, are thrilled to blog about it. It turns each of us into ads for Apple and what is worse many of us are not even real shills because we don’t get any payment for our work for them.

Blogs can be traced all the way back to 1983 Brian E. Redman. In 1983 I saw my first Apple computer. The entire student body of Arran-Tara Elementary School (around 400 kids) sat cross-legged and hushed as the Apple Local Integrated Software Architecture (LISA, named for Jobs’ daughter) was cautiously rolled out onto the stage. Mr. Ripley our principal pushed a button and we watched in confused awe as the first commercial computer with graphical user interface (GUI) turned on. But the 5MHz CPU (5 million calculations per second) could barely run it.

As of last weekend, the Petaflop Roadrunner Supercomputer is the fastest computer in the world, processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. Yottahertz here we come!

As a Grade 5 kid, I was too pissed off at monstrous-breasted Mrs. Gowan telling us that we should all be sent to “the retard school” for how we behaved at the computer assembly to reflect upon seeing my first Apple. They never let any of us touch it, but we could go stand near it in the library. I did not, in fact, see anyone ever using it, because no one knew what it was for.

This subtextual story of Apple’s cultural effects is key. Apple has transformed the work I do, the relationships I have and my identity. Among other things, I am an Internet communication consultant and tech blogger. The reverential introduction to my first Apple computer has had long-lasting and unimaginable social and economic effects on my life. I am simultaneously advertising for Steve Jobs and actively creating a unique and yet socially situated identity with each Apple-related blog post, including this one.

The point is, embracing commercially produced products and producing a complex personal identity are not mutually exclusive. Culture is more sophisticated than even a Yottahertz CPU. Infinite points of entry, contexts and innovative historical interpretations mean that Kim Kardashian can give me words to live by:

I’m doing it with class ‘cuz I’ve got a big ass

Even so, I will unrelentingly be an incomparable person. Mass-produced movies, books, characters need not be guilty pleasures unless you have an extra-cultural locus. Piling your desk with the latest literary tombs and fending off urges and making excuses to rush out to see Ironman or Sex in the City is an elitist waste of energy. Don’t be afraid to become one of us—the overt Perez Hilton-reading, Amy Winehouse-watching, WWDC blogging people who are brave enough to fully immerse ourselves in whatever culture is available to us and still know ourselves.

Tags: Apple

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Posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 2:13 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.