It all happened yesterday on my porch as I anxiously watched the street for the brown UPS truck.

Weeks of waiting (all long-term customers were punished by Rogers for their patronage by having to call in their iPhone orders instead of picking one up from the now reasonably stocked stores) culminated with me labouring over a way to sound certain about Derrida’s approach to popular culture analysis called “hauntology.”

The truck pulled up and the delivery person asked if the package was for me. He said “I think it’s a phone or something.”

“A phone!” I said. “This is no phone. I’ve been waiting for this all my life. I gave up a kidney for this thing.”

He handed me my box and I sank softly into tech oblivion.

I am an extremely punctual, impatient person. The iPhone has cured that.

Waiting for a meeting this afternoon at the Starbucks across from MuchMusic was effortless.  I can now research, write, read, record, note, label, share and best yet, connect with my far flung partner anytime and anywhere. My iPhone is like a shiny rectangular him. Another perk with the iPhone is that I can watch over 100 versions of Toronto’s propane explosion and episodes of The Whitest Kids U Know while relaxing in a bubble bath.

Here in Toronto the legitimate un-jailbroken iPhone has just arrived and it is still only in the hands of early adopters. What I felt though as I looked up through the lens of my iPhone (to take a picture with the AirMe App which automatically sends photos to your Flickr account) was that I was alone here. In the heart of all that is holy and young and modern and consumerist in Canada and yet my gnarled and clumsy Generation X hands were the only ones clasping an iPhone! Compared to other major urbanized countries—most notably Japan—we Canadians are living in shackled cities deep in wifi drought.

Until now I was forced to drag my laptop around and pray to find an unprotected linksys signal to hop on to get my work and social messages so I would know what the rest of my life looked like. Usually I just stayed tethered to home or the university so I’d be hooked in. And blind and deaf when I ventured north to visit family or decide to take a walk on the beach.

But now I’m Oscar Mike. On the move, in military phonetics, and no longer languishing while awaiting the inevitable. What sort of identity will a half-century of this immediate and constant collecting, merging, networking, purging and repeated reflection upon all of these productions produce? How can I hope to ever gather enough of all this stuff to begin to describe my own popular culture let alone create a coherent analysis of these cultural systems? I’m no Derrida, and despite my name, I’m not even French. Nonetheless, untethered by my iPhone I can begin to try figuring it all out.

Tags: derrida, iphone 3G, oscar mike, rogers iphone, toronto wifi

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Posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 10:56 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.