The evolution and meaning of our love affair with Apple and its devices.

At dinnertime: check. At a traffic light: check. In bed at the end of the day: check. In line at the coffee shop: check. In The Geek’s Chihuahua, Ian Bogost addresses the modern love affair of “living with Apple” during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance.

The ubiquitous iPhone and its kin saturate our lives, changing everything from our communication to our posture. Bogost contrasts the values of Apple’s massive success in the twenty-first century with those of its rise in the twentieth. And he connects living with Apple with the phenomenon of “hyperemployment”—the constant overwork of today’s technological life that all of us now experience. Bogost also reflects on the new potential function—as well as anxiety and anguish—of devices like the Apple Watch. We are tethered to our devices, and, as Bogost says: that’s just life—anxious, overworked, and utterly networked life.

Format

The Geek’s Chihuahua appears in the University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners series. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Contents

  1. The Geek’s Chihuahua
  2. What Is an App?
  3. Pascal Spoken Here
  4. The Phones of Fall
  5. The Cigarette of This Century
  6. Hyperemployment
  7. Two Elegies for Apple
  8. Can We Have Your Attention, Please?
  9. The End of the Hangup
  10. Future Ennui
  • Notes

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