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Has The Age Of Totemic Gadgets Passed?

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 06:12 PM PDT

The lads here, mostly Devin and Matt, were talking about Everyday Carry, a website dedicated to the things we carry in our bags, pockets, and purses. Most of the EDC gear looks pretty heavy-duty – many EDCs include guns and long stickin’ knives for, you know, those times when you need to stick stuff (Merlin Mann’s is particularly interesting, for example) – and from the looks of the site it seems lots of people have totemic items, items of power that they carry to get things done. You’ve got Leathermen and diving watches. Little Moleskine notebooks. Pocket cameras and Space Pens.

I remember my first totemic item, a fat Wenger 30-tool Swiss Army Knife my father bought me when I turned eleven. My dad picked it out for me at Lev’s Pawn Shop on Main Street in Columbus, Ohio, and that knife held great power to me. I carried it everywhere, used it on my “projects” and learned how to take care (or not take care) of good things by learning to care for that knife. I still have it, a quarter century later, and it holds a place of honor among my tools, a veteran fading away next to my harmonicas and a nice Gerber aluminum-handled stickin’ knife. These items still hold power and they are important to me.

But we’re fast reaching the end of that era. What do we do that requires a knife? Our food is pre-portioned and cut, our McDonald’s apples sliced into shards and vacuum packed, our cheese pre-packaged, or meats pre-marinated. We don’t hunt – most of us don’t – and we don’t tinker – most of us don’t – and we carry most everything we need in one or two disposable devices. Who needs a Leica when we carry an iPhone? Who needs a notepad when we carry a Nexus S? Who needs a book when we carry an iPad? These devices don’t have the same import, the same heft as their simpler counterparts but does that really matter? They do the job well enough or better.

I worry that Everyday Carry is a window on a vanishing cargo cult, a group of men and women who think that something out there needs tightening and that at some point they’ll need to tell the time and the power will be out and the world will have stopped and the only thing running will be an automatic Seiko diver in blaze orange strapped to their wrist. It’s the survivalist instinct in miniature.

They’re going away. Instead we now carry one or two items – maybe keys and a phone – and go through life in a soft cushion of air conditioning. It seems that everywhere you go, there are eyes on you who will frown if they see your potentially lethal Leatherman or (and I find this inscrutable, but I’m not other people and so I won’t judge) your licensed firearm. As a watch fiend I learn the risibility of wearing a nice timepiece on an almost daily basis. After all, the cellphone has a clock right on it, right?

So maybe we’re losing totemic items or maybe we’re replacing them when magic items, items that the makers of the first knives and the first leather notebooks and the first pocket watches would have considered mesmerizing at best and witchcraft at worst. I’ve often said that if Ben Franklin came back today, what would we be able to show him that would prove he had not landed on an alien world? We’d bring out a knife, a watch, a notebook and say “Look at that. We’re still here. We still exist. We made it through ages of darkness and we made it out and this is what survived that crucible. We’re still human. This is us.”

Will Social Media Save WrestleMania 27?

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 02:30 PM PDT

Well, maybe not "save" WrestleMania, but help ensure it does better than last year's edition, WrestleMania 26, which, at well under one million pay-per-view buys worldwide, was considered a bit of a disappointment. What's different this year is WWE's use of social media—that is to say they're actually using it this time around. But even if this year's edition, WrestleMania 27, which airs from Atlanta tomorrow on pay-per-view, does better than last year's, how much of that can be attributed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how much of that can be attributed to the return of The Rock? Serious business, etc.

To be fair, it very much is serious business. WWE pulled in $477.7 million in revenue last year (up from $475.2 in 2009), and its flagship TV program, Raw, on the USA cable network, regularly draws [PDF] five million viewers per week. The move to a more family friendly, PG-oriented product may have upset some fans—you can't visit a pro-wrestling message board without seeing fans clamoring for a return to the late 1990s/early 2000s Attitude Era, what with its edgy content and more adult-oriented storylines—but the shift has enabled the company to strike lucrative deals with the likes of Mattel.

The company has had a somewhat unusual relationship with technology in recent years. While it was quick to move its NXT television program from the SyFy network to WWE.com, it did so only to make room for another program, Smackdown, which made its SyFy debut last October. (NXT still airs on television networks outside of the U.S.) It made available, on YouTube and WWE.com, full episodes of some of its television programs last year, but this was long after people had been watching TV shows online on services like Hulu and iTunes.

But the embrace of social media has been a concerted effort. The company's chief marketing officer, Michelle Wilson, told Multi-Channel News that the company's increased use of Facebook in particular should help the company achieve its goal of one million worldwide buys. (The company currently has 4.9 million "likes" on the site.) It has promoted its talents' individual Twitter accounts, who use the platform as an extension of on-air goings-on, as seen here:


Dear John Cena – let’s just hug it out ok? APRIL FOOLS – IN 2 DAYS IM STOMPIN A MUDHOLE IN YOUR FRUIT LOOP PUNK ASS – TEAM BRING IT.less than a minute ago via Who SayDwayne Johnson
TheRock

The fact that there are so many things working in the company's favor this year—not coming the day after a major UFC pay-per-view event as it did last year; the return of The Rock; the presence of Jersey Shore's Snooki—will make it difficult to pinpoint one particular reason why the show does better (if it does, indeed, do better).

Although, to be honest, we all know The Rock is the real draw here. I'd find it hard to believe even one person would buy the show to see Snooki, who's regularly on free TV doing whatever it is she does that makes her famous. Incidentally, wouldn't the Italian feminine diminutive of "guido" be "guidetta" and not "guidette" as Snooki claims? I'm pretty sure the "-ette" ending is French and not Italian. But then again I don't have a fancy MTV show, so what do I know?

Another wild card: online piracy. We're all familiar with UFC's fight against illegal online streams, but there's but so much a company like it or WWE can do to fight streams that are oftentimes based overseas. It's not a problem that will go away quickly, or easily. Stream quality will only improve as bandwidth becomes cheaper and more plentiful ("peak bandwidth" notwithstanding); most everybody by now knows that with a cheap HDMI cable you can connect a laptop to a big screen HDTV in order to watch the stream there. How will these streams affect the event's buyrate, and will UFC's lawsuits have scared off potential pirates? Tough to say, but it's not as if piracy is a new thing phenomenon: "black boxes" could illegally tune into pay-per-view channels on analog cable systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and WWE and boxing still had a number of events then with massive buyrates. I'm pretty sure Mike Tyson is still the biggest pay-per-view draw of all time, and he was at the top of his game when these "black boxes" could be pretty easily obtained, as anyone who read the classified ads in electronics magazines will tell you.

Getting one million worldwide pay-per-view buys is no easy feat, and we've already seen how just because something is popular on Twitter doesn't automatically mean money is being made, so it'll be terribly exciting to see if WWE's social media push has any impact whatsoever on WrestleMania 27's numbers. Again, if the show does do well much of that success will have to be attributed the return of The Rock, whose WrestleMania 17 main event with Stone Cold Steve Austin in 2001 led to an estimated 1.04 million worldwide buys. Outside of Brock Lesnar, The Rock's the closest thing to a surefire (if short-term) pay-per-view draw you'll find.

Giveaways: His & Hers Phosphor Reveal Magneto-Digital Watches

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 11:09 AM PDT

Over at aBlogtoRead.com you can win a pair of new Phosphor Reveal watches for “him and her” (or him and him, her and her?). Just got over there, comment, and wait until the end of the month.

Enter to win one here…

Weekend Giveaway: A Tagged Tumi Bag

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 06:23 AM PDT

This weekend we have a jam for the ladies (and the fashion forward men.) Tumi would like to offer you this handsome $445 suitcase tagged by some guy named Crash. I didn’t dig too deeply into this one but I assume someone out there a) likes Tumi and b) likes stuff like this, so here you go.

How do you win? You comment below, describing your favorite piece of art. This could include a fancy car, a painting in a museum, or a grilled cheese sandwich sainted by the likeness of Elvis. Your call. Enter once and make sure you include your email address (not in the comment but in the email field). We’ll pick one winner at random on Monday.


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