Let’s Get Digital

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Sometimes I think we need a new calendar: cancel those New Year’s party plans, we’re already in the second month of 5 A.i. — short for After iPod. Apple’s white wires have been red-hot fashion at home and abroad for most of this millennium, and won’t be falling out of style anytime soon. In a year that witnessed the dawn of the Sony PSP, Microsoft Xbox 360, cellphone television and other high-tech frivolities, Apple’s music-photo-video machine held its place as the First World’s alpha gadget. Like Eminem raps in the iPod’s latest hard-to-avoid ad campaign, the iPod remains your best shot to lose yourself.

Look elsewhere for definitive rundowns of 2005’s top technology products, games, websites or — ack — iPod accessories. Instead, here’s a jog through 25 of the year’s best/worst/weirdest happenings in digital culture.

January

1. Apple unveils the iPod shuffle, a tiny, no-frills MP3 player aimed at shoppers who are unwilling or unable to splurge on pricier models. Further releases continue throughout the year: the Harry Potter Collector’s iPod, the iPod nano, the fifth-generation, video-enabled iPod and — as a gag on Saturday Night Live — the iPod Invisa, a device so small it can’t be seen by the human eye.

2. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, announces an initiative to build and distribute millions of $100 US laptops to children in developing countries. The lime-green machines will be powered via wind-up crank, and will use a technology called “mesh networking” to share internet connections. Negroponte plans them for exclusive sale to foreign governments, targeted to begin by the end of 2006 or in early 2007. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan later proclaims the non-profit venture an “expression of global solidarity.”

February

3. London’s Sun newspaper, keen purveyor of believe-it-or-not journalism, writes about a Swansea man who sends text messages in his sleep. “Help, I’m in trouble, someone’s chasing me,” the Sun reports Richard Griffiths, 23, SMSed to a friend one night, and then woke from a dream when she called to check on his safety.

4. A new reason to love/hate the internet: a hacker leaks the contents of Paris Hilton’s Sidekick II (a hand-held thingamajig with phone, organizer, camera, email and instant messaging functions). Her address book contains telephone numbers for myriad celebs, including Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova, Vin Diesel and Stephen King (?!). Also exposed: Hilton’s collection of private snapshots, including topless photos of the hotel heiress kissing a comely video jockey from MTV Latin America. Ay caramba.

March

5. A Sydney private school bans its students from using iPods while on campus. The principal explains her decision in a letter to parents: “[iPods] allow students to avoid communication with others and may lead to social isolation or escape from our community.” Pupils are still permitted to bring the devices onto school property, but must store them inside a locked drawer until the end of classtime.

Wait, they come in white? Alas, only in Asia — checking out Sony PSPs in Tokyo. Photo Toshifumi Kitamura. AFP/Getty Images.

6. I want a new drug: the Sony PSP (games, music, movies, internet; all in the palms of two hands) is released in North America.

April

7. The Vatican announces the April 2 death of Pope John Paul II by sending text messages to reporters’ cellphones. A confirmation email follows: “The Holy father died this evening at 21:37 in his private apartment.” Officials install cellphone signal jammers in the Sistine Chapel to prevent information leaks from the conclave that decides his successor.

8. Apple pulls all titles by John Wiley & Sons, a major publisher of technology books, from the shelves of its Apple Stores. Why? Because Wiley execs rebuffed attempts to quash its publication of an unauthorized biography of Dear Leader. Er, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

May

9. Rumble of the thumb-able! An Australian messaging competition pits a veteran Morse code operator against a 13-year-old girl armed with a cellphone. Their challenge: be first to transmit this sentence, chosen at random from an ad in a teen magazine: “ Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing.” The girl truncates the message to “ hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing,” but loses (by 18 seconds) to the Morse coder, who sends the text in full. And is 93 years old.

June

10. The CRTC approves three applications to bring satellite radio to Canada. Two services, Sirius Canada (a partnership involving the CBC) and Canadian Satellite Radio/XM Radio Canada, go live by December 1. Neither carry the antics of Howard Stern, the controversial “shock jock” who negotiated a five-year deal with Sirius’s American arm to decamp from his syndicated FM morning show. Stern’s contract, signed last October, is worth an estimated $500 million US. It makes him the undisputed star of an emerging technology — and lets him skirt the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s obscenity regulations, which do not apply to satellite services.

July

11. Pop quiz: Texas or Singapore? Glenn Alvin Reed, a 31-year-old who has multiple felony and misdemeanor convictions dating to 1991, is on trial for stealing a cellphone, then beating the owner who demanded it back. Reed rejects a plea bargain that would have given him a 15-year prison sentence. He instead takes the witness stand, and opts for the always risky courtroom confession. “There’s things I choose to do, like, if I go in a store and choose to take a Snickers bar. If you catch me, you catch me,” Reed testifies. “If not, I’m going to go home and eat it up and go on about my business, dog.” Jurors, unmoved, sentence him to 99 years in prison. (Answer: Texas.)

12. The Supreme Court of Canada says nuh-uh to an appeal by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (a music industry watchdog with a hate-on for file sharing) to reinstate a levy on the iPod and other MP3 players. The levy, struck down by the Supremes in December 2004, compensated copyright owners for consumers’ habit of ripping songs from CDs for use on their MP3 players. No word whether the CPCC received a follow-up memo from Captain Obvious: iPods are designed for playing music, not copying it.

August

13. Lights, camera, lockdown. A Missouri man, Curtis Salisbury, is caught attempting to sell pirated copies of Bewitched and The Perfect Man on internet file-sharing networks. He secretly filmed the movies with his own camcorder, and thus becomes the first person to be indicted under a new U.S. federal law (enacted in April) that forbids the videotaping of movies as they are screened in theatres. Salisbury, 19, pleads guilty in September, forgoing the obvious temporary insanity defence: why else take the risk for such, ahem, chick flicks?

14. A Virginia school board arranges to sell 1,000 used Apple iBook laptops at a local raceway, charging $50 US each. Shoppers begin arriving at 1:30 a.m. on the day of the sale; an estimated 5,500 wait for the gates to open at 7:00 a.m. Five off-duty police officers are on-site to provide security, but cannot prevent the ensuing “computer stampede.” Baby strollers are crushed, an elderly man is trampled, 17 bargain-hunters are treated for heat exhaustion. Ron Burgundy-approved newsclip available here.

Electronic music pioneer Dr. Robert Moog. Photo John Warner. Warner Photography, Inc./Getty Images.

15. Rest in peace Bob Moog (rhymes with vogue), the engineering genius who built the synthesizer that built electronic music.

16. Idaho weatherman Scott Stevens theorizes that Hurricane Katrina was manmade, the deliberate work of unknown foes in control of Soviet storm-making machinery from the Cold War era. No, really.

September

17. WWL-TV, New Orleans’s CBS affiliate, commandeers the student news facilities at Baton Rouge’s Louisiana State University, then streams 24-hour coverage of Katrina’s aftermath on its website. Tears flow around the clock, as reporters file story upon story about death and devastation. Community sites including Craigslist New Orleans mobilize to assist the hurricane’s victims. They organize offers for housing, food and employment, links to aid agencies and, most valuable of all, databases of survivors’ names and locations to help friends and family members find each other. SMS also plays a key role in New Orleans: damaged cell towers and network congestion prevent most voice calls from connecting, but storm survivors in and around the city use their cellphones’ text messaging features to communicate with the outside world.

18. A Buddhist monk in Bangkok is troubled to hear teenagers’ cellphones that play sexually suggestive ringtones. He partners with Thai telcos to create “dhamma doctrine” ringtones, believing their digitized mantras will promote cleaner living. Translated to English, some of the dhamma: “It is better to sweat from hard work than cry from laziness, which encourages poverty” and “Compose yourself before answering this call. Avoid being irascible and causing disputes.”

October

19. When fake documentaries come true: For one design graduate of London’s Brunel University, it’s all gone Pete Tong.

November

20. A U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating government response to Hurricane Katrina reveals emails sent by Michael Brown, the deposed director of FEMA, during and after the storm: “If you look at my lovely FEMA attire, you will really vomit. I am a fashion god.” “Do you know of anybody who dog-sits?” “I’m trapped now. Please rescue me.”

21. Microsoft releases its Xbox 360, the world’s most advanced gaming console. Most new owners are thrilled, though some discover why the 360’s manual warns against turning it from horizontal to vertical (or vice versa) during game play, as such movement can gouge deep scratches into game discs. Others complain that the system is prone to overheating, causing it to seize during game play. A Chicago man files a proposed class action lawsuit against Microsoft, charging that a design flaw is the cause of the machine’s heat problem.

December

It's a dog's world: collar cellphones. Courtesy PetsMobility.

22. (555) HERE-BOY. Arizona company PetsMobility announces plans to sell a cellphone for dogs. The phone, scheduled to launch next March, will be waterproof, GPS-enabled and designed to be worn around Fido’s neck. A two-way speaker will let owners talks to their pets — and, presumably, hear their barked replies.

23. Woe is BlackBerry. This is complicated, but let’s slog through it together. (a) NTP is a Virginia company that has no employees and makes no products. Its only assets are a series of patents for mobile email systems that were granted to its co-founder, the late inventor Thomas Campana, in 1991. (b) Campana’s surviving partner, Donald Stout, is an attorney who has spent years trying to collect licensing fees from companies that copy Campana’s patents. (c) In March, Waterloo, Ont.’s Research In Motion, maker of popular BlackBerry wireless emailing devices, agreed to pay $450 million US to NTP. Why? Because, Stout and his legal team argued, RIM’s BlackBerry technology somehow copies Campana’s patents — despite RIM never having referenced or studied them while inventing their devices, and despite neither Campana nor NTP ever having developed the ideas that his patents describe. (d) Nonetheless, NTP rejected RIM’s settlement offer in June, and returned to U.S. courts seeking as much as $1 billion US from the Canadian company. (e) Except the U.S. Patent Office has since ruled that some of Campana’s patents are bunk to begin with, so the two sides are now trying to settle. Again. (f) Ugh. I need a drink.

24. Oi! Judges from U.K. gadget websites Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny declare the iPod shuffle their “Must Chav Gadget” of 2005. (A chav, according to Wikipedia’s Wiktionary, is “a member of the underclass in the United Kingdom, seen as under-educated; having poor taste, especially in their choice of clothes... music and modified road vehicles; having interest in celebrity culture and brand presence; and having poor social skills.”) “The shuffle is perfect for chavs,” reads Tech Digest’s announcement. “It’s cheap. It’s by a cool brand, and you can let others know you have one as it is designed to be worn round your neck. As it is white is also accessorises [sic] well with those classy gold chains Chavs wear.” In semi-related news, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary select “podcast” as their word of the year.

25. Little more than a month after French rioters created text messages, blogs and mass emails to organize anti-police demonstrations in the suburbs that surround Paris, rival factions in Australian riots use text-messaging campaigns to encourage racially segregated rallies on Sydney’s beaches. Sacré bleu, mates.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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