This is an essay I wrote for Phil Patton’s Typologies class. It’s sort of an expansion of this. I don’t know why the entire thing is in italics. I also can’t save any formatting changes. I’m beginning to sound really feeble. Anyway…
A few Saturdays ago I noticed a man on the subway with a small bag slung over his shoulder. Let’s call him Tom. Tom was maybe in his late thirties, with a mostly bald head and round belly. He wore the uniform of the Cool Urban Husband – faded jeans, a solid navy blue t-shirt, brown leather Merrells. We were on the PATH, headed back from Greenwich Village to Hoboken. You see lots of Cool Urban Husbands on the PATH. You hardly ever see them carrying tiny shoulder bags.
The bag was too small to carry much of anything; the main storage compartment was about the width and length of a hardcover novel, but not as deep. What the hell could be in there? I wondered. A few large index cards? A stack of three comic books?
Then, with the tips of his fingers, Tom opened the bag. Nestled perfectly inside was an Amazon Kindle.
Amazon currently sells 162 different cases for the Kindle. These range from simple neoprene sleeves available in a dozen colorways, to hundred-dollar attachés made from hand-woven leather. There are cases made of faux-crocodile skin, cases with built-in kickstands to prop up the Kindle when your hands are occupied, waterproof cases should you bring your Kindle whitewater rafting, and tidy little Kindle messenger bags like the kind Tom had.
Perhaps the sheer abundance of cases made for the Kindle is not surprising today, least of all to the kind of plugged-in, technologically progressive human that might purchase a Kindle. We live, after all, in a post-cell phone, post-iPod, post-BlackBerry world, where almost every small, portable electronic device supports a huge aftermarket of cases. It is easy to forget, though, that this is a relatively new phenomenon.
Portable electronic devices of previous generations were too big, too diverse and too durable to necessitate a carrying case. Consider, for instance, the average boom box circa 1984: this was an object the size of a small suitcase, made of thick plastic (or even metal) and powered by an array of a half dozen D batteries. A boom box did not need a protective case; it had the structural integrity of a Panzer.
With the introduction of devices like the iPod, though, consumers were suddenly in possession of a pocket-sized device with incredibly sensitive internal mechanisms. The iPod was something that needed protection. Unlike the Walkman, iPods and BlackBerries did not change shape as much – new models were introduced every year or so – and each iteration sold in huge numbers. The market was finally right for the carrying case.
With the introduction of devices like the iPod, though, consumers were suddenly in possession of a pocket-sized device with incredibly sensitive internal mechanisms. The iPod was something that needed protection. Unlike the Walkman, iPods and BlackBerries did not change shape as much – new models were introduced every year or so – and each iteration sold in huge numbers. The market was finally right for the carrying case.The carrying cases made for portable electronic devices today share a few key traits. Functionally, they protect the device from physical damage by preventing scratches to the screen and distributing the force of impact when the device is dropped. The cases are also implicit marketing vehicles for the devices they protect. They indicate the object’s importance – this thing is valuable, worth preserving.
At their core, though, all the cases designed for portable electronics have one basic thing in common: they can only hold the device they were designed to carry. When that device becomes obsolete, so does the case. Which brings us back to Tom, with that little Kindle bag on his shoulder…
Here was a grown man, apparently in good physical health. Somewhere along the way he decided that he needed an entire bag to help him carry his 10-ounce Kindle. Certainly he must have felt compelled to purchase the bag for the same reason a person buys any case for their Kindle – to protect it. But why choose the messenger bag over the hand-woven leather attaché? Or why not just carry it in a backpack? To a large extent, it was likely a matter of personal taste.
Expressing taste is a key function of cases for portable electronics. Because there was so much diversity among earlier generations of portable electronic devices, the product alone said something about the consumer. A waterproof, yellow Walkman Sport communicated very different messages – about lifestyle, taste, etc. – than a blakc Panasonic cassette player. These days, there is far less physical variety. The iPhone is only available in black or white; the Kindle can only be had in white. The media contained on these devices is the primary vehicle for expression – our two Kindles are physically identical, but they are different because I have harlequin romance novels on mine and you’ve got Goosebumps on yours. The case you choose for your Kindle, then, becomes the primary means of expressing a sense of personal aesthetics.
The question of aesthetics only explains Tom’s Kindle messenger bag to a certain extent though. You also have to wonder if Tom had a choice about whether he would buy a case at all? I don’t think he did.
Naked out of the box, the Kindle is too delicate to face the rigors of, say, a daily commute. We may be well into the 21st century, but the subways and bus depots of the world are still 20th (or maybe even 19th) century environments, analog and dirty. As an object, the Kindle is out of place within the world it promises to change. Consumers must buy a case if they ever wish to use the Kindle outside of their homes. It is entrapment by design.
The whole situation is thick with irony. Among their many promises, devices like the Kindle are supposed to reduce clutter. Instead the Kindle actually begets clutter, encouraging manufacturers to produce inherently obsolescent objects, and forcing consumers to purchase them.
If you’re trying to visualize this strange relationship between Kindle and case, you might think in celestial terms: the Kindle is a distant planet, the vast number of carrying cases its many moons. You could also think of the Kindle as the Earth. In this scenario, the cases would be the trash, millions of tons of it, floating in space, trapped by the planet’s gravitational pull.
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