WE ARE ALL GADGET NERDS NOW

By DAVID CARR,Reuters

“Avatar,” a homage to both the perils and the dominance of technology, has people all over the globe donning goofy glasses in order to witness its wonders.
Over the holiday, Decoder was in Lower Manhattan at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex and found himself staring at Bo Diddley’s guitar. Even, or especially, locked behind glass in an inert state, it is a thing of majestic, mysterious beauty.

Certainly, Bo Diddley, who died in 2008, was a wildly inventive musical mind who came up with one of the foundational beats of modern music. But that cigar box guitar, with its gleaming surfaces, early era pickups and tremolo effects, had a starring role as well. The man made the music, but the thing, the gadget, the device, changed everything. Without the electric guitar and its sonic possibilities, we probably wouldn’t have had the chance to fall in love with Buddy Guy, or more recently, Jack White. Technology, placed in the hands of a legion of rough hewn auteurs, created a new art form.

The intersection of culture and technology has always been a rich, mashed-up place, but today’s burgeoning army of electronic devices, rather than just hosting stories, seems to be authoring them.

On the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show, it’s worth pointing out that content, which we’ve been told is king, seems increasingly to be serving as software used to animate various devices. At the risk of going on at length and offending the equally windy Michael Kinsley, Decoder thought it might be a good time to roam across platforms and see how machines appear to be taking over the world. Again.

Decoder thought a lot about the growing dominion of the gadgets over the holidays. When the family went to the Christmas Day movie, and we looked up at an auditorium of people, it looked like row after row of nerds, everyone wearing futuristic glasses. “Avatar,” which crossed $1 billion on the way to establishing dominion over the global box office, is an homage to both the perils (the plot suggests machine-enabled people do bad things) and the dominance (the execution of the film suggests machine-enabled directors can do wondrous things) of technology.

If James Cameron ends up making his way to the stage on Oscar night to declare that he is not only king of the world, but also the universe beyond, it will be in part because he has demonstrated an innovative way forward for the movie industry. It’s not just what he made, but how he made it. Mr. Cameron has been developing the film since 1994, but he was waiting for technology to catch up. “Avatar” is a nice story and all, but it his use of stereoscopic cameras and a new generation of motion capture that has people all over the globe donning goofy glasses to see what technology has wrought. Imax and various iterations of 3-D allowed the industry to make more money off of exhibition than DVDs for the first time since 2002. It looks like Hollywood, a place were our stories are writ large, is going to be spending a lot of time walking around in geek wear.

The television industry, which got people hooked on color half a century ago and then pretty much left it at that, is now a hotbed of technological innovation. As Brian Stelter and Brad Stone write, an industry that only recently managed to entice people to buy in to the high-definition revolution is now setting about the business of bringing “Avatar”-like 3-D experiences to the home entertainment theater. With sports programming leading the way, the industry will be working to convince consumers that it might soon be time to trade out plasma and HD technology that was state-of-the-art as recently as the last Christmas season. The industry seems intent on putting much of its time and energy into making what is on the box at least look better, even if they are mostly selling old wine in a new bottle. Technology, not storytelling, is where the action is.

On Tuesday, Google, a company built on algorithms and data management, landed in the hardware business with both feet, unveiling a handset called Nexus One. Even though David Pogue says the phone itself isn’t all that and a bag of chips, it is breathtaking to see a company that took over the world by invisibly crawling across data putting its treasured name on a device that fits in the palm. After watching Apple take over a lot of mindshare with its gleaming array of gadgets, Google came to realize that technology is more than a fetish object — that it can create an intimate bond that often determines who controls, and profits from, the relationship with the consumer. (And now word comes in the Bits blog that Microsoft, a software company in every corner of its DNA give or take the Xbox, is jumping ahead of Apple by unveiling its own slate device here.)

And speaking of Apple, a number of fanboys have suggested that the likely introduction of a large-format tablet device could be a game-changer for media providers. Any number of prototypes for the gadget that has yet to show its shiny face are already in development, and the echo chamber of hype around the gadget is reaching thunderous dimensions.

Even in books, the most analog of all media platforms, most of the excitement is of the plugged-in variety. Although Amazon did not provide any sales figures to back up the claim, the company announced that on Christmas Day, it sold more Kindle reading devices than actual books — a watershed that probably foretells the future.

Much of the music business, which got run over by a gadget called the iPod, seems to be now living in the cloud. Music sampling and selling services like Pandora and LastFM seem more relevant than the labels that produce much of the music. LaLa, a music streaming service, became a piece of taffy between Google and Apple, with Apple eventually winning the prize for about $85 million. While that may seem like a software-driven shift, the growth of these services is just one more reminder that there is a vast array of embedded smart, mobile devices to be fed. The coming cohort of consumers expect to use and add to their libraries at times and on devices of their choosing.

Longtime players in the media space have been struggling to come to grips with an era in which the consumers serve as their own programmers. And now, the rapid rate of hardware innovation is metastasizing the trend, putting smaller, more powerful tools in their hands, leaving producers of all manner of software — not just the coded kind, but movies, novels, pop songs, magazine articles — struggling to format their content in way that pleases consumers and still provides a way to make a living. At this year’s show, the most anxious looky-loos are likely to be the media companies themselves. In among the blinking laser lights, the whirring whatchamacallits, and clanking of a new future being unveiled, they will be looking frantically for a safe place