I-Power: Pop Culture in the Age of the Internet

Abstract

Products named iPod (a digital storage device), iTravel (an online travel company), iPath (a shoe brand), iCom (computer software), among many others spelled with a lowercase i, are found everywhere one looks in todays marketplace. That little letter is definitely appealing, bespeaking, it would seem, of technological savvy and a new hipness—a hipness that was captured by a mid-2000s ad campaign by Apple, pitting a hip Mac guy versus a dull PC guy (as mentioned in the previous chapter). The Mac guy can now more precisely be designated an “i-Guy,” a young man who dresses and behaves in the style of urban geeks that have grown up in a world where computer savvy, along with an attendant “slacker look,” is perceived to constitute the basic form of male cool. The PC guy, in contrast, looked like a leftover from the rigid and stodgy business world of the pre-Internet era—a lifestyle dinosaur who had absolutely no savoir faire when it came to understanding the lifestyle patterns of the emerging i-World, as it can be called. The Mac guy was resplendent with what can be called, simply, i-Power (with a lowercase i), defined as the ability to adopt and harness emerging trends in digital culture into personal lifestyle. As David Sacks has observantly written, “Today little i, meaning computer connection, has joined e, X, and a handful of other letters as a brand mark of the digital revolution.”¹

I … how huge a word in that small English mark, the shape of a Grecian pillar.

—William H. Gass (b. 1924)