The Geek's Chihuahua: Living with Apple (Forerunners: Ideas First) by Bogost, Ian (2015) Paperback

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Ian Bogost

At check. At a traffic check. In bed at the end of the check. In line at the coffee check. In The Geek’s Chihuahua, Ian Bogost addresses the modern love affair of “living with Apple” during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance. The ubiquitous iPhone and its kin saturate our lives, changing everything from our communication to our posture. Bogost contrasts the values of Apple’s massive success in the twenty-first century with those of its rise in the twentieth. And he connects living with Apple with the phenomenon of “hyperemployment”—the constant overwork of today’s technological life that all of us now experience. Bogost also reflects on the new potential function—as well as anxiety and anguish—of devices like the Apple Watch. We are tethered to our devices, and, as Bogost that’s just life—anxious, overworked, and utterly networked life. Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Paperback

First published April 22, 2015

About the author

Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.

He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames as well as the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost also released Cow Clicker, a satire and critique of the influx of social network games. His game, A Slow Year, won two awards, Vanguard and Virtuoso, at IndieCade 2010.

Reviews

[Trent Shell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful thinkpiece

This group of essays really hit close to home in a pretty uncomfortable way - Bogost's style is logical, progressive, and informed in a way that will definitely make you think twice about picking up your smartphone again. Except that we both already know that you'll do it anyway.

[Zachary G. Augustine · Rating 2 out of 5]

66 pages does not justify a $10 book. To make matters worse, if you remove the sarcasm it's only half the length--and the remaining half of the book are merely interesting but hardly novel observations on tech culture. The author attempts to draw out our own shameful desire to use smartphones, but the result is at once too short and far too slow to be at all worthwhile.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best of Bogost's writing.