Apple iPhone’s Meta-Capital: Exploring the Processes of Systemisation and Subjectification through the Everyday Practices and Predispositions of Young iPhone Users View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Eylem Kim  

This paper offers a critical scholarly account of the social and ideological occupations constituted by mobile communications through the process of documenting the impact Apple's iPhone has had on synchronising and affirming user relations in the iPhone’s environment of expected use. Through a combination of ethnographic, historical/textual, and theoretical research, this paper offers unique insight into how the emergence and popular use of iPhone has produced and sustained its own affective culture. This is accomplished by codifying the social currencies that represent the social contexts in which users can be affirmed through their presentation of formal and practised systematicity within iPhone's environment of expected use. So far (n=15) young iPhone users between the ages of 18-25 have been interviewed. I argue that the developments of a novel form of a user gaze in conjunction with the economic and cultural stratification of user positionality in social space is, in part, a response to the emergence and impact of Apple’s political economy that is predicated on selling ontological security in late capitalism. Thus, to explicate iPhone’s unique holding of symbolic capital, this paper offers a complex reflection on the emotional relationship between memory and hope by rejecting shallow conceptualisations of teleology, and instead seeks to develop a new framework to better understand the ambitious futuristic ideals inscribed into Apple’s world-building and interoperable ecosystem, as well as the trading of a romantic and complete past (nostalgia) that is experienced by iPhone users.