On production for digital culture: iPhone Girl, electronics assembly, and the material forms of aspiration
Seth Perlow · Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2011
In 2008, a British man found that his new iPhone contained photographs of a smiling woman on an iPhone assembly line in China. The photos quickly spread across the internet; the worker was dubbed iPhone Girl; and her factory promised she would not be punished for this ‘beautiful mistake’. New media criticism has a major stake in user-embodiment but has largely neglected this other set of bodies: those that build our electronic gadgets. Attending them can enrich histories of new media and challenge consumerist framings of digital aesthetics. Recent excitement about gestural interfaces suggests that our aspirations for intimacy with computers have informed the design of emergent devices. To idealize gestural control as an escape from technology’s disciplinary effects, we elide the suffering that gesture occasions on the factory floor. Meanwhile, digital culture represents the Asian female as a vessel for fantasies of sex, submissiveness, and adventure. Such fantasies deeply inform the reception of electronics assemblers, including iPhone Girl.