Memetic co-option

At eTech (and apparently at SXSW too), Bruce Sterling spoke about the power of names in forming our mental representations of things. The example that leapt to mind is 'Podcasting', and seeing this AT&T billboard today brought it home for me.
When we were talking about 'automatically downloading audioblogs' it took lengthy explanations for people to grasp it at all, but now radio stations and legacy telcos can blithely throw the word around and people get it at once.

Before the iPod appeared, the idea of a personal music library had been around for a while, notably in Bruce's Heavy Weather (1994):

Jane turned on the radio, heard a great deal of encrypted traffic from banks, navigation beacons, and hams, and turned it off again. Funny what had happened to the broadcast radio spectrum. She turned on the car's music box. It held every piece of music that had ever meant anything to her, including stuff form her early childhood that she'd never managed to erase. Even with sixteen-digit digital precision, everything she'd ever recorded took up only a few hundred megabytes, the merest sliver in the cavernous memory of a modern music box.

Jane played some Thai pop music, cheerful energetic bonging and strumming. There'd been a time, back in design school, when Thai pop music had meant a lot to her. When it seemed that a few dozen wild kids in Bangkok were the last people on earth who really knew what it meant to have some honest fun. She'd never figured out why this lovely burst of creativity had happened in Bangkok. With AIDS still methodically eating its way into the vast carcass of Asia, Bangkok certainly wasn't happier than most other places. Apparently the late 2020s had just somehow been Bangkok's global moment to shine. It was genuinely happy music, bright, clever music, like a gift tooth world. It felt so new and fresh, and she'd listened to it and felt in her bones what it meant to be a woman of the 2020s, alive inside, and aware inside.

It was 2031 now. The music was distant now, like a whiff of good rice wine at the bottom of an empty bottle. It still touched something inside her, but it didn't touch all of her. It didn't touch all the new parts.

Or in Richard Turnnidge's 1991 mockup of an interactive radio player. Sometimes ideas take a while to accrete enough cultural baggage to be built.

Technorati Tags: 1991, 2006, etech, iPod, meme, podcasting, SXSW