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II Ramifications of the Ringtone’s Identity Crisis: The Social and Cultural Fallout of Technological Transformation In an excellent treatment dating from 2005, Sasha Frere-Jones underscored the ephemeral and transitional nature of the polyphonic ringtone: Next time you hear your favorite song playing in full verisimilitude from someone’s pants, give a moment’s thought to the lowly, twinkling polyphonic. Transitional stages of technology often have their own imperfect charms, memorable in ways that no one could have predicted. Polyphonic-ringtone nostalgia is approximately six months away.1 The “imperfect charms” of the ringtone’s earlier phases and potential nostalgia for its loss point to some of the ramifications of the ringtone’s rapid history of technological development from monophonic to polyphonic to sound-file formats, as described in the previous chapter. As “attractions,” such digital charms are the (degraded) utopian elements of the ringtone as novelty, but more is at stake in their efflorescence than entertainment.2 Indeed, if we briefly consider the broader impact of mobile telephony, which some have characterized as a genuine Schumpeterian economic innovation—as opposed to a purely technical invention, the innovation’s counterpart in the conservative Austrian economist’s famous dichotomy— we might appreciate the degree to which its transformative effect has not only been profoundly productive, but also destructive.3 Since the mobile phone might best be described as what economists call a General Purpose Technology (GPT)—a technology having widespread “disruptive effects” on the social fabric, such as automation-induced unemployment—we should appreciate that the mobile phone industry has certainly produced its share of GPTs, the same being true on a smaller scale of the ringtone industry as well.4 If, then, Schumpeter’s term “creative destruction” can be used appropriately here, eschewing both its originator’s subjectivist understanding of capitalism and its corresponding appropriation by management gurus to lionize corporate downsizing and other predatory techniques of the 54 Ramifications of the Ringtone’s Identity Crisis “new economy,” it should be framed within a broader understanding of the familiar discourse of planned obsolescence (and the fact that, contra Vance Packard, technological advance and stylistic obsolescence cannot be easily distinguished where technologies of cultural production are concerned) and of theories of social acceleration, whose complex determination must be understood, in the last instance, as a by-product of acceleration in the productive processes and systemic life cycle of capital accumulation theorized by Giovanni Arrighi.5 The result of the modern capitalist economy’s speed-up, Frere-Jones suggests, would seem to contract the temporal horizon for nostalgia, with the indexical origins of the aura, age value, or historical value of its objects becoming progressively telescoped in time along with the corresponding increase in the outmoding of commodities.6 But if all of the foregoing can be understood as an essentially unidirectional process related to the historical transformation of newness under capitalist modernity, it is not the whole story where the ringtone is concerned. For the problem of nostalgia identified by Frere-Jones should alert us to other forms of ringtone nostalgia, and as such, to a broader, entrenched dynamic of cyclical processes concerning the ringtone ’s historical referents. That dynamic concerns not only the more obvious forms of nostalgia facilitated by sound-file ringtones’ recordings of old-fashioned phones or music conglomerates’ exploitation of their lucrative back catalogs of groups such as ABBA and the Beatles for ringtone sales.7 At a deeper level, nostalgia is built into the very structure of the popularity of older ringtone formats—at least for developed-world consumers in their twenties and thirties during the 2000s—on account of the reuse, with minor adaptations, of the sound production systems of earlier technologies, such as the Yamaha DX-7 frequency modulation synthesis chip for polyphonic ringtones, which can produce sounds that are not profoundly distant from the synthesizers on video game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). These kinds of sonic affinities between historical synthesizer systems make polyphonicringtone arrangements of the popular Super Mario Bros. theme song by Koji Kondo reasonably comparable to their original source.8 Bracketing, for the moment, the heavily youth-directed (especially teen and “tween”) target market for ringtones, the cyclical process under consideration here is one that is most specifically relevant to that generational cohort for whom the ringtone functions as a form of implicit nostalgia. Indeed, the ringtone may have unwittingly participated in the 1980s fashion [3.15.10.137...

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