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The CES Swarm went swimmingly (there’s really something to this idea of collaborative research), and now I’m back home starting to fit the pieces together and figure out what I make of them. Some fragments:

* Going into this year’s show, I had a few established interests: the relationship between amateurs/enthusiasts and professionals, the role of conventions as social spaces for communities to cohere, and the fetishization of technology.
* One of the things I kept hearing prior to and during the show was an underlying narrative questioning the relevance of CES as a show. In several press accounts before the show, you had retailers asking themselves whether it was even worth attending the show, given its cost and sprawl, a sense which was echoed by a few of the attendees I spoke with.
* There seems to be a core contradiction in the gatekeeping mechanisms for the show – CES bills itself as the world’s biggest technology trade show (a claim which bears no small resonance with earlier World’s Fair hype), and there’s a sense that the sheer size of the trade show floors and numbers of attendees are some of CES’s greatest assets (the show is measured in square feet and bodies), thus more attendees = better. However, perhaps in response to the aforementioned relevancy questions, the registration process repeatedly emphasized that attendees (who could register for free up to a week before the show) *must* be affiliated with the consumer electronics industry, implicitly restricting attendance (and going against the bigger = better rhetoric by which the show is advertised).
* This tension is, of course, ultimately bunk…one of the worst-kept secrets around CES is how ridiculously easy it is, in fact, to get an attendee badge. My favorite interview of the show was with a guy who fabricated a video store two decades ago, and attends every year with his made-up business cards; most don’t go to those lengths, however, and one could argue that it would be pretty difficult, in this day and age, for an interested party to find a consumer technology relationship, however tenuous, with his or her own work.
* Which leads me to the relative unusefulness of “Consumer Electronics Industry” as a category, consumer technology being so vague and pervasive that virtually anything might conceivably fit under its umbrella.
* On the press coverage: while the registration and gatekeeping mechanisms were all about keeping the public out, the media narratives were all about simulating the experience of being an enthusiast visiting the show. Press coverage bypassed the “Industry” part of the show almost entirely, except in the sense that manufacturers were displaying their wares…from the vantage of the television cameras and newspaper reports, retail and distribution were functionally invisible.
* Another axis: the main CES foci were screens and mobile devices. That said, the really big announcement of the week didn’t even come out of Vegas, but hundreds of miles NW in San Francisco, where Apple unveiled both the iPhone and AppleTV. On the CES floor, there was only a very small sense of impact, but in the Press Room on that Tuesday morning the buzz was all about MacWorld, and a cursory look at press coverage seems to bear that assessment out.

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