Changing the rhetoric: post-PC Era

Two weeks ago I noted that at the Apple Keynote Jobs had put forth an interesting display of rhetorical jiujitsu: repeatedly referring to now, i.e. the current moment for a sale, as “the post-PC era.” Thus far I hadn’t seen a lot of commentary about the injection of this meme, but I see it now in the incipient stages of taking hold.

Time magazine’s Harry McCracken’s article of March 10th bears the title: The Post-PC Era Is Already Here. McCracken’s article is more a “mention” than a “use” insofar as refers repreatedly to the introduction of this term by Jobs, but I believe Time’s editorial board is positioning and helping introduce this meme into a wider circle.

I’m not particularly sure that the term needed to be introduced outside of the marketing and messaging departments of Apple, but as the Caltrain rolls out of San Francisco this morning, I count ~70 individuals doing email, web browsing, and word processing – the classic low bar activities of computing demand – on iPads or iPhones.

Verily, a paradigm has changed. It is not in the 90’s paradigm of machine at desk, machine at home, and / or machine in laptop bag that these efforts of my neighbors occur, but much like “cloud” the fact

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