There is only hardware?

Graphene

Engadget reports that South Korean scientists(biggups to the motherland)have made some breakthrough regarding graphene for electronic device use. What’s graphene? I didn’t know either. I figured it was close to graphite and come to find out, it is. It is a kind of weirdo sheet made up of carbon but is extremely bendable and has potential to be super-conductive. The future of gizmos is tactility.

Ever since PCs and then mobile phones became pretty much the norm, we have kind of under though the rather stark dichotomy by which these devices are described in terms of tactility–hardware and software. Hardware is the outside. Software is the programs and applications. Pretty simple. But why does hardware need to be “hard”? Why can’t we have play-dough like mobile devices? It is this kind of rethinking of hardware that has so many people who follow mobile devices so excited. We have already seen companies take the “tactual turn” with the iPhone, tablet PCs, and the MacBook’s new trackpad (in lieu of the touchpad mouse) among other things.

Why this is particularly interesting for me is that there have been debates in media and social theory regarding exactly what kind of “epoch” we are in. On the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman has called what we have “liquid modernity” dominated by “software capitalism.” On the other hand, Friedrich Kittler has declared “there is no software.”

Ummmmm, so maybe we can split the difference with graphene? Flexiware?