LAS VEGAS – The Consumer Electronics Show, an international gathering of tens of thousands of cybergeeks and techno nerds giddy in their collective dweebness, has once again overtaken Sin City. And as the digital age reaches adolescence, it seems the gadget worship marking every CES has snowballed into a full-fledged frenzy of technological ecstasy – a techgasm, if you will.
To attend CES is to witness scurrying hordes practically tripping over each other to see the next home-theater demo or to ogle the scantily clad "booth girls" (this is an overwhelmingly male audience, after all). It's marked by standing-room-only press conferences on such insider subjects as the format war between Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD. It involves walking several miles of exhibit space housed in the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center, sometimes feeling like Caine in a bastardized techno-version of Kung-Fu. It means lines that snake through endless hallways so everyone can pack into the pre-conference keynote to watch Microsoft's Bill Gates squirm uncomfortably as Conan O'Brien pokes fun at him (it didn't help that several Microsoft demos didn't work correctly, eliciting a certain giggly schadenfreude from the audience).
But above all of this noise, CES is really about one thing: the celebration of gadgets. And while it's impossible to see everything in the first day of the show, a reporter with a digital camera can take a few snapshots and try, as best he can, to capture some of the gadgetry in all of its pomp and glory.
