Is technology "killing" us?

Recently, a young girl was tragically killed by a car when she attempted to cross a road – also whilst listening to an iPod. As a result of the phenomenon of Facebook, I heard this news first when my friend’s new status popped up on my Homepage:

“If a girl steps onto a pedestrian crossing and is hit by a car the car killed her, if the girl is listening to an ipod when she is hit the ipod killed her. With all due respect to the poor girl I think you are being a bit sensationalist NZ Herald.”

I also agree with my friend’s point of view, the reporter was being a little exaggerative. The iPod did not kill the girl. There are still many logistical questions needed to be answered about the case such as the speed of the car before and during impact, and whether or not the victim was actually on the pedestrian crossing etc.

This got me wondering about our dependence on new media and the control that it can have over us and our day to day life. To be frank and please no judgement - I like writing essays. There is nothing like the feeling of having completed a piece of writing that is coherent and eloquent in all aspects. But with the rise of social networking sites, mainly Facebook, I have become addicted and spent a lot of unnecessary time procrastinating by stalking other people’s pages and photos. Is Facebook just a new medium for putting off our assignments or have we always distracted ourselves with other meaningless fluff?

This situation can be referred to the “master-slave dialectic” as coined by G W F Hegel who said that “those who enslave others will become enslaved themselves.” Let’s hope he wasn’t thinking of a Facebook World Domination when he made this statement!

Religion of Apple + iPhone

Excellent piece about the "Religion of Apple" and the 'Jesus' mysticism associated w/the iPhone.

Note: You'll need to be logged in @the Uni (or the library proxy) to access this to save and/or print

Marketing prof Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State study the parallels between Apple's fanbase and the followers of religion, assembling a framework for Apple's mystical mythology. They believe the entire Apple brand is based on four key myths. Heidi Campbell, a scholar at Texas A&M aggregated their work for a recent article

"How the iPhone became divine"

Here are Campbell's four key "myths" about Apple:

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

Abstract: This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans and bloggers, news media and even corporate advertising.