Adam McLane

iPhone, Your New Cigarettes

iPhone, Your New Cigarettes

The parallels between the iPhone in 2011 and cigarettes in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s are stunning.

  • It’s iconic.
  • It’s celebrated as the cool thing.
  • It’s a status symbol.
  • It’s celebrated in the media.
  • It’s manufacturer is getting rich.
  • There are cheap imitations. (Sorry Android users)
  • It’s addicting, but not viewed as a serious addiction.
  • The first thing you do in the morning is light up your iPhone.
  • The last thing you do before you go to bed is put your iPhone out.
  • People step out of meetings to check their iPhone.
  • People huddle around their iPhone while they walk around.
  • They do it in public, to the sneering glare of non-iPhone users.
  • After sex… well, some people light up their iPhone.
  • The price could go up at any minute, but you’d still need an iPhone.

I’m as much an addict as the other millions of regular users. Hopeless. Helpless. And happily satisfied in my addiction.

Just like cigarettes– users are left with the question:

Do you own your iPhone or does your iPhone own you?

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Comments

3 responses to “iPhone, Your New Cigarettes”

  1. Todd Porter Avatar
    Todd Porter

    I can’t wait to get my first pack.

    Reply
  2. Peter Marin Avatar
    Peter Marin

    Quote attributed to; Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald:
    “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink,
    then the drink takes you.”

    Paraphrased to iPhone:
    “First you connect to iPhone, then iPhone connects
    to the iPhone-apps, then the iPhone takes you.”

    Quote attributed to: ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS,
    The Big Book:
    “For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality,
    companionship and colorful imagination. It means
    release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous
    intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good.
    But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking.”

    Paraphrased to iPhone:
    “For most normal folks, iPhone means convivality,
    companionship and colorful graphical interfaces. It
    means release from care, boredom and worry. It is
    joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life
    is good. But not so with us in those last days of
    heaving texting.”

    The best definition I have heard as to what qualifies
    as an addition: If you go through withdrawal with
    behavior designed to get ‘it’ back, then you’re
    an addict.

    I would say: It’s our neediness combined with physical
    hands-on wanting as front loaded into a psychological
    force that attaches inherent values or meaningful levels
    of importance into an object of desire.

    Whether the meaninfulness is vague, vulgar or vivacious,
    it stands beyond reason into the realm of self-identify such
    that any less of this object translates into a diminshment
    of our perceived selves.

    Therefore, to remain mentally intact, we ‘n-e-e-d’ this
    object in order to ___[fill-in-the-blank]___.

    Reply
  3. Autumn Avatar
    Autumn

    “There are cheap imitations. (Sorry Android users)”
    Amen! Andriods are the worst!
    Also, can’t wait to make the switch from BlackBerry to iPhone on my next upgrade…

    Reply

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