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?
I can’t wait to get my first pack.
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]___.
“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…