This article was originally posted at the blog of Sjors Timmer, besides doing MA in Digital Media at Goldsmiths in London, he is also involved in doing web design work

The Jesus Phone

The enormous media hype around the “Jesus-phone” proved it once again: there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there seems to be no other company able to sell a piece of the future than the Cupertino dream-weavers. Once bought however, the great promise turns out to be quite an ordinary thing which is certainly not as good as those futurists had promised. But at that moment it is already too late, so why do we still keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products that are over and over again still not quite there yet?

The Future Promise Paradigm

To get some answers on that question, we can take a look at three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us into accepting things that would normally not directly benefit us optimally.

1. The future is often used to force us to change our habits for own benefits. The products that use this tactic often send the message that “change in our way of working and living” is needed to improve our situation.
2. The promise of the future can be used to keep us from complaining. If a product or service might not be that good today, the promise of improvements in the future is a good incentive to continue on. In other words: be strong, keep going, everything will be alright….. soon.
3. The future is used as a shared dream of mankind, as one day we’ll all be united. If you want the best for the world stay with us, and if you don’t adopt you are obviously against the best interest of mankind.

These partly overlapping points can be found both in business and governmental planning and often tries to explain their choices for the future.

Promising the Future

An example of changing our habits for the best is how the iPhone forces a new paradigm for text input. David Pogueⁱ of the New York Times writes: “Text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The Blackberry won’t be going away anytime soon”. Not only is the iPhone’s text-input different than the Blackberry’s, it’s also slower. The multi-touch interface of the new iPhone is a good example of getting something new, and losing some good features from the past for the sake of it. On one side you get a larger screen and a more flexible interface to operate your phone, but on the other side you lose a way of getting any tactile feedback during the input. When asked, many 14 year olds would show that they are perfectly capable of typing text messages on their phone without even looking. This mastered skill is mainly based on the fact that they can actually feel the shape and location of the buttons they are pushing, but on the iPhone without any physical buttons achieving a skill like this will be something of the past.

Later on in the article even Pogue falls for the “in the future everything will be better”-dogma when he analyses some of the current flaws in the iPhone and concludes to say that he expects things to get updated to be better soon:“On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cell phones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.”Just beyond the horizon lies a land of milk and honey where Internet is fast, photos are sharp and interfaces are workable.

The Benefits the Disadvantage

Obviously, Apple is not really selling you a product that is created for the current times, but merely raising your expectations for future products. When you buy any state of the art product, you merely get a beta version of the next model and pay Apple’s research and development cycle. The point however, is not that Apple makes bad products, but that we should start to judge them on their value for money at this moment, and not how good they might become someday. In the end, this is just as we do with almost any other product.

Than again, if you look at it from a more sociological perspective, the use of the future concept can also have a positive side. Historian Allan Nevisⁱⁱ wrote in his research on American history that we are besides bound by history even more bound by our hope for a better future. So, despite the fact that Apple might not be keeping up with their promises in present-day, they do provide a structural basis for giving us the feeling that we are heading for a better future.

Conclusion

To sum things up, all of this leads to the conclusion that although branding strategies like Apple’s force us techniques and methods that would not directly benefit us, not believing in these strategies and instead judging them like others, we would lose the shared hope for a brighter future.

Footnotes:

ⁱ Pogue, D. “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype”, 2007www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

ⁱⁱ Nevins, A., 1971:398 in Quirks, J.J. The history of the future

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 20:48 and is filed under Apple, London, business, launch.