There’s a new iPhone gadget out. Or, at least new to me. I ran across the commercial for it while watching Saturday Night Live with my roommate. This new gadget is called audio recognition. Don’t know what song is playing? Don’t know who sings it? Audio recognition is for you. Apparently all one needs to do is hold the iPhone up to the speakers playing the song and poof! On the screen are the song title, the artist, and the album—everything you need to find it on iTunes and buy it.
Sounds to me like a great way of boosting the already high use of iTunes. Advertisement within company products? Low cost, high profit. But beyond that this new gadget, and the iPhone itself for that matter, seem to emphasize the directions a lot of media has been taking. Look at everything the iPhone can do: take pictures, record videos, play music, surf the internet, and identify songs, to name a few. Features like voicemail, texting, and basic calling are secondary in the advertising, if present at all.
What does it say about a society when a phone, the basic function of which is to communicate with others, is not even noted in an advertisement?
Here’s a communication tool—a phone—which has lost its natural function as a communication tool by the addition of the myriad of gadgets and features it offers. Arguably an iPhone is much more than a phone now; it’s a symbol, a marker of status. A basic phone isn’t ‘good enough’ anymore? We need something that functions in the way the iPhone does?
2 comments:
Isn't it funny the "phones" that they come up with these days. The only thing that i need my phone to do is dial a number or send a text, but i guess i will invest in a newer model because we all know that a phone is really a status symbol :)
Nobody needs these things. Least of all you.
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