If you have any doubt about the deity-sized ego of Apple CEO Steven Jobs, this ad is proof that the iPhone now wants to replace God. I joked in a previous post that by making iPhone a keyword it doubled my Web traffic. But it was true. Yet AdAge reports that sales are not living up to the hype (article may be behind registration wall). But if you are God, nothing will.
The ad is an unmistakable reference to Michelangelo‘s “Creation of Man” image of the human finger touching God. Originally that was a conceit of the Renaissance that humanism would replace God as the central focus of society. Here we leap to a screen that enters us into heteropotic space– the in-between not here-nor-there of cyberspace. The image of the map on the iPhone screen indicates that with our fingers we have full control of the globe, the world at our fingertips, literally. But of course one company intends to mediate that experience: Apple. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is probably a great toy and as soon as the price drops by a few hundred bucks and ATT is no longer the sole provider I’ll probably get one. (Disclosure: I use and recommend Apple products and also advertise them here, but it doesn’t mean I won’t be critical of them).
The ad also reveals an emerging bias of contemporary culture: the tactile is replacing sight as the central sensory experience of our age. This is not to say sight isn’t a kind of “touching,” but more and more our bodies are getting involved with new media, whether it is with joysticks or wifi controllers. In general, I’d say that is a good thing, because the mind-body dichotomy has really gotten us into a dualistic heap of a mess. With the iPhone, “I think therefore I am” becomes “I touch therefore I am.” Too bad Descartes didn’t deploy more of his senses. Maybe our scientific revolutions would have had earth as a partner rather than as a specimen reduced to a field of visual objects that can be reduced and cataloged into conquerable parts.
I end with Paul Virilio, who observes that terminals, be they where airplanes and buses arrive and depart from or computer interfaces, are both entry and exit points:
Each surface is an interface between two environments that is ruled by a constant activity in the form of an exchange between the two substances placed in contact with one another…. What used to be the boundary of a material, its ‘terminus,’ has become an entryway hidden in the most imperceptible entity. From here on, the appearance of surfaces and superficicies conceals a secret transparency, a thickness without thickness, a volume without volume, an imperceptible quantity…. As with live televised events, the places become interchangeable at will.” (The Lost Dimension, p. 17)