iSoul Sell-Out

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Apple Chairman Steve Jobs gleefully proclaimed last week at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

Maoist China had Little Red Books, Jacobin France had Phrygian Caps; Any doubts about the icon by which our age will be remembered have surely now been dispelled with a Multi-Touch click.

The vanguard of cell phones, laptops, and music players have finally achieved the sleek unity that is the iRevolution’s ultimate victory. And this revolution occurs at the crucial intersection of our crazed gadgetphilia and our intensifying demand to pump maximum efficiency into and out of every moment. The epic of our iCivilization shall read, to update Pope, “Music, cameras, and mobile phones lay separate hidden in the night; Jobs said, ‘Let iPhone be!’—And all was light.”

But surely even this illumination casts some shadows? Even in the nineteenth century, when sheet music was the closest thing to “Shuffle Play,” some recognized the dangers of information overload: Ralph W. Emerson, Class of 1821, noted of the overly-busy man: “His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit… A Greenwich nautical almanac he has… but does not know a star in the sky.” Perhaps the advent of the iPhone is a moment for us all to pause and reflect upon the gadgets that rule our lives.

After all, combining our highly evolved ability to socialize (phone, Facebook), remember events (photos, video), and work (papers, e-mails) into one dashing unit, the iPhone is set to become the digital incarnation of ourselves. And with it we sacrifice yet another great measure of self-reliance for the convenience of being able to Skype our roommate abroad and watch Scrubs on the same handheld device.

The iPhone will become more than the latest accessory of the de facto Ivy League uniform; It will become a requisite for our existence in our world, just as WiFi Internet is now. It will dramatically reshape and speed up society—especially Harvard society, where list-servers, text messaging, and online lectures already govern our hours. Soon, we will live in a Harvard that seems possible only because of the iPhone and its unified marvels.

Let us ask ourselves if too many hours haven’t already been fed to the idol of Facebook in place of hearty dinners with friends. How many much-needed moments of solitude are drowned out by iTunes, or conversations are shattered by shrill ring tones?

We should, of course, buy and enjoy our armadas of gadgetry, but not forget that they all come with an “Off” switch, and no natural law commands us to keep them ever next to our hearts. Perhaps a day at Harvard shorn of cell phone, iPod, and email would be inconvenient, but it would also bring us freedom from constant contact—before we too do not “know a star in the sky.”



Paul G. Nauert ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.