Written
Analysis, Week 2: iPhone Rituals and Stereotypes
John
James Crowley
Popular
Culture, HUMN 240
Professor
Harlan Schottenstein
Oct.
19, 2014
iPhone
Rituals and Stereotypes
iPhones not only require rituals – and
invoke stereotypes – there’s even an “app” for that. Before you download the alleged-productivity
program, you have to: Log into iTunes; pay credit-card points to buy it; verify
the purchase; download it; and then open it.
“Ritual” from Stoeffler.cc costs $2.99 for
version 2.42. Upgrading is another ritual about Ritual and iPhones in general.
If you don’t remember your iPhone/iTunes password(s), you have to guess three
times. Then you answer security questions. If you can’t remember those answers,
you have to start over. Or you can ask that it be sent via email. Finally, you
have to change a randomly-created password to something you can remember. Next
week, when you want to buy something else, you likely have forgotten your
password – or lost that scrap of paper you put in your wallet. Still, Yahoo’s
news says iPhone users are smarter than Android owners. Stereotype?
Yahoo quotes an admittedly unscientific Hunch.com
study. Android users are less-educated men who embrace technology late. Women
use iPhones at an older age and make more money. Users of each phone type also
have different tastes in movies, style and varying personalities, Yahoo claims.
Hunch.com interviewed 700,000 people to predict demographics, traits and
tastes. Then 15,800 boiled-down answers were somehow parsed against millions of
other questions answered by the same group of Android versus iPhone users. Such
studies are themselves suspect. The reader doesn’t know how the study was done,
and Androids also are cheaper to buy.
Smartphone stereotypes overall though are true: Being tethered to an outlet to
recharge. Sitting entranced in traffic, in line or multi-task engrossed in a
public restroom. iPhones promise an easier existence. You just endure rituals,
stereotypes and complicated annoyances in order to simplify. The same is true
of Androids, but Yahoo says those people are somehow dumber.
References
“Android,
iPhone User Stereotypes Revealed,” Yahoo Live Science. Aug. 17, 2011
Retrieved from:
Ritual, an iPhone
productivity application (Stoeffler.cc) July 20, 2014
Apple iTunes pay-to-download site
Retrieved from:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ritual-get-motivated-build/id731897835?mt=8
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