Coming home from my mission in West Africa, I was faced with a Frostian decision. Rather than choosing which path to take, I had to decide whether to continue being a PC man or jump ship and swim to the island of Apple. I consulted the best source I knew: my younger sister. She had been using a MacBook Pro since her first year of college and could only tell me that there was nothing better than seeing the glow of the Apple insignia in a dark room. She cajoled me into turning away from my PC heritage (I had used a Dell XPS laptop my first year of college) and embrace the world of Apple products.
Now that I have been converted to the wonderful world of Mac, I have been immersed in a world full of the imagination of Apple's former CEO, Steve Jobs. This world is filled with iPods, iPads, iPhones, iMacs, iTunes, and laptops the size of a manilla folder. Those that are avid Mac users buy multiple products and are able to sink them together and share data from their desktops at home to their iPod Touches, MacBook Pros, or iPads. The hardware allows for you to be connected at all times (if internet is available) to a vast global community. My question is, will Apple's broad reach and ascent to the top of the most valuable international brands turn the company into the next Big Brother, with the ghost of Steve Jobs at its head?
I was very interested in a blog post that was written by my professor, Gideon Burton, where he examines the operations of Apple and how their restrictive practices may be the future of creativity in the digital age. Open sharing is wonderful, but also a potential nightmare for uniformity with product design and accessibility. Dr. Burton brings up some good points about how Apple's "walled garden" may be an oasis for creativity because of the level of importance placed on keeping Apple's products uniform where application sharing spans all of their products. He also says something interesting about how "sometimes, the way to be open is to be closed,"and relates it to Orwell's 1984. In examining this thought further, I can see how this dabble in doublethink could actually go deeper.
The world of Apple is a niche community that is vastly expanding throughout the world. Those that own Mac products do feel like they are part of a club, as Dr. Burton suggests in his blog post. I can see how this club could develop into an elitist group that is constantly connected by some form of "telescreen" (using Orwell's terminology) that could lead to privacy issues. Mac products are the hardware that may one day connect us all and keep us connected to the line of some "Big Brother" figure.
This would be an interesting avenue to explore more. Dr. Burton suggested to me that I should look at Google and how their expanding presence in our lives could be related to how Big Brother was able to control the party members of Airstrip One. The same ideas might be applied to the world of Apple which is creating forms of control in their "walled garden" which keep people in and always looking for another upgrade to their hardware. Their restrictive policies draw people into the Apple community and once in, many people do not seek to leave.
Now that I have been converted to the wonderful world of Mac, I have been immersed in a world full of the imagination of Apple's former CEO, Steve Jobs. This world is filled with iPods, iPads, iPhones, iMacs, iTunes, and laptops the size of a manilla folder. Those that are avid Mac users buy multiple products and are able to sink them together and share data from their desktops at home to their iPod Touches, MacBook Pros, or iPads. The hardware allows for you to be connected at all times (if internet is available) to a vast global community. My question is, will Apple's broad reach and ascent to the top of the most valuable international brands turn the company into the next Big Brother, with the ghost of Steve Jobs at its head?
I was very interested in a blog post that was written by my professor, Gideon Burton, where he examines the operations of Apple and how their restrictive practices may be the future of creativity in the digital age. Open sharing is wonderful, but also a potential nightmare for uniformity with product design and accessibility. Dr. Burton brings up some good points about how Apple's "walled garden" may be an oasis for creativity because of the level of importance placed on keeping Apple's products uniform where application sharing spans all of their products. He also says something interesting about how "sometimes, the way to be open is to be closed,"and relates it to Orwell's 1984. In examining this thought further, I can see how this dabble in doublethink could actually go deeper.
The world of Apple is a niche community that is vastly expanding throughout the world. Those that own Mac products do feel like they are part of a club, as Dr. Burton suggests in his blog post. I can see how this club could develop into an elitist group that is constantly connected by some form of "telescreen" (using Orwell's terminology) that could lead to privacy issues. Mac products are the hardware that may one day connect us all and keep us connected to the line of some "Big Brother" figure.
This would be an interesting avenue to explore more. Dr. Burton suggested to me that I should look at Google and how their expanding presence in our lives could be related to how Big Brother was able to control the party members of Airstrip One. The same ideas might be applied to the world of Apple which is creating forms of control in their "walled garden" which keep people in and always looking for another upgrade to their hardware. Their restrictive policies draw people into the Apple community and once in, many people do not seek to leave.
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