See the two commercials for the iPhone 4S: one with Samuel L. Jackson and the other with a "Zooey Deschanel". Note the repartee between actor and phone. What are they selling?
Most immediately, they are selling Command. Command requires a commander, someone who controls, who navigates, who regulates; in this case, the phone owner. Command also requires the attention of another, someone willing to take as her will the will of the commander; she is the audience--in this case, the phone.
But what need does Command satisfy? What common desire are the marketers exploiting?
We're buying the license to indulge our own personality. To indulge, to express the self to the machine for the benefit of the self. Notice how the characters run a commentary, as if entertaining the phone; but really they are entertaining themselves.When we narrate for and "interact" with Siri, we can act obnoxious or cute, voice whatever witticism, drivel, passing thought and fancy that would otherwise shrivel and die as things do when they are unfit for survival. But now such behavior is legitimized because now you have a (captive) audience, which, in your mind, makes you a star, a sovereign without territory, holding court with your first and only servant.
But that is the illusion. What is the actual effect?
Man, obliterated again and again by technologies since the industrialized age, seeks yet again to actualize himself through more technology, this time through the validation that comes with getting recognized by the machine--the machine that consumes him.
He doesn't speak to a person through the phone; he speaks to the phone, and the phone answers him. But it answers not the way a patient parent answers her insufferable child. Rather, he merely hears the mechanized echo of his own voice and mistakes it for contact. And rather than grow up, he grows even more dependent until he can't function without it. He is obliterated in his discourse with the machine that tolerates him, for, in this discourse, no one is learning about him, growing to like to him (or hate him), getting used to him, making him more compassionate or better or more patient--indeed, probably the opposite is true. He regresses into infancy.
But now he is old.
Notes:
- I don't know who a "Zooey Deschanel" is but judging by an images search it's a professional face maker.
