Last night as I attempted my physician-ordered daily hour-long walk (to help speed healing after surgery, but which I should do anyway, of course), I observed two long lines in the middle of Town Center Mall: one spilling out of the Apple store, and then its continuation, beginning at the Starbucks kiosk, not too far away from this fountain. Badge-wearing Apple employees in blue polo shirts manned the lines and kept order among the ranks by chatting and offering pleasant updates on the line's progress. All of this I found out was because of the latest iPhone. Many of the folks in line waiting for the new iPhone passed the time, you guessed it, amusing themselves on their current iPhones, which obviously still worked. Among the people standing in line were a uniformed postman, and a woman on crutches and whose right leg was in a cast. Didn't the mailman have a hard enough day doing his job in over 90 degree heat? He wants to waste his precious evening standing in line in the mall for a phone? And the broken leg lady? She's going to put herself through standing and hobbling through not one but two long lines just to get a new phone?
Then in this morning's New York Times appear pictures of a young, healthy New York man, holding up his new iPhone as if it were a trophy, or an archeological find. Another young man pictured in the paper had painted the word "iPhone" on his face. I found this all rather sad. It's not sad that people want the iPhone; we all want things, and by all accounts, the iPhone is a cleverly designed and useful device. What I find sad is that people want this device so badly that they are standing in these crazy lines, and wasting precious time that a few weeks from now would not need to be expended to buy this same item. What's sad is that some people feel that the only way that they believe they are somebody is to buy something that, although for a short time, they will be among the few to own. And yet even this is fallacious if you see how many people are standing in line to become "early adopters." How can they feel that they are unique or special in getting this phone now, as they stand in line with hundreds of others who are doing the same (and thousands of others if they consider other lines in other places)? My friend's idea was that these people will be the first in their circle of friends to own it, but for how long? A few weeks? A month? And then when all of their friends have the phone, too, what next will these people have to buy to distinguish themselves, to feel unique?
In place of the imagination that drives people to develop themselves, and become who they want to be or can be, some folks simply buy things. The iPhone fills the gap created by a lack of imagination, the imagination that otherwise inspires people to learn languages, play instruments, practice sport, art, science and business, and do many other fulfilling things. These are things, too, that define one better than possessing a mass-produced device owned and a few years later discarded by millions of other people.
Of course, the corporations benefit a lot from this state of affairs. Once one device loses its ability to confer upon its owner a kind of uniqueness, then another device awaits him so that the cycle repeats, ad infinitum. The attention garnered by the early adopter arouses in his or her friends their desire to garner the same, spurring more sales, until the tipping point when so many people own the device that the cachet is now gone and society moves on to the next thing, repeating the process. This is not to say that everyone who buys an iPhone buys it to fill this imaginative void; many people probably simply like the product. It's hard to believe, however, that the people standing in line in Town Center yesterday were not craving something besides just the phone.
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