On Thursday last cities across North America, Europe, and Asia including Hong Kong and China were united voluntarily, cross-culturally, racially and inter-faith, as overnight queues at last gained access to Apple shops simply to buy the latest i-Phone.
The timing for this latest release was quite unbelievable. Firstly, Blackberries – the major contender for the other most sought after phone (or pocket computer to describe the modern “phone” more accurately), had been silenced on several continents due to a major malfunction. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the launch came a week after the funeral of Steve Jobs, the outstanding visionary behind Apple.
As “The Economist” observed, “When it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”…
…”As a technologist, Mr Jobs was different because he was not an engineer—and that was his great strength. Instead he was obsessed with product design and aesthetics, and with making advanced technology simple to use. He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed idea—the mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer—and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly. Rival firms scrambled to follow where he led. In the process he triggered upheavals in computing, music, telecoms and the news business that were painful for incumbent firms but welcomed by millions of consumers.”
I write as one who was a computer illiterate until Jobs came on the scene. The IBM and its clones heretofore were for the person with the scientific and mathematical skills – something which I have proven consistently to lack! But along came Steve and I have been with him since extracting my first Apple Mac from the packing. It was the one which looked like it was shaped in an old fashioned biscuit tin with a small integral screen and a very small floppy disk slot beneath it. But it came with “a mouse” and pull down menus which took Microsoft and Bill Gates a long time to catch up with. And just as my ignorance of the theory behind the internal combustion engine did not prevent me driving a car, hey presto, I could work a computer. Sales around the world proved I did not walk or work alone.
From then on various models of computer, i-phone, yes and i-pad, have followed. I saw my fellow devotees and disciples in Bethesda, Maryland last week who were preparing to camp out all night before the Thursday launch. And on Saturday last in Georgetown, Washington DC, the queue for the must-have new i-phone still overflowed into the street two days later. Mercifully the weather was better than we have had most of the so-called summer in the north of Ireland.
The genesis of all this enthusiasm is a man who could grasp concepts and who has created a sense of world identity amongst users of this unique brand with which he will forever be synonymous. Small wonder some have placed him on a level with Edison and Newton. The tributes to him were almost like hagiographies – (PR bios of the saints). A couple of illustrations were especially poignant. One was Jobs in an icon image, dressed is Orthodox liturgical vestment and holding an i-pad rather than a Gospel. The other was a cartoon of Jobs presenting Moses with an i-pad on which to write the commandments.
It all left me wondering how the church internationally perhaps has failed in comparison to “market” our brand image… the good news of the Gospel of Jesus. A message defeated by self-cancelling versions of the singles greatest truth in the history of creation? And as our corporate excuse we claim the influence of secularisation.
Perhaps the response tot he death of Steve Jobs may suggest to us that secular man is looking for saints. One commentator in “The Washington Post” op-ed stated of Jobs, “He has attained secular sainthood faster than you can download a season of “Mad Men” onto your iPad 2.”
He continued, “Ordinary saints are a somewhat dour and antisocial bunch, prone to wearing hair shirts and delivering sermons to birds.
“Secular saints are the opposite. They are all things to all people. They smile down on us from the fronts of T-shirts and the backs of buildings. We find them painted on the walls of our coffee shops, Marilyn Monroe high-fiving Oscar Wilde. Hunter S. Thompson shooting pool with Andy Warhol. Like ordinary saints, each has a beat: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, patron saint of those with ’60s envy. Bob Marley, patron saint of that guy with dreadlocks in the back of your math class. Che Guevara, patron saint of those unwilling to wear blank T-shirts.
“But the requirements for secular sainthood have somewhat shifted. It used to be, you touched a guitar or a microphone with success at some point in your life, and you got a pass to the head of the canonization line.
“It’s no longer so simple.
“Amy Winehouse? Tragic, but not saintly.
“Michael Jackson? He was the last of the musical saints. Sure, we’ll mourn the Boss and the remaining Beatles. Jagger? Keith Richards? Not to worry; the Stones evidently sold their souls to a malign force that preserves you intact forever, even though you look like the picture of Dorian Gray on a bad morning. But the only musicians who will ascend to the cloud on the wings of our collective prayers are the ones from an era when we all listened to the same thing. And that’s long over — thanks, in no small part, to Jobs.
“These days, what unites us isn’t our music. It’s the devices we listen to it on. We no longer talk about the same things. But we talk on the same devices.”
Food for thought… and prayer in any re-assessment of mission?
Houston McKelvey