Salon.com > Apps

How consumer brainwashed are you?

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:54:00 +0000

For his 15th birthday, I gave my son an iPod Touch, a piece of technology that would have seemed like the purest magic to me when I was his age. He likes it, a lot, and I like to watch him use it a lot, because paying attention to how teenagers interact with modern consumer technology is an endlessly fruitful way to learn about where the intersecting forces of capital and entertainment will push society next. But even with long experience at this voyeuristic style of technology journalism, I was a little taken aback when I saw what he was doing with his new favorite toy last Sunday.

He was playing Logos Quiz, a game that is based primarily on the ability to identify corporate logos.

I was appalled and amazed. We've all become quite used to product placement in our entertainment, to living in a world in which TV shows like, say, "Hawaii 5-0" don't even try to hide their primary function as vehicles for Victoria's Secret and Microsoft Surface marketing campaigns. But to make the ability to recognize a brand into the product itself -- that's pure genius. A 15-year-old's attention span in 2012 is perhaps the most fickle thing to ever exist on this planet -- to see my son trying to guess whether a certain squiggle signified BMW or Mercedes Benz was astonishing.

Baseball goes sci-fi

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Possibly the most impressive thing to be said about Ryan Woodward’s comic/app “Bottom of the Ninth” is that it got me to read about baseball, a subject I usually exempt myself from due to extreme indifference. True, the story is set in a slightly sf future (the characters play, or follow, a game called New Baseball) and the central figure is a pitcher who’s the first young woman to play in a professional league, two elements that somewhat softened my resistance to it. But still: baseball, and the way some writers go absolutely sappy over it? Not for me.

Apple cans game modeled on Foxconn tech workers’ suicides

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:13:00 +0000

In 2010, a series of suicides among workers at a Chinese manufacturing plant that makes iPhones brought worldwide attention to Foxconn — and difficult ethical questions about what's behind some of our most beloved gadgets. At the time, amid charges of "labor camp" conditions, things were so grim at the world's ostensible "biggest electronics maker" — supplying not just Apple but Dell and Hewlett-Packard — the company was driven to install nets to prevent workers from hurling themselves to their deaths. Were the over one dozen suicides over a short period of time an act of protest? Were they the result of stress culminating from the alleged 12-hour days that went into making Apple's first generation iPad? And were we, with our dependence on the newest, shiniest hand-held devices to entertain us, in any way morally accountable for the fates of factory workers half a world away? All intriguing questions. And for answers, naturally, there's an app for that.