Response to visual from new iPhone 5 commercial– of wasted- and lost-looking, reclining young kids zonked-out in a dark other-world.
With ironic tagline: You’re more powerful than you think. [with an iPhone5–thinking is not necessary; kids will be powerful if they–or their teacher–own this phone]
Ironically, the iPhone 5-’empowered’ teacher looks more excited about her projected show than the extremely passive, uncaring kids lying on the blue gym mat.
Reassuring millions of trance-like, screen-obsessed kids that the depicted dark, dreamy, sedentary lifestyle is not harmful, but actually empowering. And kidding many techno-hip teachers that they’re making a deep significant difference to lazy, bored, spaced-out students’ lives.
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Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” are here. The ultimate wish-fulfillment dream of escape from adult responsibilities and conflictful life for an entire wireless generation.
“The Lotos-Eaters” (1833)–Tennyson poem line excerpts:
“Why should only toil, the roof and crown of things?
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone.
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind….
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands,
But they smile, they find a music centered in a doleful song
Steaming up a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.
Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong…
Till they perish and they suffer–some, ’tis whisper’d–down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”
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other iPhone5 ad copy:
iCool. iExpensive. iRulez.
Catering to fantasy pipedream of ultimate power and control.
Complete with proudly defiant misspelling signalling originality, rebellion, and nonconformity.
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I see the picture/I feel strong/I see the river /Flowing on
Do you see the picture?/Do you feel strong?/Do you see the river/Flowing on?
–Johnny Clegg, “Into the Picture”