Why Debating Apple's 'Misunderstood' Ad Is An Amazing Holiday Gift
Evan Selinger
2013-12-25 00:00:00
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​The protagonist of the ad is a young man who appears to care more about being on his phone than focusing on what his Christmas celebrating family is doing right before his eyes. But in the end, he surprises everyone and reveals that, ta-da, the whole time he really was creating a finely edited video of their holiday—a digital heirloom to cherish, filled with shared memories of cookies, skating, tree decorating, and snowman building.

What could be bad about this homage to digital age family values where the illusion of absence masks a conscientious and caring presence? For critics who put the ad on the naughty list, lots of things!

Jennifer Rooney uses explicitly moral language and denounces the ad for “caving to people’s vices”. She sees it as validating two bad choices: prioritizing removed experiences of looking at life through devices and fetishizing recorded activities.  “What would have had more impact,” she writes, “was if Apple made a commercial that said, ‘put down the iPhone this holiday season and actually look at, talk with, be with your family and friends.’”

Rooney’s criticism is all about timing. She worries about how we experience holidays in 2013, and pines for a major technology company to promote a counter-cultural message. She wishes Apple would bolster the burgeoning “backlash against smartphone use that’s happening all around us.”

Over at The New York Post, Kyle Smith takes the cultural anxiety about smart phones “turning us into disconnected loners untethered to reality” a step further. He basically depicts “Misunderstood” as self-serving corporate propaganda that obscures a recent history of large-scale, deleterious social engineering: “Apple knows it has turned us into iZombies, and has become defensive about it, releasing its own little movie arguing that there’s some upside to this depressing new reality.” Indeed, Smith even compares the endeavor to “mid-century effort by the tobacco industry to assuage fears about the safety of its products.”

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