When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday, the news was everywhere within the hour and still is gaining coverage and momentum. AP Images sent me an email on Thursday morning entitled "Steve Jobs: An American Genius. Iconic AP Images & Footage." I understand the man did a huge amount, but it seemed like a president died. Some of my friends made the Apple logo with a Steve Jobs cut-out in the corner their Facebook profile picture, nearly everyone had it in their status and there are about four different links to stories on him on my Google News front page.
We talked about the Amanda Knox coverage in class, but now this has reached an even higher level. And it definitely reminds me that the media definitely does produce who we are. From this story we have seen ones about his fortune, his family, his history and even all the details about pancreatic cancer. The Washington Post had a chat on pancreatic cancer as well on Thursday or Friday. So, isn't this a little much? We talked about the competitive news environment driving coverage, and used examples of Michael Jackson and Amanda Knox, and this is definitely another instance. But I think to some extent we definitely allow this to happen. They wouldn't do the stories if people wouldn't click on them, they wouldn't buy the pictures. Clearly Apple had a huge market, so the news is trying to buy into that Apple/Steve Jobs/tech fantatic market. And while I tried not to read a story on Steve Jobs after his death, it's kind of hard to turn away. Just like it was hard to avoid the Amanda Knox coverage and look at a picture of Michael Jackson's funeral. Sometimes it's the curiosity of those of us in the middle or who are apathetic who are just as guilty of driving the media frenzy as those who are actually obsessed with these topics.
But to some extent, that's who we've been trained to be. When we see a lot of coverage, it automatically peaks our interest, for better or for worse. The media has produced us to be that way, like we talked about with the Media Regulation article. We know that when something gets a lot of coverage, it's something big, and the media is going to milk it for all its worth, covering every possible angle to make every different person interested. Because even if you aren't tech-y, maybe the story about pancreatic cancer got you to click or the story about his family or his fortune. But for most of us, there was definitely something that drew us in.
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I have a Mac and I'm glad Steve Jobs is dead. Call me hypocrite. It's true that my purchase helped fund the global sweatshop industry that Jobs revolutionized. I held out for a long time by not even having a laptop, let alone a mac. But the inability to work with technology makes going into journalism harder, giving me less of a platform to criticize Jobs. So it's a devil's bargain.
ReplyDeleteAs a billionaire in charge of a global empire, you have a responsibility to use your power to help uplift people, not to exploit them. Jobs didn't create sweatshops, but as the head of Apple he profited immensely off of the misery of the workers in his Chinese factories. Mac has the lockdown on the market when it comes to multimedia platforms (not that workers in PC factories are any better off) so I'm stuck between the options of owning a piece of the misery or going computer-less.
People always talk about how Jobs created something different. Why couldn't he have created something different with his labor practices? I normally don't like to speak badly of the dead, but I think for people like Jobs there are always some exceptions.
Dan, I think you have an interesting point - but aren't we stuck owning a piece of the misery in so many aspects of our lives? Computers hardly seem to have the corner on the profiting-off-of-others'-misery market. I've found some loopholes (ie, if I shop at thrift and second-hand stores, my money isn't going to textile-producing sweatshops or the megacorporations that profit from that cheap labor) but we're still really almost always backed against a wall, aren't we? Whether we're buying food, computers, clothing, etc... aren't we usually (if unintentionally) owning a piece of the misery?
ReplyDeleteI haven't done the research on this (so this is a real, not snarky question): is Steve Jobs worse than any other CEO out there?
Finally, as a side note: WHERE ARE ALL THE THRIFT STORES IN DC?!?!?! Am I missing something?