iPhone Ads: Yes, We Have No Dilemmas
by Evan James
Apparently it is no longer possible to watch even two hours of vitally important teen television dramas on the CW without being bombarded by iPhone commercials, all of which are set to cutting edge music that signals in an increasingly smug way just how thoroughly Apple knows what you think is cool, sometimes even before you do. If you haven’t seen the newest batch of these commercials yet, all of which revolve around “solving life’s dilemmas,” their neurotic, self-satisfied, bugaboo-conjuring voiceovers go a little something like this:
I. The “What’s That Strange Music?” Dilemma
You know when you don’t know what song is playing, and it’s driving you crazy? With the Shazam app from the app store, you just hold your phone up to the song like a strung-out control freak every time you hear a sound you don’t recognize. Your heart will race as every passing note plunges you deeper into a paroxysm of hellish musical ambiguity, and in seconds, you’ll know who sings it, where to get it, and whether or not it actually qualifies as music under our authority, all while speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour.
That’s the iPhone: saving you from three minutes of the unknown, one app at a time.
II. The Restaurant Roulette Dilemma
You know that age-old dilemma: where shall we eat tonight? With the Urbanspoon app from the app store, you can spend the next five minutes standing on the street corner fondling your phone, finding restaurants that are across the street from you. Instead of asking somebody, planning ahead, or taking the enormous risk of wandering into a nearby restaurant, you can shake your phone like a maniac until it tells you where to go, how to get there, and whether to order the pork chop or the steak. Yeah, that sounds good.
That’s the iPhone: showing you who wears the pants in the family, one app at a time.
III. The Interpersonal Surveillance Dilemma
Staying in touch with friends can be tough. But if you have Loopt from the app store, you can see what they’re doing, where they are, who they’re with, if they’re ignoring you and why, what they did last night, what kind of day they’re having, how beautiful, cool, and successful their other friends are, and whether or not they want to have lunch.
That’s the iPhone: solving dilemmas that existed only peripherally until we brought them into the center of your world and exaggerated their importance, one app at a time.
IV. The Dilemma Store Dilemma
This is how you enter the app store. And this is how you browse over a thousand new solutions to over a thousand new life dilemmas we’ve dreamed up for you. And this is how you download one, right to your information-crazed little life.
And this is when you realize: this is going to irritate and embarrass whichever one of your friends has to wait around being ignored by you while you paw at your iPhone, begging it to invent some way of solving the dilemma of other people coming between you and your dilemma-solving machine.
And this is when you realize: this is going to derange everything.