Regard below; a young Steve Jobs. I have to say, after watching a few of his keynotes, including the one for the original iPhone, he was as close to an anthropologist as a developer could be. Jobs' keynote speeches were more about our emerging culture than the emerging product.
Here we see him enticing us to align ourselves with the Apple brand, something we did with enough zeal to commodify our deepest technological desires. Is the iPad really just another tablet? Or is it a greater symbol of ownership over technology, an emergence from something akin to MaryJo DelVecchio Good's "biotechnical embrace" as we very nearly are becoming biologically linked to our technology. With the iPad, Jobs achieved a closer level of attachment, melding life with device with hardly a seam.
That freshly bit apple apparently speaks to us not just as a culture, but as a species. For humans, the most social creature of all, Apple's logo has brought us into the technologic fold, introducing smart phones, laptops and complex software programs to those with silicon anxiety. I argue that the Apple image carried Jobs' ideology farther than the product itself could alone, and that is saying a lot for the company that portabalized our life management systems so elegantly and taken such an innovative look at form. An image like this, a graphic of and for our anthros, can transfix our social processes with such precision, carve an identifying symbol into our minds and lives and embody whole social revolutions in techno-temporal context.
Ethnography, a method of anthropological research, harkens to the Greek origin of "ethnos", or "the people" and "grapho" or, "to write". While he was not a writer by trade, Jobs knew people and was an unparalleled business mind as well. His days of tinkering with electronics in his garage grew and combined with understanding people and creating an understanding of business, he created an image, intimately linked with a product, that is visibly a part of us. Our glowing apples beam outward from our computers, phones and devices, like a spotlight of consumer desire or a beacon of omniscient circuitry, carrying our tweets, texts, status updates, messages, chats, emails, upvotes, jpegs, docs, images and video to billions of other points of data storage instantly. The Apple breathes with us, gets sick with us and syncs with us. We share out most intimate moments and create the most memorable with it.
Regard below; Steve Jobs in his office circa 1982. If he really was an anthropologist, he would have many more books and much less shelter. Aside from the practical, Jobs thought a lot about people, which is what anthropologists do, when designing Apple's productions and defining its vision. This is the sort of pondering that produces the expression seen below; expressions of intense scrutiny into human behavior followed by the mental equivalent of detective's work. These thoughts have had, and will continue to have, world changing power, as evidenced by the virtuoso above. These thoughts powered the ethos of the PC revolution and are hopefully, going to keep on growing.
