Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs by Brett T. Robinson
Name
project_muse_572139.pdf
Size
232.45 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2d9eef8b9baab4872914ea259cf53b5a
Author(s)
Fischer, Michael M. J.
Date Issued
January 2015
Journal
Technology and Culture
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Citation
Fischer, Michael M. J. “Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs by Brett T. Robinson.” Technology and Culture 56, 1 (2015): 291–293 © 2015 Society for the History of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This reading of Apple ads—for the Macintosh (iMac), iPod, iPhone, and iPad—by a marketing professor suggests “Jobs and Apple provide an allegory for reading religion in the information age” (p. 105). With white dust jacket, black lettering, and silhouette with dark red highlighting of “topia” and “Steve Jobs,” the slim book mimics an Apple product. Brett Robinson traces his method to the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (p. 108) but it seems more akin to the University of Chicago’s symbolic interactionist marketing studies in the 1950s and to the symbolic anthropology of [End Page 291] the 1960s and 1970s (see Melissa Cefkin, ed., Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter, 2009).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/TECH.2015.0000
