Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs by Brett T. Robinson

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).