Out of the cutural loop
As encomia to Steve Jobs swamped my Twitter timeline last week, I felt acutely out of step with the zeitgeist. I love my Apple products, but I didn’t feel a direct emotional connection to Steve Jobs. And I had a slight suspicion that the heart rending tributes amounted to a sort of voluntary marketing blitz, or a final product rollout.
Hagiography versus biography — a clean assessment of a powerful figure who changed some things about the way we live versus a bleary eyed, sentimental tribute that sanitizes the human foibles. That difference came into focus when I read, in succession, the obituaries in The New York Times and The Telegraph.
My question here is about the media and culture. Why such a pronounced difference in tone and approach? Consider the leads:
Telegraph: Jobs never designed a computer in his life, but it was because of him that Apple products, even when they do largely what other products do, are perceived to be different and infinitely more cool.
NYT: Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday.
Or description of Jobs’ management style and catalogue of his faults:
Telegraph: He ruled Apple with a combination of foul-mouthed tantrums and charm, withering scorn and carefully judged flattery. People were either geniuses or “bozos”, and those in his regular orbit found that they could flip with no warning from one category to the other, in what became known as the “hero-shithead roller coaster”. Employees worried about getting trapped with Jobs in a lift, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened.
NYT: It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
Telegraph: On his return to America Jobs resumed his work with Atari and was given the task of creating a more compact circuit board for the game Breakout. He had little interest in the intricacies of circuit board design and persuaded his 16-year old friend, Steve Wozniak, to do the job for him, offering to split any bonus fifty-fifty. Jobs was given $5,000 by a delighted Atari, but Wozniak only got $300, under the impression the payout was $600.
NYT: No mention of this anecdote.
Hamilton Nolan at Gawker does a nice sendup of the overwrought emotion,but is almost as exaggerated in his distaste as the mourners are in their shows of grief.
In time, we’ll either see this as a symptom of a pop culture that has lost perspective, or as an inflection point marking our transformation to a digital society.
