Apple Watch 7 is not going to save your life.
by Dan Krutka and Marie Heath
Side note: Before you start reading, we hope these blog posts are the starts of conversations. Please consider adding ideas, questions, resources, corrections, and distractions in the comments!
Hi! Marie here. I’ll be honest with you, the melodramatic Apple Watch ad gets to me. I’m talking about the one where we’re given a bird’s eye (or God’s eye, perhaps) view of landscapes while authentic 911 audio crackles with various victims’ voices of desperation and fear. A woman is trapped under water in her car. A man is being swept out to sea on his paddle board. Another man falls into a well and breaks his leg. Ultimately, all of the victims are saved because they can call 911 on their Apple Watches, even when they can’t reach their iPhones. I know, I know. I’m being manipulated by the media and the message (or the media which is the message), but it takes me a healthy moment of frontal lobe work to ignore the second hand panic I feel for these people. And then there is the briefest flash of fear I feel for myself. It could have been me—or worse, my kids!—in that car, or on that paddle board (admittedly, it probably wouldn’t be me down a well, but who knows?!). Would an Apple Watch save me from impending death if I were ever in an accident? Can technology save us from brokenness in the world?
It’s Dan here now. I recently read David F. Noble’s 1999 classic in technology criticism, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. It’s one of those books that’s not really a page turner for most people, but the thesis sticks with you. In short, Noble argued that from the middle ages on the development of science and technology (historically the “useful” or “mechanical” arts) has been intertwined with millenarian Christian apocalypse prophecy. First, scientists and Christian monks believed that technological developments could bring man* back to the Adamic perfection of God. Later, scientists, whether Christian or influenced by it, came to see their inventions as making them co-creators of the universe. Noble thus argues that in western thought, religion and technology are not separated, but tightly intertwined in the same journey: salvation. L.M. Sacasas has a more detailed blog post on the book linked** at the bottom of this post if you want to know more.
*Side note: Noble paints a vivid portrait of how deep the patriarchal sexism ran in religion and technology. I don’t know why it was not clearer in my mind before, but Noble explains how Christian monks viewed women as fallen, irredeemable, sinners who did not even deserve a place in heaven, thus monks lived a sexist life away from them. (lol that view has long been pretty clear to me! Signed, Marie, A woman who wants to know if you want a bite of an apple (watch) served with a side of original sin)
**Side note: As we started this blog, I (Dan) started reflecting on how hyperlinks contribute to the types of distracted reading and thinking Nicholas Carr detailed in The Shallows. So I, and I can’t speak for others, have decided to add links at the end of posts and not throughout. Hopefully, you will only end up with 10 open tabs after you’ve completed a post. Sorry for the hypocritical distraction from the main post..
Turning back to the new Apple Watch commercial, technology still promises salvation. In this case, Apple is more first responder than God, but still, you’re saved by technology from a lonely death. Marie again here—Once my frontal lobe kicks in of course I realize how manipulative the ad is. I can pause and consider how highly unlikely it is that I am alone on a paddle board being swept toward the horizon. But there is an allure to techno-salvationism. Maybe technology won’t save me from random accidents, but the pervasive suggestion that technology will bring the earth back into balance, allow us to explore the heavens, and ensure long and healthy lives with full bellies and good medicine is a tempting and often told tale.
We see this in less melodramatic forms through techno-solutionism, and -narcissism, which are often part of the packaging of technologies both in and out of school. Scholars in the educational technology field too often portray technologies as silver bullets. But, if a century of education research has shown anything it's that the context, including the people (students and teachers), is everything. Yet, technologies promise us simple solutions to complex problems. Playing on human fears of death, Apple Watch might just be an intensified version of the rhetoric of the technology industry more broadly. If you’d like to think through this with your students, we’ve crafted a short lesson you could use.
Lesson
We suggest showing students the Apple Watch commercial along with similar technologies and critiquing the ways screen commercials seek to sell their products:
Apple Watch Series 7 “911” commercial
Life Call "I've fallen and I can't get up!" commercial (background information)
These three commercials offer similar salvation pitches, but their commercials and products are different. The comparisons of the commercials and the products should elicit discussion about technologies' cost and promise. For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials will be rather nostalgic.
Educators can critique the techno-commerical-salvation message by using Alice Sullivan’s (2015) article and handout on teaching students about how commercials “appeal to emotions” with “just plain folks” and “card-stacking” exaggerations about the benefits of their products. Educators might encourage students to consider the unlikelihood of the situations in the commercial and the likelihood of other problems associated with Apple Watch’s not mentioned (e.g,. data surveillance, exorbitant price, frequent distraction).
Too often, educators teach students to analyze screen media as if they are critiquing print text. Educators can help students critique screen media advertising with Lance Mason’s (2015) M.I.T.S. approach. His approach doesn’t simply focus on the messaging, but the way “screen media uses a combination of images, written text, and sounds to communicate ideas to audiences” (p. 105). Drawing on the work of media ecologists, he explains:
The M.I.T.S. questioning framework stands for main ideas, images, text, and sounds and is designed to isolate each dimension of screen media so it can be examined separately. (p. 105)
Taken together, these approaches offer a media education that can help students critique the commercial messages.
Finally, we offer our five critical questions about technology to critique the salvation messaging from Apple:
What does society give up for the benefits of Apple Watch?
Who is harmed and who benefits from Apple Watch?
What does Apple Watch need?
What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by Apple Watch?
Why is it difficult to imagine our world without Apple Watch?
These technoskeptical questions are intended to bring more balance to our discussions of technology, which always have downsides. You can find further explanations on the curriculum page of this site.
After students critically inquire into these commercials and their messages, maybe they’ll consider a possibility that didn’t make it into Apple’s commercial: technology won’t save us.
For more discussion of religion and technology, see the following:
Marx, P. [Host] (2022, January 20). 98. How evangelicals emulate startup culture w/ Corrina Laughlin. Tech Won’t Save Us [podcast].
Samuel, S. (2020, January 13). Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral. Vox. (see embedded Robot priests: the rise of A.I. in religion podcast).
References
Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. Norton.
Mason, L. E. (2015). Analyzing the hidden curriculum of screen media advertising. The Social Studies, 106(3), 104-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2015.1005284
Noble, D. F. (1999). The religion of technology: The divinity of man and the spirit of invention. Penguin.
Sacasas, L. M. (2012, April 28). Revisiting “The religion of technology.” The Frailest Thing [blog]. https://thefrailestthing.com/2012/04/28/revisiting-the-religion-of-technology/
Sullivan, A. M. (2015). “I don't buy it”: Critical media literacy in the fifth grade. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 28(2), 14-16. [Lesson Handout]