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Latest update: 07/10/2011
- Afghanistan war - Apple - financial crisis - iPad - iPhone - NATO - Steve Jobs - technology
Steve Jobs: 'John Lennon of technology'
He's being described as a genius to rank with Johannes Gutenberg and John Lennon. Tributes for the late Steve Jobs, Apple's techie pioneer, fill page after page. Among the other main stories is the tenth anniversary of the Afghan war. That's the focus for the world press review, Friday 7th October 2011.
The International Herald Tribune headlines “the genius who transformed modern life”. And to drive home just how much of a genius Steve Jobs was, it points to the 317 Apple patents that list him as an inventor. A cartoon in the IHT shows him in heaven wearing his trademark jeans and turtleneck and with a handful of angels nearby enjoying an i-Pad.
The China Daily has a photo of the Apple co-founder with two Apple fans laying apples with bites taken out of them. That’s at the Apple Store in Beijing. The Bangkok Post has a cartoon showing a tree with an apple with a bite taken out of it that has fallen to the ground and the letters RIP, Rest in Peace.
PC Mag publishes what it says are the Best Steve Jobs stories from the Macintosh Years. It took them from the website folkore.org. One anecdote reports he wanted the original Mac designed like a Porsche and that even the motherboard for the memory chips had to be elegant, even though no one sees it.
Another anecdote says that Jobs showed the first Mac - while in development - to folk singer Joan Baez. Colleagues were dumbfounded that he could disclose such a secret project to someone so famous. Jobs reportedly dated Baez at one point, although it is hard to know as he kept his personal life private.
A couple of tweets online include this one: “All I know is 10 years ago we still had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash and now we have no Jobs, no Hope, and no Cash”. And this one from news magazine Nicaragua Today saying that Steve Jobs is "El John Lennon de la tecnología", which translates as “He is the John Lennon of Technology”. Elsewhere in the press, there are comparisons to him with Johannes Gutenberg and Elvis Presley.
The other main international story grabbing headlines is the 10-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The Dubai-based Gulf News has an editorial headlined: “Ten wasted years in Afghanistan”. It says US President Barack Obama was wrong in the summer when he said the tide of war was receding. It argues “the light of secure peace is not to be seen” and insists that NATO and the United States should “think beyond their fight against extremist groups”.
And the Daily Beast looks at their plight with a piece by an Afghan specialist, the British writer Magsie Hamilton-Little, who returns to the country. She says the conditions today are “worse than ever” and asks where have “all the billions in aid money gone?” She can’t see it on the ground.
The British press, meanwhile, is leading on the current financial turmoil and a statement from Bank of England Governor Mervyn King who says the “world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s”.
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(1) Reaction
Groupthink, Zombies, and Real Genius
I truly respect Steve Jobs for his contribution to the personal electronics industry with the iPod, iPad and iPhone. But let's not go overboard into iDolatry now that he's died. Let's not raise him above actual inventors and innovators.
Once the media hype and dust settles, it will be abundantly clear to anyone who checks the facts and history that Steve Jobs was only a "mastermind" at marketing inventions conceived, created and developed by real inventors and innovators --- like Douglas Ingelbart, Chuck Peddle, and the many unheralded genuine geniuses at Xerox PARC and others around the world.
Unfortunately, there is a generation of consumers that have become uninformed Apple zombies, and believe that Jobs invented or perfected personal computing. Ironically, one of Apple's first TV commercials in 1984 presented a mass of zombie-like slaves who had to be freed from big brother groupthink --- though it appears that Apple consumers need to be emancipated from believing Apple makes the best and most open devices for free thinking and creative users. When they do a little homework and check the facts on the past and future of their gadgets, they stop buying into the groupthink corporate marketing hype that companies like Apple have branded and perfected.
True free thinkers and creative people don't iDol worship. Moreover, they know better not to annually waste money on the same brand of overpriced disposable consumer products.