CI 5475 Week 2.1 - "Now there's a phone that truly lives in real time..."

To advertise the Palm Pre, Sprint's newest smart phone powered by Palm's revolutionary (at least revolutionary until other companies follow suit) WebOS multi-tasking technology, Sprint developed the slogan "Now, there's a phone that truly lives in the moment." In other words, as opposed to other smart phones currently on the market including Apple's iPhone 3gS, Verizon's Black Berry Storm, and T-Mobiles G2, which can only run and update one application at a time, the Palm Pre can run and update multiple applications at any given time. With this multi-tasking technology, the Palm Pre "truly lives in real time" as it can be logged into and receive INSTANT updates from any number of applications including email, Facebook, Twitter, AIM, and countless of other communication and social networking tools. Check out one of Sprint's many advertisements touting the Pre's unique multi-tasking capabilities:



However, as Will Richardson states in our course text, such multi-tasking technology that affords individuals the ability to live their lives with a TREMENDOUS amount of voyeurs directly tuned into what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at any given moment creates a tremendous amount of discomfort for previous generations who center their lives around more private paradigms of socialization:

"These technologies make more of our lives transparent to others in ways that many find unsettling. And, there is a growing gap between how this digital generation defines privacy and the way most adults do. To our kids, making their lives come alive online is just another way they live. Communicating and collaborating with peers using IM or text messaging, Twitter or their MySpace accounts allows them to be "always on" and always connected. That is their expectation, one that has changed greatly in just the past ten years" (4-5).

As Richardson states, whether or not previous generations find the absolutely full disclosure paradigm central to current youth social practice uncomfortable, this extreme level of disclosure IS where things are headed!

As you can see by the advertisements that I have embedded throughout this post, Sprint has no doubt caught on to this trend and is milking it for all it's worth with phrases such as "Now there's a phone that truly lives in the moment" to sell their technologies to individuals, who as Richardson states, have the need to be "always on" (5).

In addition to the advertisement posted above, take a look at how Sprint has centered literally their entire advertising campaign (and network name for that matter as it's referred to as the "Now Network"!!!!!!!) around the strategy of appealing to the individuals' needs to be "always on," easily accessing the networks they are a part of, discovering and joining new networks, and everything else we have been reading about and discussing throughout class so far!