“From 1994 until 2004, the sitcom Friends was a pop culture phenomenon,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac. “But according to Rachel Green-actress Jennifer Aniston one thing would stop the show from working today: the iPhone.”
Dormehl reports, “‘If Friends was created today, you would have a coffee shop full of people that were just staring into iPhones,’ Aniston told Arianna Huffington on Wednesday’s episode of iHeartRadio’s Thrive Global Podcast. ‘There would be no actual episodes or conversations.'”
“Back when Friends debuted in 1994, the Apple press would have been busy talking about Apple’s PowerBook 150 laptop, the company’s first truly affordable PowerBook, as well as its plans to license out the Mac OS to third-party manufacturers,” Dormehl reports. “Steve Jobs, meanwhile, would still be running NeXT.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, there was a world Before iPhone and a world After iPhone.
This calls to mind Eric Pickersgill’s Removed project.
So would have tattoos. And the Justin Bieber theme song.
That is exactly what I see whenever my 16 year old daughter has her friends over – 6 kids sitting in the living room all typing on their phones, no talking, no conversation. I wonder all the time if they’re actually group texting each other while sitting in the same room.
iFan: just watched a local new special on kids & stress. Besides intense pressure for good grades, their “device” holds the weight of the entire HS population for them to deal with online “communications”. I love technology, but the phone has elevated a curious tension & obsession. Culture’s representation has gone from Rodin’s famous “The Thinker” pose/sculpture to the same crouch with the gaze to the phone in hand…The Texter.
Epidemic. And it just isn’t iPhones. Our society has been corrupted, irrevocably.
I’d be her friend if she lost Friends.
Jennifer Aniston ruined dating for me. No one compares to her.
On Netflix, check out the Twilight Zone -like show: “Black Mirror,” specifically the episode “The Entire History of You,” in which the iPhone of today has evolved into a contact lens . . . someone could be looking right at you, but they’re actually watching a video — “Sorry, did you say something?” . . . that’s where we’re headed . . .
Not to mention “Nosedive”…..
Nosedive was great!
Can’t mention the phones without social media. facebook is evil/wonderful, e.g.
It’s ruined at least one of my relationships (a misunderstood post), and turned me into a never-intended semi-stalker in the case of another (because we didn’t unfriend each other and she posted so many details of her life) on one that that was in the process of falling apart. (We eventually became friend friends back in the real world, but damn, it felt creepy during the adjustment.)
While keeping me in touch with people I really do care about who are all over creation…. ….pluses and minuses, or as my uncle always calls the results of “progress” – trade-offs.
Don’t forget Jenn’s appearance on “Nick Burns-the Computer guy” – Jimmie Fallon,
I actually go to my neighborhood coffeeshop quite a bit, and find people there talking quite a lot. I do it myself, with friends I meet there. I wouldn’t panic about the death of friendship quite yet.
same here.
You can’t play chess and use a device…a beautiful game and always a venue for interesting conversation.
MIT Technology Review (Vol 115 No 6) had a great cover story called “You Promised Me Mars Colonies, Instead, I Got Facebook,” in which the authors lament the misguided direction technology has taken – going after the big bucks instead of solving the big problems. Definitely worth a read.
you would have a coffee shop full of people that were just staring into iPhones
Thankfully, there are those of us, particularly among we technologists, who do not live in a fake inner world that orbits around their computerized devices. That includes INTJs (see ‘Myers Briggs’) like myself who bask in creative solitude. Eyes-glued-to-iPhone syndrome is a wonderful litmus test, among so many these days, for people I don’t want to know.