Anyone who's ever used or intends to use an Apple iPad has a stake in this story..!
An apple is where everything started a long long time ago. But even after all our troubles from biting it, the human race is still loving it. Only this apple is the galaxy of glittering digital baubles from the empire built by Steve Jobs.
The "Oh Wow...!" he is said to have exclaimed as he was dying may have been at the sight of even grander digital baubles in the beckoning hereafter. Or, just possibly, at the sudden realization baubles don't glitter that much when seen in the bigger picture.
If that sounds something like today's critics, you're right. You see, while the buying public loves every Apple they see, sociologists and psychologists are concerned about the impact their impersonalization is having on human discourse and even human brain functioning.
Couple hundred years ago, an angry passel of workers in England got upset with the way the new mechanization was changing THEIR world. These Luddites went out and attacked every machine they could find. A hundred years, later a gentle legion of farmers in the United States took a different approach. Rather than attacking THEIR new mechanized age, the Amish simply withdrew to their own unmechanized world.
We all know the Amish as a quiet part of our American population which sticks close to their lands and their ways. Simple. Secure. Apart from the modern world, they thrive inside their own world. What seems to be a very good world indeed. While the angry Luddites are long gone, the contented Amish seem to thrive.
As far as we know, most of them with nary an apple in sight. Except the kind they grow.
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