An idea we gladly consume

Every day felt like Christmas during my decade as The N&O's book review editor and books columnist. I began each morning tearing open packages from publishers stuffed with the latest literary offerings. So when my editors asked me what I wanted to write about in my first column as the paper's ideas writer, I answered immediately: the iPhone.

Unfortunately, the economics in Steve Jobs' world are different from those in John Updike's.

Life, as they say, is filled with these little disappointments.

I did get to play with the iPhone at the Apple store in Raleigh's Crabtree Valley Mall. But that was almost beside the point. Ideas are not about nouns -- people, places or things -- but the meanings we attach to them. Where my previous column explored what we think about books -- and how those interpretations illuminate our culture -- this new column will discuss a broader range of subjects. By unearthing the often hidden ideas shaping our culture, I hope to help identify the forces shaping our world and encourage readers to consider their responses to them.

What's the big idea about the iPhone? I'll let the tech guys deconstruct the gadget itself, a slender cell phone combined with a music player and Internet browser. Far more interesting to me is the tsunami of excitement that surrounded its unveiling.

The wall-to-wall coverage on TV and the Web and the cover stories in newspapers and magazines seemed to embody the worst excesses of our consumer culture. Between June 20 and July 3, for example, The N&O ran 15 stories mentioning the iPhone, including tips on where to camp out to be among the first to get one. The scientists who cure cancer one day can only hope to generate the febrile coverage generated by Apple's latest product.

At first blush, this iPhone mania seems dangerously out of whack. Why are we paying so much attention to something somebody wants to sell us?

For good or ill, Americans increasingly define themselves by the things they own. Turning an advertising slogan into a societal value, we are what we drive. We tell the world who we are by the labels on our shirts, shoes and handbags, the types of food we eat (are you organic?) and the processing speed of our computers (I run at 6 gigahertz -- how about you?).

As the best recent example of this pivotal dynamic, the iPhone deserved the megacoverage it received. The iPhone matters, deeply.

Some may notice more than a whiff of self-fulfilling prophecy here, suggesting a sinister synergy between corporate advertising and media pimping. If they didn't exalt these objects, would we crave them so desperately?

The question of whether businesses create demand or simply satisfy it raises a richly complicated debate with strong arguments on both sides. On the one hand, if corporations can't shape our tastes, why would they spend billions on advertising? Yet if consumers are merely puppets, we'd all be drinking New Coke.

Ultimately, one overriding fact inclines me to believe that consumers drive the marketplace -- the astounding affluence Americans have enjoyed during the past six decades.

The government reports that in 1950, the average American had $8,306 in personal disposable income -- the money to spend as he wished after taxes. In 2006, the inflation-adjusted figure had ballooned more than threefold to $27,755. This turbo-charged purchasing power has in large part fueled the rise of the consumer society. Average Americans are more interested in products because more products are within their reach.

This is especially true of luxury items -- from $500 phones to $800 handbags to $4 ice cream cones and $8 bottles of "designer water." Luxury spending has been growing much faster than overall spending, according to James B. Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

In a culture where money is often the scorecard people use to judge success, luxury items enable people to purchase instant status. At a time when bonds to family and local communities are fraying, they also allow people to buy into nontraditional communities -- of people who ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, carry Louis Vuitton bags or use iPhones.

Indeed, other gadgets have the same capabilities of the iPhone. But the iPhone offers something the others cannot: Apple culture, Apple cool. When people buy an iPhone, they're paying the entrance fee to that world.

Twitchell, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate whose books include "Living It Up: America's Love Affair with Luxury," agrees that the dynamic is frightfully shallow.

"Is it stupid? Yes," he said. "Should we transcend it? Yes. Still it seems far more egalitarian than the system it has replaced, what I call the lucky sperm culture."

Just a few decades ago, he observed, the concept of blood was king as our identities were largely forged at birth -- by our class, religion and skin color. These were the markers people used to identify themselves and one another. Consumer culture, which empowers people to reinvent themselves through their tastes, has helped erode their power.

The iPhone is not just a cool new toy. It's a slender product that symbolizes powerful ideas and economic realities that have transformed American society. That's the big idea.