Connection: iPad Commercials and Postmodernism

Recently, Apple has released a string of different commercials for the iPad proving their slogan that "iPad isn't just one thing, it's thousands of things." These commercials show all of the different things that the iPad can do, ranging from showing constellations to organizing presentations.

While looking at these different advertisements, i was reminded of the chart we read about modernism and postmodernism for Heart of Darkness. I could not help but think that the iPad is the perfect example of postmodernism in our world. It perfectly exemplifies the multiplicity of postmodernism as well as the ambiguous nature of it.

The iPad commercials show multiplicity very clearly because the main point of them is that the iPad can perform thousands of different tasks, so it cannot be said that the iPad has one specific purpose, but rather all of its purposes overlap, and vary from person to person.

The iPad itself is a very ambigious piece of technology. It contains elements of a mobile phone, a computer, and an MP3 player all in one, so it is hard to define exactly what it is. The ambiguity of the device I'm sure had something to do with the fact that we are moving into a postmodern world where it is harder to define exactly what something is, because it will contain elements of many different things.

Reading about postmodernism has made it a lot easier for me to see examples of how we are living in a postmodern world. In the same way, seeing these examples make it a lot easier for me to understand exactly what postmodernism means. It is a difficult concept to grasp, and one that few people can truly grasp, but I guess that makes perfect sense because in a postmodern world, no single person can explain anything entirely.