Becoming Something: The Blog of Jim Anderson: FaceTime for Apple's iPhone 4

Well, Apple is at it again. With the newest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 4, Apple has just released one of its most innovative and engaging features to date, something which, in this humble blogger's opinion, will revolutionalize the way that we communicate interpersonally.

Since the days when Captain James T. Kirk explored the expanses "where no man has gone before," and I suppose long before, man has dreamed of the day we could use technology to facilitate highly efficient, highly portable interpersonal communication.

Those days have arrived.

Introducing FaceTime for Iphone 4. It's a revolutionary way to communicate, and just like the brand name implies, it is a way for iPhone 4 users to view each other and interact face to face. In simple terms, video conferencing for your mobile phone.

But what struck me as very powerful and very memorable was not simply the tech, but the way in which Apple chose to inform its consumers about the functionality of this particular product. They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, and if that is true, it must also hold true that a video about a minute and 52 seconds long at 30 frames a second must be worth about 3,360,000 words.

So they didn't need any words.

Instead, producers chose to play an old Louis Armstrong favorite, When You're Smiling. The lyrics begin:

When you're smilin'....keep on smilin'
The whole world smiles with you
And when you're laughin'....keep on laughin'
The sun comes shinin' through

Then, we see five of the strongest use cases for the product illustrated on the screen, and some of them are very powerful. First we see a one year old baby crawling around on a bed, and a mother holding up the iPhone 4's FaceTime to allow conferencing between her baby and an unknown individual. Cut to a successful looking young businessman in a hotel room setting and BOOM! I'm instantly engaged as I fall under that demographic. Just weeks ago I sat in a Manhattan hotel room myself and said goodnight to my wife and little ones via Google talk on a MacBook Pro. The downside? I had to be in a certain place at a certain time. How much more convenient to have the portability that FaceTime offers, with face to face human interaction literally in your pocket. How many times would I call my wife just to see her face and watch her smile as we talked? If this is sounding all too sentimental, it's because Apple has done a remarkable job at appealing to the traveling daddy demographic.

Next up: Cut to a young lady in black cap and gown. It's moments before graduation, and she is sharing the moment with her grandparents no doubt half a nation away. So covering a completely different demographic here, singles, or more specifically, graduates - or anyone who wants to share a specific event with others. Beautiful.

Elegant. I love it, even though to be honest at this point in my life this fits me personally less than any of the other use cases depicted. Graduating girl holds up her iPhone 4 and shows us how simple FaceTime is to use. And the music plays on.

In the third situation, a woman shown studying receives a FaceTime request from one of her girl friends, which she accepts. Her friend is out shopping and in a matter of seconds we understand just how easy it is to communicate with your peers as the caller displays a variety of new outfits and the girlfriend nods her approval or laughs with dislike for some outfits. We get the picture, there are a variety of situations where communication with others is vastly improved by utilizing the moving image.

Now this next sequence was particularly moving, especially given the day and age in which we live with so many away on foreign (or not so foreign) soil, sacrificing the time they could be spending with family in service to their country. Couple that with fear, the nervousness, the excitement, the anticipation, and sheer joy that a young father experiences all at once upon becoming a father. It is my personal experience that the ultrasound is one of the most sacred and special times that a father experiences with the regards to the birth of his child, as he is not carrying the child and therefore does not experience the reality of the pregnancy on a day to day, hour by hour basis as does his wife. And the first ultrasound often occurs before kicks can be felt, so for me seeing evidence of the ultrasound was a real eye-opener. A welcome to reality, please come again soon moment.

But back to the genius of this work: when we first see the wife come onto the screen to speak to her soldier husband, she mouths the words "I love you." and that speaks volumes to me. They obviously are in a loving relationship and she is sharing this moment with him of her own free will. His look of humility and utter awe for the magnitude of the moment was played beautifully, and the soldier was particularly well cast. This moment takes the Lacanian film theory of The Gaze and nearly flips it on his head, as we are watching on a screen a man watch his wife on a screen who is in turn watching him on a screen. It begs the question, who is watching us? But that is for another day.

I love the slow pan into the soldier, and as we get in tighter, it is revealed that there are tears in his eyes. It's not cheesy, I don't feel that the media is trying to be something that it is not, as it doesn't feel that there is gratuitous emotion, but the scene feels raw and chock full of feeling.

In the last use case we see a woman signing to his wife or girlfriend. We don't know if he is deaf, she is deaf, or if they are both deaf but it doesn't matter. Even though this use case probably serves a much smaller slice of the population, we see the need for it and the amazing doors this opens for those who communicate in sign language.