Why Me?

Adam Lisagor (aka lonelysandwich) writes an engrossing post about Apple’s new branding, its switch from iProduct to MobileMe. And by ‘engrossing’, I mean I enjoyed reading it so much, I even read it a second time. That’s pretty impressive given my internet reading habits.

I offer evidence only in my strictly unacademic impressions of the differences between ‘I’ and ‘me’. For instance, ‘I’ implies activity, a doing and a being of something. Ideologically, this meshes well with Apple’s provenance as the tool of the artist and its aim to imbue the user with the identity of Unique Creator of Digitial Artifact, of curator and distributor and master of his or her digital hub. In this model, I am the center of my digital lifestyle, from which springs endless evidence of my unique and lovable existence and expendable income.

By contrast, ‘me’ implies passivity, an identity of self-evident existence without the burden of activity. In the ‘me’ model, I exist by the token of my relation to my Contacts and Calendar. In the ‘I’ model, I exist by the token of my photos, which I sync from my camera in iPhoto and upload to my iDisk.