The New Yorker revealed its first cover of 2014 on Monday. The cover, entitled, "All Together Now," illustrates an audience of parents filming their children at a school play using various digital devices:
It perfectly captures the tendency of current society to experience a moment on an iPad, iPhone or tablet versus simply watching and experiencing the moment live -- remembering it as it actually happened.
Artist Chris Ware, who also drew the magazine's first cover of 2013 inspired by the Newtown shooting, described this tendency as a result of the "new touch-sensitive generation of technology."
"Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket," Ware wrote in a blog.
Ware said that he was inspired to create the cover after attending a showing of “Jungle Book" with his family and hearing the line, "Well, one’s own children are more important than the children of others.… Everyone knows that. The world runs on that.” He says he soon realized that many of the memories he has of his own daughter are just "memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves."
"The more we give over of ourselves to these devices, the less of our own minds it appears we exercise, and worse, perhaps even concomitantly, the more we coddle and covet the devices themselves," Ware continued. "The gestures necessary to operate our new touch-sensitive generation of technology are disturbingly similar to caresses."
Read his full blog on the cover illustration here.
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