I believe everyone is pretty familiar with the series of productions from Apple Inc., the iPhones.  A majority of students even owns one or multiple iPhones. IPhone is a smart phone invented and sold by Apple Inc. Recently, Apple released a new version of iPhone known as iPhone 6s. It is shocking that after selling eight generations of iPhones, Apple still manages to market their new product and reaches an incredible amount of sales. Apple’s successful marketing strategies help themselves to break their own selling record.

On Apple’s home page, the name of its new product iPhone 6s is written in bold, and the “s” is bounded with a square like shape. This square like shape attracts people’s attention and distinguish iPhone 6s from their previous product iPhone 6. Whenever people browses Apple’s home page, they will notice the change immediately. Apple’s slogan for iPhone 6s is “The only thing that’s changed is everything.” Because iPhone 6s has a similar design as iPhone 6, a lot of Apple’s customers complain about the lack of development of iPhone 6s. By using this slogan, Apple makes a logic error on purpose in order to mock the critics. Apple refers to the famous saying, “Do not judge others by their appearance” and suggests those who criticize the similarity between iPhone 6s and iPhone 6 are judging through the appearances of the phones only and ignoring the inner differences.

Interestingly, Apple does not put any statistical data on their home page since the major customers of iPhones are people from 20 to 40 years old.  Most of them are addicted to cell phone and favor technologies. However, only very few of them are professionals and can interpret the data. Most of the customers purchase iPhone only for its fashionable elements and convenience. As a result, instead of putting all these verbatim data on their front page. Apple chooses to compress all of its professional information in the “Learn More” tab and makes the homepage more vivid.

Last but not least, Apple announces their new product on September 9^th 2015. However, their sales will not begin right away but in about 2 weeks. They have pre-order option online but only a limited number of iPhones are available. Apple does this every year when they market a new version of iPhone. This is a marketing strategy called hunger marketing. The company limits the sales of a certain product intentionally in order to make people long for that product more eagerly and increase the demand.  In this advertisement, Apple uses relatively small fonts to notify the customers that sales will begin at 9.25, and the pre-order option implies that this product will be sold out really soon. Consequently, customers who might be hesitating will purchase the new iPhone decisively since they will worry about the incoming sold out.

As a child in love with sports and the culture behind both professional and amateur athletics, I watched a lot of ESPN. Channel 41 (173 in high definition) on Comcast was embedded in my mind at eight years of age and was the first channel I plugged in after flipping the on button of the television remote. My favorite show, sports-center, a sequence of breaking news, game-highlights and analysis, aired all night and all morning long, providing a perfect way to spend each morning I woke up a little too early before leaving for school and late nights where I struggled to fall asleep. Amazed by the talent, the skill, the creativity and passion put into each sport, I quickly fell in love. However, there was one specific part of sports-center and the ESPN channel touched my heart each aired episode. The soundtrack of rascal flats played on the background, introducing the powerful “My Wish” series. The “My Wish” series was created as a way to help disabled and terminally ill children by connecting them and providing the opportunity for them to meet their favorite athlete or sports team. If nothing else, for a few hours a purity, their spirits were lifted and they felt normal, if not, like a superhero. For my presentation, I would like to focus on the introductory page/ logo for the “My Wish” series and the manner in which it draws its audience through coloring, genuine-looking font choices, and drawing imagery. The page itself consists of a light blue background with a picture of the participating child with a joyous grin from the experience he or she had been give. Additionally, the sports-center logo sits above “My Wish..” with a cursive “My” and a star as the finishing point of the “y”. Underneath sits the child’s name in his or her handwriting.

In Alabama Hall, one of Emory University’s Residence Halls, lies this dying plant. It caught my attention because from far it looked beautiful. I observed it and noticed upon my thinking that dying plants may symbolize many things. I searched and found an image of an infuriated carrot claiming, “Plants have feelings too. Eat cow.” After a long laugh, I used this idea to create my one staged argument. I wrote the same sentence on a yellow sticky note and taped it to the base of the plant with transparent tape. I placed some of the dead leaves and flowers around the plant and gave it a finishing touch with a ripe banana. The purpose was for the argument to be fully set using my limited resources. One may assume that the audience are those that decide to not consume meat for various reasons and indulge themselves in fruits, vegetables, and other veggie foods without noticing that plants also had life before they consumed it. When focusing on the image, the intended tone is more of a combination of a morbid sight infused with humor. The morbid part has an appearance with all the imprints of death around. Leaves and flowers no longer living. This was intended to appeal mostly the pathos type of rhetoric.The humor comes in the message written on the sticky note, “plants have feelings too. eat cow.”The font of the text is placed with grammatical errors, yet is it very simple and attractive. The note conveys a message that creates conscience about the situation without degrading or offending the audience.

A major theme of most science fiction and dystopia novels is the rapid development of technology and its dominance over the human race. In Super Sad True Love Story the people have become reliant on certain technologies clearly diminishing human interactions and connections. Although our society has not gotten as bad as this one, we are getting close. People are wasting a lot of their time making fake interactions on social instead of making bonds with real people in person. The amount of time our generation spends making random posts and updates on their lives instead of just experience real life is surprising and scary. What was really shocking to me is when we discussed how weird it was that you could find any information you wanted from someone through your applet, but Facebook does a similar thing now. By creeping on someone’s wall you can find out a lot about their life and even some things that are meant to be private. Another parallel between the book and our own lives is how the characters in the book communicate. Eunice and her friends and family tend to only communicate through online chats and emails, also Lenny posts in an online diary like a blog. Although we do not like to admit it we all do this, rarely do we talk to people on the phone or sit down and have a genuine conversation. We use texts, instant messages, snapchats, and status updates to tell ourselves were social and that we have lots of friends. I think that without more human connections we will become more distant and end up more like the dystopian society in the book.

One of the more understated, but relevant elements of Super Sad True Love Story is materialism.  On page 38, Lenny, while looking for information about Eunice, comes across her and her sister’s purchases that are mostly comprised of boutiques in L.A. and New York, footwear, and expensive socks.  During his analysis, he feels the need to save them from themselves and “the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly.”  Materialism also comes into play with the apparat models.  You aren’t cool or important if you don’t have the newest model with all of the best functions as displayed when Lenny returns from Rome and is forced to get the most updated version in order to increase his status at work.  The consumer approach of the apparat is similar to that of iPhones in the sense that the most recently released version shows status.  This plays into the social hierarchy that controls their world, and is beginning to control ours.  In our society, there is so much emphasis placed on how you look and what you have.  Due to our judgmental nature, there is a lot riding on first impressions and appearance.  As the saying goes, you must “dress to impress.”  To be someone of importance you have to look the part, which requires you to have money.  This creates a socioeconomic issue that restricts those in the lower class from reaching higher levels in many industries, and results in a vicious cycle.  The novel seems to comment on the societal obsession of consumer culture, and how this dangerous cycle is connected to the financial crisis of America.

Twenty and thirty years ago, acronyms such as “AFK”, ‘BFFL”, YOLO”, “ROFLMAO”, and “TTYL” were hardly ideas that came to mind as full phrases. Instant messaging and texting were obsolete concepts, creating no use for acronyms such as “Away From Keyboard”. Many people had dear and best friends, but felt no reason to conceptualize it in 4 letters available to put next to a hashtag on an Instagram post (Best Friends For Life). People accepted to idea of carpe diem and living life to the fullest, but artist Drake had not yet coined a term that would be used in a large percentage of text and instant messaging conversations for teens (YOLO). The fact is, the acronyms, capitalizations, and phrases that are used with regularity in Super Sad True Love Story may not be as inappropriate, obsolete, or nearly as far-fetched as we may believe.

On page 88, Vishnu introduces the term/acronym FAC meaning Forming a Community. He states: “It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you. Essentially it’s a system that picks up blood pressure levels and “tells her how much you want to do her”. With the level of knowledge already available to the society about one another through the apparat technology, this not-so far fetched idea caught on and was used several times by the group of guys in a matter of minutes. The same way our current society and culture ridicule such possibilities of connection and word usage, prior generations would have ridiculed our manner of communication and the types of phrases we have coined to create meaningless “shortcuts” in our everyday live. These acronyms and messaging concepts are simply the results of a more updated, faster, technologically updated culture that is not too dissimilar from our own.

While reading the blog posts before me, I noticed that a lot of people discussed the increase of technology in the society in Super Sad True Love Story, and I completely agree with these posts. The reliance on technology in this new, dystopian society definitely reflects aspects of our own society. While I believe that technology is beneficial in our society and has many advantageous uses, I also believe it hinders our human interactions that are so important and vital in human society. With the increase of facebook, text messages, gmail etc. comes the decrease of face to face contact. I believe that face to face communication, or even phone calls, are very important and if our society comes to the level of reliance of technology in Super Sad True Love Story, we are going to lose something vital. For example, instead of calling her mom or younger sister on the telephone, Eunice relies on emails and text messages. She loses human emotion by only communicating across a screen and could benefit by talking to them on the phone. She can ask questions and hear the answer right away and can even detect inflection to notice if her sister is doing well or not, a struggle she is dealing with in Rome. Another example is when Lenny FAC’s on the radio show. The whole system of FAC completely diminishes our concept of human interaction. In our world today we see the increase of matchmaking sites which echo this idea of online profiling to find a relationship. While it may help people in the end, it also skips the human communication portion. There is less talking in person and getting to know one another before either accepting or rejecting them as a possible partner. The FAC system gives the user statistics on whether or not they would be compatible, just as matchmaking sites do today. By doing this, we lose the concept of learning communication skills and also possibly learning about ourselves through these processes. While we may not end up with said person, we learn through mistakes, which make us more human than any technology site can do. By relying solely on technology we lose the portion of human, face to face contact our society is built and relies on. Overall, while in our society today we have many beneficial uses for technology, Super Sad True Love Story demonstrates what our world could come to if we do not balance said technology and important human characteristics such as face to face communication.

In an increasingly technology-dependent world, we find ourselves becoming more and more lonely and isolated, just as Lenny and Eunice feel in Super Sad True Love Story. Though leaders of the technology industry proclaim that the internet and social media creates expanded connectivity between people, Shteyngart’s book provides an opposing narrative that cannot be overlooked. Through the eyes of Lenny, Shteyngart reveals the longing of the waning generations to return to the unplugged era and have more personal connection. Lenny cares more about his thoughts and feelings talking to people than using his aparat to communicate for him. Despite society’s pressure on Lenny to conform, he resists and shows how loneliness appears when one tries to stay against the times.

Lenny may be seen by critics as an anachronism stuck in the novel, but Eunice and her actions are consistent with how technology does the opposite of what its creators intended. In a message to her friend “Grillbitch”, Eunice confesses, “I miss you so much, Pony. I really do. Come to New York please! I need all the love I can get these days” (75). Eunice’s pleas come across the internet even as she can communicate daily with her mom, sister, and friends. In this technologically advanced society, Eunice’s emotions are only natural do to her detachment from physical interaction. Relying on technology for emotion has gotten Eunice flustered, confused, and lonely, showing that healthiness is diminished by technology.

The beauty of an epistolary novel is that the medium through which the character communicates with the audience can greatly alter our understanding of the character. The element of Super Sad True Love Story I found relevant in our own world was the presentation of the secretive nature of man. No man can be completely candid to another person and Shteyngart explicitly displays this through the various medium through which the character communicates with the readers.

In Leonard’s personal diary, where the confidentiality of the information is guaranteed, the readers are exposed to greatly personal emotions and thoughts that one would be reluctant to share with another person, however trusted they may be. On the contrary, when the reader sees Eunice’s letters, very little information regarding her emotional position and personal worries are expressed. Also the changing style of writing when writing to her friend and to her mum clearly shows that the character Eunice presented in those letters are not truly reflective of her character. This suggests that the Eunice we see through the letter is not her true self but a Eunice barred by social conventions like writing politely to a parent and the gibberish talking with a friend. The insincere selfportrayal in Eunice’s letters evidently proves that no one can absolutely disclose their true self in the presence of others.