(A screenshot from the Samsung ad.) Some of those moments may be wrapped in the realization that you are now a tool of technology. You don’t control it half as much as it seems to control you. The worst feelings, perhaps, come with phones. You can’t put them down, even though you want to put them down. When you succeed in putting them down, you can’t help but pick them up again after a few minutes. Or seconds. Samsung has empathy for your plight. So much empathy. So much so that, in a new ad released in collaboration with Google, it’s offering a remedy. The ad shows a microcosm of everyone’s life. Well, almost everyone’s. You’re sitting around a table with your friends or family. You know you’d like to chat with each other, but your phone is always slightly more alluring. Here we are, then, at a dinner party. It’s no ordinary dinner party. This is Addison Rae’s dinner party. She’s famous. She became famous by dancing on TikTok, sometimes with her mom. She has, surprisingly for a famous person, quite a lot of friends. Yet they, like the rest of us, spend their whole table time texting, posting things to social media and not leaving their phones on silent. Rae can see this is a problem, even though she’s being paid to be in this ad. She knows she has to attract her friends’ attention. You’d think this would be easy. She’s famous, after all. Yet the only way she can break through the clickety-clack of phone keyboard joy is with, oh, more technology. She hums a song into her Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, a clever exposition of Google’s Hum To Search attribute. Still, her friends ignore her. What else can she do but avail herself of more technology? She clicks a button or two and sends the song to her Samsung TV so that it can blast it through the family room. Surely this will work. This is “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys. Who could resist that? Nobody. It always works. Rae gets up and begins to dance, yet still, she’s being ignored. Talk about a tough crowd. Perhaps these aren’t her friends at all. Perhaps they’re merely actors, cast to play her friends. Soon it transpires they’re not actors. They’re dancers cast to play her friends and finally drag themselves away from their fine Samsung phones to dance along to the music being played by her fine Samsung TV. Surely, though, we need a little more technology. Of course, we do. One “friend”’s Galaxy Watch 4 fires up the lights because you can’t dance over to a light switch and do that. How lovely to see humans all commune over a song. But wait, Rae is still holding her phone while she dances. We’re all done as a civilization. Or, as Samsung puts it: “Make It Epic.”
