on 23 April 2009Apple has taken down an iApp depicting a crying baby that would shut up if you shook it. Let’s all have a moral panic!
I’ve had babies – they’re too big to shake nowadays, and just as noisy – and I don’t find this egregiously offensive. Unlike Marilyn Bar, ‘a board member of the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation’ (do you squirm at campaigns named after tragic tots?) and founder of the US Center for Shaken Baby Syndrome, I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say the developers are ‘making fun of shaken baby syndrome’, and I don’t think anyone in their right mind believes ‘they are actually encouraging it’. It’s a joke, see? Just a joke.
When my wife and I were in ante-natal classes in south London, the group leader asked, in the patient and patronising tone of ante-natal class leaders, ‘So what should you do if your baby won’t stop crying?’ To which a teenage mum-to-be enthusiastically responded: ‘Shake your baby, miss! Shake your baby!’ It was a joke, see? Just a joke. We laughed. Nobody phoned Sky News.
What I do object to is Apple initially passing such a crappy, lazy bit of software. The authors couldn’t even be bothered to do any animation. Even for 99 cents (that’s about two quid now, yes?) it’s lame.
If Apple insists on acting as gatekeeper for iApps, it needs to show it can tell the difference between a useful app that might accidentally display something offensive and an app so lacking in merit that its inclusion just wastes everyone’s time.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper