The Dawn of the virtual cigarette
By Claire Tierney
Editor-in-chief
Courtesy of Google
Smart phones are now offering apps that let you light and smoke a virtual cigarette. You simply blow into the microphone, or onto the screen, and an image of a cigarette glows red and ?burns.?? Exciting, huh? The kids will love it too. Experts, as well as the rest of society, are in general agreement that cigarette and tobacco ads have a strong effect on our youth. In fact, The World Health Organization has set strict requirements on how smoking and tobacco products are marketed. Tobacco companies in the United States are banned from sponsoring sports teams, giving away t- shirts and advertising on TV at all. These applications advertise directly to kids in that they feature cartoons and celebrities. They also feature simple games whose primary goal is to smoke a cigarette as fast as possible or not mess up the rhythm of the smoking circle, hence the name of one game, ?puff, puff, pass?. This is undeniably a more hands-on, interactive form of advertisement than simply a billboard or TV commercial. According to Barbara Loken in an NPR article, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota, these applications serve to ?increase the involvement or engagement of the participant, even more than advertisements.? Furthermore, this ?may make the participant even more likely to take up smoking.? According to NPR, ?Public health researchers at the University of Sydney have found 107 apps on iPhones and Androids with pro-smoking messages, including these so-called smoking simulators.? These applications are popping up at an increasing rate and threaten to cross the line that these strict tobacco-marketing guidelines have been enforcing for decades. The bitter irony of this situation is that many of the pro-smoking apps (created by tobacco companies like Marlboro) claim to help stop smoking by curbing the need for a cigarette. This puts these applications square in the ?Health and Fitness? section. Loken argues, however, that for an app to facilitate quitting a severe addiction such as nicotine, it would have to ?depict smoking in a negative light.? Rather than help quit, these apps are serving to normalize smoking, says Loken. Beyond the smoking simulators, which account for about %99 of the smoking-related app downloads, smartphone users can purchase ?photo galleries of cigarettes for wallpapering your phone, instructions for rolling cigarettes into various shapes and tobacco ?shops? where you can build your own cigarettes.? All interactive advertising strategies which facilitate the normalization of smoking. Obviously these apps and games are being played by bored adults as well as our impressionable youth, but these apps are hardly regulated in distribution or in content so as to avoid reaching an unintended (or perhaps intended) audience. The idea of a college student sitting in class rolling his virtual ?cigar or cigarette? into various shapes on his iPhone doesn?t bother me in the slightest. In fact, as a smoker, it sounds sort of appealing. But kids are highly impressionable. Adolescents are in the awkward process of forming their identity and their values. By normalizing tobacco and making it so widely available to ?virtually? enjoy, we are removing the taboo that smoking has in our culture, which is a very dangerous thing. According to the Center for disease control and prevention, the percentage of the population that smokes cigarettes has decreased by about 50% since 1965. Clearly these advertising regulations have been effective in reducing our youth?s exposure to tobacco products. Why stop now?
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Source: http://clarknews.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/smoker-in-training/
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