Well, in today’s globalised world, an anonymous female assembly line worker in China has become the Internet’s newest ‘celebrity’.
Photos of assembly line worker in Shenzhen found in an iPhone bought in the UK
HONG KONG: Pop artist Andy Warhol famously said that in the world of the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Well, in today’s globalised world, an anonymous female assembly line worker in China has become the Internet’s newest ‘celebrity’ after photos of her were discovered in an iPhone purchased in the UK.
The customer, identified only by his Internet name of ‘markm49uk’, says he received his iPhone, the latest coveted tech accessory, recently and noticed when he activated it that the home screen had a photo set against it. The photographs showed a beaming female worker with Asian features in a pink-and-white assembly-line uniform. “It would appear that someone in the production line was having a bit of fun,” the customer noted on an Apple fans’ forum last week.
Picking up on British media reports, the story of the “beautiful iPhone girl” has become a huge hit on the Internet around the world and quite a rage in China, where the iPhones are manufactured in Shenzhen by the Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn, which also has facilities in India. Some exuberant ‘fans’ of the ‘iPhone girl’ have even put up websites to collate information about her and try tracking her down.
Initial speculation had it that the photographs were deliberately planted by Apple as part of an elaborate public relations effort to show that its iPhones manufacturing facilities in
China were not sweatshops. As one Internet commentator observed, the assembly line facilities — with smiling workers fully gloved and hair netted up — served to remedy media portrayals of Chinese factories as hell-holes without adequate safety and protection equipment for workers.
Foxconn’s spokesman, however, told the Chinese media that the photographs were taken by assembly-line workers as part of a testing process, who may have forgotten to delete the pictures. “Our production line workers usually take photos on every mobile phone to check that its photo function is working,” he added.
“It’s just a beautiful mistake,” the spokesperson said.
On the Chinese Internet, the “angelic iPhone girl” has a huge following. One commentator noted that although the girl was working on the iPhone production line, she could probably never afford to own one.
Some Netizens expressed fears that she might be fired from Foxconn over this episode, but the company spokesman denied these reports. “She’s still working in the mobile phone testing department, but she is painfully media-shy and has requested us not to make her name public,” he said.
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