Why does Steve Jobs inspire this kind of reaction?

Candlelight vigils. Sympathy cards left at Apple stores. Prayers and flowers. As flags flew at half-mast at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Steve Jobs’s death inspired the kind of reaction across the country that’s normally reserved for the world’s most famous pop stars and celebrities.

“It’s so sad,” Manish Ramji, a customer visiting from London, told The Washington Post’s Michael Rosenwald. “He understood people, and he wasn’t like one of these other CEOs who you never see. He was always out there.”

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According to Lance Strate, a professor at Fordham University’s Communciations and Media Studies department, that sentiment is exactly why Apple fans are reacting to this death in this way. Jobs inspires this kind of reaction, Strate said, because his approach to technology spoke to a generation that initally saw computers as the domain of unapprochable IT experts. Jobs was able to quickly establish himself as someone different, somone on whom the average user could project their attitudes about computing.

“He understood that the computer is not simply a tool or an appliance,” Strate said. “He understood that it’s not just a thing, it’s an experience. And that was the genius behind him.”

Jobs’s own personal story may also have something to do with the devotion he’s inspired, Strate said, noting that the often-repeated narrative of how he was forced out of Apple only to return as its savior has echoes of the classic American dream.

“That anyone of no particular means can, through hard work and talent, reach great success...that’s what we really want to believe,” he said. The belief in this narrative, Strate said, could also explain why people are willing to gloss over the executive’s well-documented personality faults — excusing his volatility because they admired his perseverance.

Reaction has been similar around the world. Apple users have said repeatedly that Jobs has both improved their lives and stood as a role model. In Syria, where Jobs’s biological father was born, a 22-year-old student named Sara told the Associated Press that, “This shows that this country can produce geniuses, if only we had freedoms instead of a suffocating dictatorship.”

Impromptu tributes also popped up at stores in Tokyo, Moscow, Hong Kong, London and others around the world. Perhaps most fitting, the bulk of remembrances appeared online through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, where thousands commemorated Jobs’s life by using the devices he invented.

Why do you think Jobs’s death has sparked this level of global mourning? Let us know in the comments.

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