The Jan 11, 2010 New Yorker cover rings a lot of bells.

Like the Apr 30, 2007 cover, it shows a man and a woman faced with an exciting experience and playing with gizmos.

I complained about that earlier cover because of the exasperating gender roles the boy and girl play, and the fact that they let themselves be drawn away from the painting to the gadget—the digital camera. They seem more interested in remembering that they saw the painting than they are in seeing the painting.

Now on this cover, a man and a woman are poised on a quiet, beautiful ski slope, but the man is snapping a photo and the woman talks on a cell phone with her eyes closed. Again, their focus is drawn away from the beautiful landscape, which must be an extra-ordinary one for their lives, and that focus is brought to these gadgets, which are ubiquitous to their ordinary lives.

But the newer image is a world away from the older one. Here the man is holding out his camera to take a picture, rather than studying the image he's captured. He's not shown as distracted from the landscape, just taking a moment out to make this capture. The couple seem poised at this peak, just about to put their skis on and plummet down, and I can hope that they'll dive into that run in a whole-hearted, immersive way.

We don't know what happens in the next moment; perhaps, instead of my visceral vision, the photographer will perseverate over this image for the next twenty minutes or more, trying out different camera settings, deleting and re-taking the picture. We've all been around people who waste their time in the woods trying to get the right camera settings, who spend that time thinking and noticing details of the camera rather than details of the woods.

But here, I can imagine that this dapper young gent is smart enough not to let the gadget kill his outing. I like to think he's just "taking a snap" and not "playing with the camera."

The woman behind is a little more removed, closing her eyes and listening on the phone. And those irritating gender roles are somewhat echoed here, with she taking a lower and partly obscured position behind him, while he seems to lead the expedition, standing tall out front. But unlike in the 2007 image, the man is not defining her experience of the environment by choosing a frame and pointing her at it. He's taking his own snapshot, off to the side, as a souvenir, and she's phoning someone to share the lovely moment she's arrived at. In this image, the woman has a more confident posture, with those skis boldly slung across her shoulders, unlike the truly passive and demure mouse of the 2007 picture, who may never be able to contribute her own observations back to that dominant hipster in the blue jeans.

I like this image. It blends gadgets into a full life, treating them as peripherals rather than the main event. Also, let's hear it for skiing in khaki pants and a svelte cardigan or peacoat. Top of the world indeed.