Other than my enthusiasm for fake Steve Jobs, I've been sceptical of all the iPad praise. I mean, we all get excited when we unwrap a new goodie, but is that state of euphoria a good one for making predictions about future usage?
But this is the first piece that's made me want one. Partly because it reassures me that something I value - the reading of long articles, or who knows, even books - might not become obsolete. But also because the author - Laura Miller - wraps her observations in a brilliant critique of certain fashionable ideas about media consumption:
We are often urged to frown on devices that don't prompt us to collaborate on and create -- or at the very least comment on -- all the amazing old and new things, from news reports to scientific studies, Web comics to video mash-ups, that proliferate online. It's so undemocratic, so anti-DIY. So old paradigm.
But here's the thing: Sometimes I don't want to talk. Sometimes what I want is to listen, really listen, to what someone else has to say... The iPad may not be ideal for what the tech industry calls "productivity," but it's well-suited for the purpose I had in mind: absorption. Even the most creative individuals will tell you that they have to spend some time simply soaking up the world around them, including the work of other creators, or ultimately the well runs dry. Much techno-utopian rhetoric implies that devoting your whole attention to someone else's creation, sans interactivity, is necessarily a sad, incomplete, merely passive experience. Not only is that incorrect, it reflects certain troubling psychosexual attitudes about surrender and control that I don't even want to get into here. When people complain nowadays about not being able to think or read as deeply as they used to, they're not just acting like a bunch of old fuddy-duddies: They're noticing a genuine lack of substance, the threadbare sensation of living in a culture where everyone's talking and nobody's listening.
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