iPad Feeds Media Consumption NOT Creation

 clipped from www.businessinsider.com

I'm Really Worried About What Apple Is Trying To Do With The iPad

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I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She's sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.

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The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn't create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine's app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It's worse than the web: we can't comment; we can't remix; we can't click out; we can't link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

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That's what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it's meant for consumption, we're told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue's review, that this is our grandma's computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I've long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny's table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad

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The iPad's architecture supports these limitations in a few ways:

First, in its hardware design, it does not include a camera — the easiest and in some ways most democratic means of creation (you don't have to write well) — even though its smaller cousin, the iPhone, has one. Equally important, it does not include a simple (fucking) USB port, which means that I can't bring in and take out content easily. If I want to edit a document in Apple's Pages, I have to go through many hoops of moving and snycing and emailing or using Apple's own services. Cloud? I see no cloud, just Apple's blue skies. Why no USB? Well, I can only imagine that Apple doesn't want us to think what Walt Mossberg did in his review — the polar opposite of Pogue's — that this pad could replace its more expensive laptops. The iPad is purposely handicapped, but it doesn't need to be. See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!), a camera, multitasking, and the more open Android operating system and marketplace.

Second, the iPad is built on apps. So are phones, Apple's and others'. Apps can be wonderful things because they are built to a purpose. I'm not anti-app, let's be clear. But I also want to stop and examine the impact of shifting from a page- and site-based internet to one built on apps. I've been arguing that we are, indeed, moving past a page-, site-, and search-based web to one also built on streams and flows, to a distributed web where you can't expect people to come to you but you must go to them; you must get yourself into their streams. This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don't interoperate — they don't play well — with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search. What we do in apps is less open to the world. I just want to consider the consequences.

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