Now that hard currency has changed hands between future iPad owners and the mother ship, it’s easier to postulate one of our basic laws of media. Yes, you can tell there’s a vector at work here, not only as a function of the knowledge itself, the waves of data passing at various velocities through the real pipes of broadband and the meta-pipes of filters, perceived affinities, etc., but also as a function of demand, the surfeit of gadget greed. Steve Jobs is the new Walt Disney, and not because of his role at Pixar. He is as sure-footed a purveyor of dreams and self-images as the old craftsman himself, landlord of another fantasy theme park, not the physical acreage of old orange groves, but the virtual grounds of our imagination.
That’s not to say the iPad is a Mickey Mouse contraption. No matter what you hear out of the Googleplex. Far from it. The iPad is a perfect representation of digital media’s geometry, the interplay between data and the physical interface of different devices or control surfaces. Some people call this form factor; others, interface; still others, user experience. Which makes me laugh, because it’s mostly psychology, another proof of the Pavlovian reflex, another trick of the light.
Glancing off the iPad’s sparkling new touchscreen are the hopes and dreams of publishers, more than one newspaper among them, who see the flow of dollars and cents (well, OK, cents) from the owner/readers as a panacea. But aren’t these the same people who bought iPods and iPhones? More than one pundit has called the iPad nothing more than an over-sized combination of its two predecessors. That’s not true, and even if it were, that’s not a bad track record to follow.
What’s at work here is another fundamental law: The velocity of information, like water through a pipe, is governed by several phenomena. Width of the pipe, yes; reach of the network, check. But the endpoint, the handle/faucet/spigot, holds the value. The set-top box boys knew this for years, but they’re such propeller-heads it took Cisco to scare them off-center. Control surfaces, the angle (vector?) at which you hold the remote, all this is fundamental. Enter Tivo, that ever-changing experiment in user experience. Nice idea, all that interconnectivity, a growing number of options that lead me to wonder if I really want TV on my iPhone. I already have Kindle for iPhone, which I’ve used on Caltrain, my last hideout from any other kind of screen. It’s an angular thing, for sure, because those real Kindles look clunky to me, I’m sorry.
Like the iPhone, the iPad will push the polyhedron potential of what is still essentially a two-dimensional interface. Its apps will be more clever, take advantage of the larger tract of screen real estate, and because of the content, which we feverishly await, probably suggest more Avatar-like experiences. All this will drive demand further, and the flat-looking Android had better keep up. It’s the geometry of media at work, the angle and circumference of knowledge, as embedded in device.
Our grandchildren will laugh at all this.
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