Stuff other people are also thinking…

More iPad thinkings while Mrs H continues to feed her Brickbreaker habit. (It’s appalling. Her inner geek – who usually gets hung up on obscure passages of international Human Rights law – has found the one game on her ancient Blackberry and suddenly the cries of fury and alarm are not about the passage of oppressive laws in Germany or actions of the British Government in relation to prisoners in Iraq, they’re about level 13 of son-of-pong… She wants me to tell you that she’s five hundred and ninety five thousandth-ish in the world league table…)

Basically, over the last few days I’ve heard more than a couple of people who simply don’t use computers in the way that I do stop and look at the iPad and say: “oh, I want one of those.” These are people who have never heard of xkcd, and who regard the mobile phone as a handy thing for making calls when they’re out and about, but would never consider getting one with a map function because they basically assume they wouldn’t be able to make it work. Likewise, they’re people who use email quite happily but have absolutely no interest in Twitter, or really in Facebook, and don’t generally buy things from Amazon. They’re not luddites. They’re just not into sailing the digital sea.

And yet the iPad is interesting to them. And the thing is that these are by definition people without laptops. They do not have computers of their own. They have phones because you can’t easily hold down a proper job in our world without one, and they use computers at work. They have enough disposable income to afford a laptop, but they don’t want one.

So while we, who love bits of sparkly kit, were sitting around thinking that the iPad is a bit in-betweenish, and would people really make room for a 3rd Device, and would we want one ourselves? and while Steve Jobs was saying that there is room for a 3rd Device in our lives, we may all have rather missed the point. The iPad doesn’t have to be a 3rd Device. It might be a device for people who don’t even have a smartphone (I know, weird, huh?) or who carry a Blackberry and switch it off when they’re not working.

Two other posts on this sort of topic which I read before writing this: Automatic Transmission (via @kulturhack) and Why The iPad Matters from the Book Oven Blog.

I now return you to your scheduled Sunday evening viewing.

News I Made Up

Dallas, Texas

The inquiry into Country & Western Music continues in Dallas today, with testimony from Billy Bob Blair of the Humanitarians.

Billy Bob, whose controversial songs have included Oh, Tony, Don’t Take Your Guns To Town and Bagram Blues was asked to account for discrepancies between his published lyrics and the real world.

“Well, I just don’t know,” Billy Bob Blair told Desmond Yackle, heading the investigation, “I mean, you say one thing at the time because it seems right, yawhaw? And then later it turns out it was wrong, well, that’s music, y’know? But, hey: it wasn’t me who started that whole crazy Mid-East war, but I was proud to go, and do my patriotic chore, you know?”

Billy Bob is also under investigation because of his hit single Justifications – which contains the lyrics “Your country, my country, just don’t get along/weapons of mass destruction, Saddam, that’s where I’m coming from/You’ve got ‘em and I know it/Even if you won’t show it/You’re gonna give ‘em to Al Qaeda/Now you know we’ve tried ta/Go the legal route, but now, oh, now/Someone load my rifle, I’m go-in’ on one giant quail shoot!” – is widely blamed for the misperception that WMD would be found in Iraq.

“Well, I jus’ believed it was true at the time, man,” Billy Bob Blair told the inquiry, “but you know, I’m a musician, is what it is, and I was taking a whole shitload of cocaine back then.”

Therese du Bois of Spokane, Washington, demanded that Mr Blair also account for the so-called 45 minute claim in the song DANGER!:

“There’s no time, no time for doubt/Gotta find those weapons and take ‘em out!/It’s not religious to object, in fact it’s a sin, it’s/So wrong, takes too long, A-bomb could fall in 45 minutes!”

Billy Bob would not concede that this claim was exaggerated. “I felt it, man, at the time, I was totally there in the music with my guys, y’know? And that whole thing we did – it was catchy: let me hear you shout/beyond doubt/call him out/Saddam’s a bad scout/don’t feel bad about/it, there’s no question/no suggestion/the evidence’s arrestin’/be no questin’/it’s all waitin’ on trucks/no shucks/millions of bucks/of hardware/it’s there/he might share/with terr’rists/UN won’t wear this!/Throwin’ a monkeywrench/(Damn the French!) – that was totally where I was at the time, dude. Totally.”

However, he did mention that, in close consultation with other C&W singers such as Hank Williams and the Be Good Tanyas, he had come to the conclusion that whipporwills – often said to be lonesome – are in fact perfectly happy birds with an excellent social structure.

“But man, the old songs – they’re the best.”

More iPad thoughts -

Interesting brief reflection: paper books are as close to unmediated as media can be. You need no reader, the information goes from your eyes into your brain, and you interact with the object using your hands. Language as a representation of the world and ourselves is fundamental to our identity as human beings. Obviously, visual media can be more immediate in some ways, but language – fiction, non-fiction narrative and so on – takes place inside the head.

This gives me a strong sense of hope for written word narrative, even as people (once again) herald the demise of the novel.

It also intrigues me with reference to the iPad. Here’s a computer device which has a tactile experience; an object which works in the same primate-ish way as a book – you point at it and stuff happens. Until we have computers which are gooey like the ones in various SF movies where you shove your hands into a jar and interact with the system either through movements or via a neural connection, this is as close as we can get to touching the data and playing with it as we would a real-world object.

Cool.

And probably hugely appealing.

And I’m smug because everyone keeps saying “you can’t get it until you’ve touched one” and I think I do get it and I haven’t.

And now I’m going to edit my book and not listen to Tony Blair trying to find ways to say “I was right in every particular despite being wrong in every particular” in ways which don’t make him sound like a candidate for a trial in the Hague.