This column is a diversion – not, as usual, about life in Dumaguete, or life in America, or life at all. It’s about a machine – a machine I saw in wide use in America recently, and surprisingly even here in Dumaguete.
The iPad: you see these things everywhere now. They are propped up on tables in libraries, cafeterias, coffee shops; in people’s laps on buses, on park benches, in parked cars. Those holding them seem detached from the world around them, their heads bowed, their faces faintly illuminated by light from the screens below.
For such a popular appliance, the iPad isn’t much to look at- it’s just a medium sized picture frame of aluminum and glass. An elegant design, but nothing very exciting as an object. Even so, it’s not cheap – Five hundred dollars US, or twenty thousand Pesos plus. That’s a good sized bite out of anybody’s pocket, especially for something that looks so bland.
In the past, an expensive instrument like this would look expensive. Instruments of precision- cameras, calculators, sextants, stopwatches, were crafted like jewels. They were made of wood and leather and polished metal- brass or even sometimes gold. To use them you turned screws or cranks, and read numbers on dials. No Batteries.
And each instrument had its own unique shape, a form that followed its only function. A precision instrument did just one thing. If you wanted to do something else, you looked for another instrument.
Then came computers. At first, they were huge machines that printed numbers on paper. Then they could display results on a screen. Then they could display text, and finally, even pictures. And they got smaller and smaller all the time.
But even today’s laptops are still obviously machines, machines with a function. They’re clumsy to carry, They have lids that open, they have keyboards and buttons. The iPad looks like not much of anything. No keys, no buttons, no moving parts. It’s a totally new concept for a machine– It’s designed to be nothing more than a window frame.
But what you can see and hear through that window is everything– songs, movies, symphonies; stories, textbooks, pictures; games, messages. That’s why the people using them seem detached from their surroundings. Why look out the window of a bus, or a car, or a coffee shop- when in your lap you have a window on the world?
