The advent of the new Apple iPad prompted me last week to read a long, glowing account of it in the Wall Street Journal. The author, Walter S. Mossberg, offered that the iPad has “the potential to change portable computing profoundly.” He then served up this observation: “It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.”
I don’t know about you, but if Mossberg had written that sentence in Linear B, or even Sanskrit, it would be only slightly more incomprehensible to me than it is in English. I think I understand, more or less, what he’s driving at, but it took me a few minutes of guessing about the meaning of “interface” and “multitouch” to figure it out. And it’s still only a guess.
Which is another way of saying that, for good or ill, I am not now, and never have been, a technology guy. Growing up in the 1950s, I did not build crystal sets, assemble plastic aircraft carriers with glue, or possess a soldering iron. I was bored by the Mercury astronauts, even John Glenn; I am totally indifferent to aviation in all its forms; I never took shop class; and, in my own variation of Churchill’s line about time spent in the saddle, consider any minutes spent under the hood of my car to be minutes irrevocably wasted. On the rare occasion when I am dragged to a computer store I feel as if I am surrounded by the same sort of people (almost invariably men) who inhabited stereo/hi-fi showrooms in the Kennedy-Johnson days.
In my defense as a male of the species, by the way, I should point out that I am perfectly capable of handling most tools, when required to do so, and was a better-than-average athlete at school and camp. I also subscribe to Churchill’s aforementioned line—“No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle”—and can shift gears and change a tire on any car. Yet when it comes to electronic/computer gadgetry, not only am I actively uninterested in nearly everything about them, but I have striven to lead a happy, fulfilled existence, as much as possible, in their absence.
I do possess a cell phone, for example—but this is only at the insistence of my alluring wife, and I seem to use it about once a week (“Do you want me to pick up some English Muffins on the way home?”). Indeed, my wife, who is in most respects an admirable person, seems to me tragically tethered to her BlackBerry, which is forever buzzing and ringing with messages from colleagues, and unwelcome late-night inquiries from London or Beirut, which must be answered immediately. I’ve never gotten an urgent message from the boss on my cell phone, am reasonably certain he doesn’t know my number, and am absolutely confident that anything he needs to tell me can wait until tomorrow.
I should also point out that, averse as I may be to contemporary gadgetry, I am not a Luddite. I have long since made my peace with DVDs and CDs—although, as I feared when vinyl LPs disappeared from the market, there are innumerable recordings (Glenn Gould’s version of the Schoenberg Suite für Klavier, the last time I looked) that don’t exist on compact discs. Accordingly, I still retain a certain number of cherished long-playing albums and a lifetime’s supply (acquired two decades ago) of diamond needles.
And of course, I have made my living in the journalism game for four decades, where computers have been an integral part of the fun since the late 1970s/early ’80s. I write on a computer—although not on a laptop, since I am a self-taught, two-finger, hunt-and-peck typist—and can transmit what I have written to wherever it needs to go. I can surf among blogs and relevant websites on the Internet, engage in commerce, flirt on Facebook, follow leads and trails into Googleland. And that’s enough: I still consume a fair number of newspapers and magazines in virginal form and have no interest at all in reading books online.
Which brings me back to the iPad. At first I thought it was a variant of the iPod; but as Walter (“Multitouch User Interface”) Mossberg reports, it appears to be more ambitious than that. To which I respond: Thanks, but include me out. I cannot imagine walking down a city street listening to music from an earplug affixed to the side of my face, and the convenience of adding some finishing touches to an annual report while traveling on an airplane sounds like torture to me. My idea of a satisfactory airline journey usually involves reading a book printed on paper, or consuming enough complimentary beverages to facilitate intermittent dozing between meals.
Philip Terzian
