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TheiPad 4 - 08 Apr 2010 - Main.JohnAlbanese
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | | If Apple continues to succeed with its marketing techniques and no competitors are able to successfully sell competing technologies, there is a good way that these technologies will change the way we use the internet, just as Word has changed the way that we create documents and Excel has changed the way that we create spreadsheets. I think this is bad. But everything has costs and benefits - sacrificing control over our internet usage likely will make it easier for a segment of the population to use the internet, just like having one dominant word processing software enabled a similar segment of the population to use word processing in ways they wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
-- DavidGoldin - 07 Apr 2010 | |
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Having never owned an Apple product, I can't really comment on the usability of the devices. (I don't have anything personal against Apple; I just like to play computer games and prefer my own mental iPod.) Eben had a comment in an interview from 2001 which I think provides the other side to the usability debate.
" In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it`s a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there`s some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity. " |
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