All the lights were out. I was laying in bed, next to the rhythmic breathing of my wife’s sleep. The only thing illuminating the dark room was the faint glow of the iPad’s screen.
I turned pages through the book I was reading; skimming my finger briefly across the screen. Mid-turn I stopped, examining the upturned corner of the page as I turned it back and forth. It’s a subtle and immersing effect, giving the iPad the feel of a book. I let go of the corner and touched the screen again. But I mis-touched and instead the invasively bright magnifier and word selection tool arose.
It suddenly and violently highlighted how distinctly NOT a book the iPad is. The technology I was holding wedged itself between me and the text I was reading – interference in the transmission. The faux leaves of pages at the edge, the faint brown trim of a book cover; all just a candy-coated shell over the LEDs, microprocessors, and miscellaneous silicon sandwiched between glass and aluminum.
Change
Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Our world is indeed then, magical.
Very, very few people understand how anything in their home, the world, works anymore. Computers, smartphones, iPads, children’s toys even – are all staggeringly complex items filled with chips and batteries and microcode that 99% of people could probably not disassemble with any hopes of being able to put it together again. YOU – reading this text right now – is the advent of me stringing my words together on my computer, slinging them across fiber optic networks buried in the ground to be uploaded to a data hosting facility. It then formats and display the content while registering the page with name servers. It’s simultaneously either been emailed or pushed via RSS to you. Or perhaps you came here from a search – Google’s robots autonomously, relentless indexing the web. Or a Tweet, or a link over Wi-Fi or 3G or landlines.
If every step in this process, from turning on the computer, to connecting to the Internet, to the tiny capacitors in the circuit board of a router at a switching station that you will never see in your life, did not work perfectly – absolutely perfectly – you would not be reading this right now. A staggering amount of technology and power is distilled into producing this simple text on the screen. We can often use it – but we can’t understand it or reproduce it. It is a foreign country in which we are only long-visiting tourists. We pick up the culture and can make by, but we will never know it in our bones. It will always be different, seething and potentially sinister under the surface of all that is new and different and exciting.
So we cover up new technology. Give it window dressing and shades. The first instinct was to make it all bland. Boring beige white boxes to be put under desks. Then came colors, industrial design, and highly refined graphical user interfaces. Crafting programs and computers and devices to look beautiful, or to take on the appearance of dead media. Word processing software with a yellow background and lines mimicking a legal pad, a subtle wood veneer on an audio processing suite, fakes leaves on a cellular tower. It’s all there to blanket the new, to weigh down technological ferocity under the weight of the familiar and the comfortable.
It would be faster for the iPad to merely change the text on the screen with a touch, instantaneous. Even the concept of a “page” is irrelevant. A book could be a long string of text infinitely scrolling from some edge of the screen punctuated by Chapters and Headings.
But we keep the familiar, even when, especially when, it isn’t necessary. It eases the transition from the old to the new.
Or Not
Last week my two-year old son was flipping through the pages of The Monster at the End of This Book. It was a favorite of mine as a child. Grover frightened of the unknown, for it only to be himself. The crinkled images, the painted destruction on the edges of the pages pulling me in as a child. It broke through the fourth wall making the reader an active participant in the story.
I watched my son turn the pages on the iPad. Grover hopped about and pleaded with my son not to continue. My son laughed as he punched at the ropes on the screen, “boinging” as they came undone. “Hiyah!” he exclaimed as Grover collapsed under the weight of the tumbling page. “Hahaha. Grover funny!” There was no fourth wall. The concept ceasing to even be relevant. Of course he was part of the story; of course he was part of the action. Not just in his mind but physically intertwined with the narrative. A physical book in comparison truly does appear to be just a lump of dead trees sandwiched into a neat block.
“Yawwwnnn. I’m tired Daddy.” It was almost bed time. I picked him and the iPad up and carried him back to his room into the faint aroma of baby lotion and diapers. I set them down on the bed and closed the curtains. “Let’s read books Daddy!” There is a stack of books piled high next to his bed. The iPad on the corner.
“Which ones?” I ask, pointing to the iPad and the stack of books next to his bed, curious if he will make the distinction.
“Books Daddy,” pointing to the stack of physical books next to the bed. “Read wrah-wrah (translation: fire truck) book Daddy.” I smiled and sat down next to him. The iPad was still something different. Books were still books, at least for now – not assimilated into something else, forgotten and discarded like cassettes or records or film. This will change over time as parts get cheaper, screens more flexible, and the tech more disposable. But for now, books remain tangible and exciting in their own 20th Century sort of way.
“I’m glad you like to read books.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“I…love…read…books…with…” trailing off and smiling at me.
“Yes?”
“Mommy!” he exclaims descending into giggles.
And then some things never change.
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