Have you had your digital soma today?
Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, observed in a recent interview on the Australian radio show “Future Tense” that Wikipedia participants who transition to tablet devices seem to contribute less as a result, because those devices “are better for watching videos and surfing the internet than for typing text.”
Her real point was that this is not just a problem for Wikipedia, it’s also a potentially profound shift in how to think about what the Internet is for. Instead of being a place where all sorts of people create all sorts of things for all sorts of audiences, Gardner continued, “I think increasingly what’s happening is, partly as a result of the kinds of devices that are being manufactured and that people are buying, people are moving toward a more consumption-based Internet experience from a production-based experience.”
(I’m quoting Rob Walker at Yahoo! News; go to Australian ABC’s Radio National to listen to the radio program he’s quoting, or to read the transcript.)
Bronxbee, who sent this in, writes:
now, won’t this actually be an advantage for those large media corporations that are always complaining the internets is stealing their stuff? is this marshall mcluhan to extremes?
This might work to reduce piracy, if we’re all just too couch-potatoey to bother pirating, but far more insidious to me is the likelihood that we’re moving back toward letting Big Content have a monopoly — or near monopoly — on the news and entertainment we consume. Will we lose the Wild West feel of the Net, where so many people who might otherwise have been vegging out on the sofa in front of the TV have instead been spending their free time starting blogs and writing fan fiction and creating Web comics and analyzing publicly what they watch?
Was Fox Mulder right? Is the military-industrial-entertainment complex trying to ensure we stay passive consumers, not active creators?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
Yes, of course it is. Apple is a media company as much as it’s a computer company; the more content you consume, the more you pay for it. Why do you suppose A (Asymmetric) DSL was pushed so hard over baseband when it came out? Because it made its customers into second-class net users, unable to serve significant amounts of content, forced to use other people’s servers if they had anything they wanted to make available. Same with the way firewalling was sold (“NAT is a security measure!”) and now CGN.
Well, just to be clear, the point you made about DSL and NAT, it is consumers who demand it. Everybody wants to consume fast, therefore DSL is “better”, and consumers are scared of and want to be “secure” on the internet so firewalls have been promoted as a sort of placebo, this is why most ISP’s offer one when you sign up with them.
I don’t see a conspiracy. The computer used to be a specialized device for programming and office work. Gradually, it became a device for gaming and the Internet and music and art. That helped large corporations, because it gave them a chance to sell us more stuff. But it’s the same stuff they’ve been selling us all along: books and movies and songs and pictures.
There’s one important difference: The new computers make it easier for us to produce our own books and movies and songs and pictures. Now people can make their own TV shows, post them online, and compete with the major networks and movie studios. We can also report our own news stories. The more control we have over the content on our computers, the greater threat we are to the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
(And, by the way, I think Michael Bay should print Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex on his business card as a job title.)
Of course, most of us don’t make our own films or record our own music. But that’s always been the case. I do think computers have contributed to the rise in obesity, but if we’re really worried about it, we can buy Wii Fitness or look at the Weight Watchers website and get ourselves in shape.
I would tend to agree with you, but with a proviso: online media also makes people easier to track, and the nuggets of good independent news reporting and TV shows tend to get lost amidst a sea of trivial and/or lousy ones, so to borrow lingo from signal detection theory, the signal to noise ratio is diminished. Further, the means by which people communicate are still largely bound by large media corporations: as far as I can tell, Youtube is part of Google, which is a large corporate entity. Same goes for Facebook, which makes its profits largely by selling tailor made ad space.
The point of Gardner’s commentary, however, is that tablets encourage consumption over creation. If people move from using computers primarily to using tablets primarily, it won’t matter how easy computers make it to make things.
The promotion came before the demand. Baseband and SDSL were just as fast as early ADSL, often faster, but were symmetric – and they’ve vanished in the race to feed the consuming market as cheaply as possible. NAT was touted as an alternative to a firewall, which it wasn’t.
Well, you have to keep in mind that DSL was created because regular phone service was being affected by people hanging online on their modems all day.
This is the real problem DSL was solving, Its consumers who gorged on the “feast” of what we now know as broadband and started fetishising “speed”
Yes, but its not a conspiracy in the “New world order” sense, its more a collusion of interests.
As for “now, won’t this actually be an advantage for those large media
corporations that are always complaining the internets is stealing their
stuff? is this marshall mcluhan to extremes?”
The reason this is not an advantage for large media corporations, and the reason why they are still fighting tooth and nail against this, is because they do not control these “markets” yet, and since they are still not sure how to make any money out of this, then they are trying to keep things unstable.
Oh, sure. Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by mere greed.
The same companies that are complaining about how much their shows are pirated are also complaining about those thieves, THIEVES, who DARE to watch their shows without the advertisements.
The fault lies not in our sites, but in our selves. Ours is a society for the majority of the last century was forged in passive entertainment. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that that has spilled over onto the internet. If we want to change anyone it, we need to change our culture–drastically.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the tablet. That being, it’s not a computer. On the consumer level, it’s a media viewer. It’s good for watching video, playing certain kinds of games*, reading certain kinds of print material, and… that’s about it. On the commercial level, it’s an interface device for a point and click application, basically mouse and monitor in one.
I suspect that there are a certain number of “creators” who are experimenting with the tablet as a productivity device. But they’re going to realize soon that there’s no way to create effective workflows, and no way to pack enough computing power, with the form factor of a tablet. Surface Pro might change that, given that it uses the same OS, Windows 8, as a desktop or laptop, but I doubt. Ultimately, tablets will continue to be overpriced and underpowered for some time to come.
I think the people Gardner is describing are currently in lust, infatuated with the nifty new gizmos coming out faster than they can afford to upgrade. I also suspect that within the next year or two, they’ll come to realize the limitations of the devices – nay, the entire platform – and return to working on their computers.
* Tablet gaming, and all the rethinking in terms of interface, game mechanics and even monetization, are where tablets have really created a sea change in media consumption. Basically, they’ve created a brand new market of casual gamers, who I think will soon dwarf console and PC gamer markets, if they don’t already.
And tablets have seduced the people who would have bought cheap laptops, to the extent that netbooks are basically ceasing production. (A shame; I find them very useful.)
Netbooks also suffer from an issue of being underpowered. The ones I’ve worked with were also unreliable, even relative to a cheap full size laptop. And the form factor is more awkward than anything. I really don’t think most netbook owners have used them for much of anything, let alone creating internet content. Which shouldn’t be a surprise. Just look at the name: netbook. These devices were never intended for productivity. They were, like tablets, media access devices.
However, full size laptops are coming down in price to a point on par with mid-high end tablets. Once people really realize how hard it is to be productive on a tablet, they’ll go back to those. By that time, those laptops will start to be ultrabooks, which keep the computing power of a laptop, along with the real advantage of netbooks, low weight.
The netbook concept has been rolled into the tablet; there’s a number of atom-based Windows 8 tablets out there now.
I actually just bought the Samsung alternative to the Surface Pro a couple weeks ago. When I need to type or play pc games, it’s an ultrabook. When I want to consume media, it’s a tablet. When I want to create, it’s a Wacom Cintiq.
The concept itself is great, but there’s enough hitches in the execution that prevent me from naming this the greatest computer I’ve ever owned. I still think this class of device is probably the most exciting thing to happen for digital artists in a long time.
No, this must be said, tablets are computers, the fact that we are being fooled into thinking they are not computers is where we as consumers use them differently because of form factor and input method.
as for being underpowered, sure, underpowered as opposed to a desktop computer, but you don’t need that much power to run a spreadsheet or a word processor.
In fact, a 5 year old pentum IV machine upgraded with some RAM can run any normal productivity suite efficiently. what we understand as being “under powered” has changed quite dramatically in the last few years.
When we ignore this difference, we also ignore the way we are being artificially kept as passive consumers.
Maybe I should clarify my terms. When I say “computer”, I’m referring to a personal computing device for which productivity is its primary function, multimedia access its secondary function. Even a “multimedia computer” is, in this description, a productivity device with additional video capability. These devices all use an operating system with a GUI built around a windows manager, be it Mac OSX, MS Windows, or X11. By “tablet”, I mean an iOS or Android device, typically. These machines are buit for multimedia first and foremost, with productivity a very, very distant second.
You’re right that it doesn’t take much power to do basic desktop publishing (though serious internet content creation can get very computing power intensive), but that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the interface. The iOS/Android touch-screen interface is very good at accessing on-screen buttons, but not menus. And the screen space needed for these interface elements is very large, relative to the screen size, because of the size of human fingers. On-screen keyboards, meanwhile, are things you use because you have to. All of this hinders workflow, which hinders productivity.
And then there’s the issue of software. There isn’t even a decent text editor available for iPad, let alone a desktop publishing suite. And that’s because the software designers know the interface is lousy for that kind of thing. Just trying to highlight text is a hit-or-miss prospect on a tablet. So, again, it comes back to the interface.
Now, I suppose a sufficiently determined and/or stubborned user can work around the interface issues. But that doesn’t change what the devices are designed for. And I also think that, within a few years, we’ll see those content creators start to work on touchscreen computers, creating content accessible on both platforms.
I’m glad we don’t disagree, tablets are not made for productivity, but rather for consumption.
My only point is that even this is an illusion, for example, garageband on the ipad is an example of something that actually works better on a tablet format then on a normal PC.
It think we don’t really know yet what tablets are good for, and most early adopters cant help but consume. but if we really look at it, the limitations of the tablet format are just bounded by our desire to consume, in other words, tablets are made for consumption, but that doesn’t mean, that’s how we need to use them. I mean, even if we use a normal PC for its intended purpose, we would never do anything creative.
TL;DR:
We agree what tablets are for, I believe we as consumers are the ones who should ultimately decide what something is for.
The history of radio repeats itself.