There’s a book called “Future Stuff” that was written in 1989 that tried to make predictions about what gadgets in the year 2000 would be like, based on interviews with people who were actively working on the predecessors of those gadgets. Blogger and writer Leonard Richardson from Crummy.com read the book in 2008 and wrote up a blow-by-blow report on exactly how wrong these predictions were.
The authors Abrams and Bernstein thought that the future would be filled with single-purpose gadgets like the GPS that would be very good at doing one specific thing. If you needed to know what the weather was, you’d pick up your weather cube and it would give you amazing meteorological predictions and forecasts pulled from the most advanced institutes. Instead, of course, we now know that the future–our present–is populated with all-purpose devices that are practically schizophrenic in the variety of functions that they offer. You can use your computer or phone for virtually anything you want it to: from tracking expenses to watching movies to creating art.
In another sense, however, Future Stuff was right on the ball. People may love their iPhones for being the solution to all of their problems, but you need a separate app for anything you want to do on the iPhone. Each app’s function is very clearly defined, but by that same token its function is also very clearly segregated.
Some of the most popular tech writers have praised the iPad for its ability to make you forget that you’re holding a tablet at all…essentially, for its ability to make you forget about the operation system itself. In effect, despite the ability to create a complex environment that dances at your fingertips, we choose to regress to what Future Stuff predicted: a series of segregated, single-purpose things that don’t interact with each other.
Brian Alvey, the co-founder of Weblogs Inc., quipped that “the most popular software for writing fiction isn’t Word. It’s Excel.” I don’t know if he meant that comment in earnest or in jest, but I do know that I’ve used Excel for tracking things that you wouldn’t typically expect of an Excel document – things like my summer reading list, or my study calendar during exam time.
Am I being totally novel in doing so? No, of course not. But if I downloaded an app for budgeting for my iPad, I can almost guarantee that said app wouldn’t be flexible enough to also do storyboarding for a comic, or party planning for a birthday.
Obviously, this kind of extensibility doesn’t apply to every bit of software. For example, compression, encryption, writing DVDs, these are all things that require that a specifically programmed function. But even something single-purpose like iTunes or iPhoto have so much more potential to be played around with, simply because they exist in a broader context of an operating system, rather than wanting to claim all of your attention and resources at once. And therein lies the difference between a traditional operating system and the current suite of mobile operating systems: the traditional system provides context, and by extension it provides freedom.
(While the ability to share things between apps is much better integrated in the Android OS than in iOS, it still uses the same paradigm of discreteness. While Android does let you play around with custom ROMs and widgets and all of that lovely geek gadgetry, that’s not any more accessible to the average user than jailbreaking your iPhone and messing around with Cydia.)
We’ve chosen a paradigm of segregation, but isn’t interconnectivity the whole reason why the internet is powerful? Isn’t that the reason international trade benefits everyone? Even though everyone hates the word ‘synergy’, when two separate, functional things come together, it’s undeniable that they can create something more powerful than those two things on their own.
I know reading on my iPad is easier: I’m not as tempted to quit Instapaper to go mess around with Tiny Wings because I don’t have a constant visual reminder of an environment with more distractions to offer beyond the immediate window I’m looking at. But I also know that when I want to do something with my iPad, I have to go hunt for apps with a specific purpose in mind. If no app exists to fit my needs, short of learning programming, there isn’t really anything I can do about it. I can’t put together an ad-hoc solution.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine was looking for an iOS app that would let him easily see how much money he’d spent that day. He downloaded Tally Counter, which displayed the tally as an icon badge. There’s nothing wrong with having Tally Counter on your phone, of course, but on my laptop I could’ve solved the problem by creating a notepad document on my desktop and changing its title every time I wanted to change the tally…or used any number of jury-rigged solutions. It’s not perfect, but at least the option was there.
I’m not really interested in rehashing the same old arguments about whether Apple is stunting the development of future computer programmers with iOS’s closed infrastructure, because I don’t think that’s the problem. It’s not about Steve Jobs’ imposition of his aesthetics upon his users, and it’s not about a doomed generation that didn’t have the intellectual curiosity to play ‘under the hood’ of their computers. It’s about a way of thinking about computing that is moving away inherently from the holistic and towards the isolated and the narrow-minded. It’s a way of thinking that discourages innovation, in my opinion. And the Cory Doctorow fans can be just as culpable of that as the Apple maniacs.
