Crucially, I think working with computers teaches you that they’re fun: it’s in those drifty moments at work when someone sends you a video of Dinner Time With The Dog-Man or that you spend time organising drinks for a friend’s birthday or marvelling at The Big Picture that you learn a sense of computers as enjoyable. Modern desk jobs force you to sit and stare at a computer for eight hours a day, so this hardly surprising: any time people are forced to do anything they find a way to have fun, whether it’s doodling in the margins of maths books or inventing games to pass the time at the checkout.

My life is changing, so I recently took a week off and went North to visit various members of my family. I took my bike so I could get out in the countryside, and I took the iPad so I could talk about some of the new things I’m doing at work. The people I visit do lots of different jobs – my Aunt’s a teacher, my cousins are retail managers, mechanics, academics and my Grandfather is rather actively retired. None of these are the 100% desk-and-data jobs my friends and I do, so it was fascinating to see how they got on with the iPad.

Everyone was interested in the iPad and wanted to see it. I didn’t want to walk in and immediately talk about it – there are more important things under the sun – but once I mentioned I had the iPad with me, everyone wanted to see it. This might sound anodyne, but it’s not always the case with technology. They wouldn’t care about a new laptop or camera or iPhone, unless I could explain why, show it doing something cool. People were genuinely interested in the iPad – in and of itself. This attraction is authentic, it’s not just media-created hype. (Although of course, hype could easily have helped stoke the fire).

*

When the iPad first came out, there were lots of lot of people saying “it’s great, it really simplifies computers.” At first, I felt this was somehow dishonest, because it’s not as if before the iPad people were blogging about how Mac OS X was too complex.

Regardless of how Damascene the conversions (theirs and mine), it’s true.

Everyone in my family has a computer – but they tend to need reasons to go on it: to fill in a job application, to send an email. Even doing something ‘fun’ – checking Facebook, personal email – is mentally constructed as a task, a to-do list item, the same as ‘call the council’ or ‘post letter.’ The computer takes time to turn on. It’s probably in a cold corner somewhere. If a few days have gone by since it was last used, people aren’t instantly sure what to do. If you don’t work with computers (and lots of people don’t), it’s work to use them.

If you don’t work at a computer all day long, and have it running all the time, taking centre space on your desk, you don’t have the always-on, latent, ambient sense of computing that geeky people, or those who spend their whole working day in front of a computer do.

There’s a huge divide between people who see computing as a noun and a verb, and the iPad has the potential to change this (throughout this post I say iPad, but I mean “iPad and other tablet/smartphone devices”).

Perhaps best way to look at it is that the iPad simplifies computers (in ways good and bad – no USB, no HDMI etc) in order to make it easier to get at what is on the computer. It turns on instantly. You can leave it on all day. It doesn’t get hot or make noise. Things load instantly. There’s no annoying hard disk light and very few crashes or pop-ups. The iPad is a self-negating computer in that it’s about making real the digital stuff that’s in the computer ecosystem. Digital music, digital photos, digital movies. These are virtually inaccessible to a huge number of people who see computers as difficult to work, mysterious, even unpleasant.

My cousin has just had her first baby, and she posted a video of Facebook of little Eva crawling – and my cousin’s Grandparents, who are old and infirm and who live a distance away could really easily get at that with something like an iPad. This is a cheesy advertising scenario, but it is also true. Geeks might say “well you can do that with a laptop,” and you can – but explaining stuff like programs, hard drives, double-clicking to people who have no background in computers, or who have no interest in spending any more time with a computer than is necessary is difficult. Not impossible, just difficult. And I’m not saying these people can’t learn this – just that people have other things to do in their lives, and time is limited, and not everyone is willing to put in hours and hours tinkering and messing with the settings on their computers. Because that’s work.

It’s easier and better to change the tool rather than changing the people.

On What the iPad Says About Us

There are two types of geeks: the first type are really excited by what technology can do, and put up with the difficulty of using it, even to the extent of enjoying figuring out what’s happening. The problem solving and the tinkering, fascinating though it may be, is a necessary part of trying to get at something which is really worthwhile. And so they become an evangelist for computers because they can see what good they can do and they really want people to get it in the way they get it.

The other type of geek is very much of the opinion: I get it, why can’t you? This stance is inherently confrontational, about asserting supremacy.

I like to think of myself of the former – I like saying ‘did you know you can do this with your computer?’ – I’ve set up blogs and Flickr for people, and iGoogle pages and showed them Twitter and Foursquare. I’m fortunate to have a family who are both curious and supportive. It’s a great mix.

In short: the more you’ve worked with computers, and the more time you’ve spent having fun with computers, learning about them, the harder it is to get the iPad.

*

Everyone who used the iPad enjoyed it. Some loved it so much that I felt bad that I’d introduced them to it and I was going to take it away from them. If I had the money I would definitely get them for my family. Well, maybe I’d wait for the next one with the Facetime camera in it. Everyone was convinced it was great – but not necessarily to the point they’d run out and get one themselves – the big thing Apple has to overcome is that unless you like the Internet, then the reasons to buy one are less. It’s quite clearly not a computer for working on, and so people tended to say it needed to be more educational, or more serious – the implication was that it needed to have more of a moral purpose to fit into their lives.

Apple stores will be key in selling it to people, as will seeing other people with it – unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t have the ‘what is it for’, practical nature to sell it. At the moment, the iPad lacks a killer app. Instapaper is really close, but it’s quite technical (something Marco Arment, the developer, is well aware of, as this blog post shows). I’m not necessarily convinced games are the killer app, either. There isn’t an iPad-only game that you’d buy the iPad for (though of course, there are great games for it). It’s great for browsing the web, for reading, but is that enough of a reason to buy it? I can certainly see parents buying it to use with their children – encourage them to learn about facts, numbers, to read. Alice for iPad really impressed people – stories are a great way to connect, and the iPad is a computer that’s good for telling stories on.

When we were using it, the fun stuff was what people responded to – the fun stuff and the stuff that was an interesting way of looking at things, of experiencing data (incidentally, this is why I think Gourmet Live and the Times’ Eureka are the two strongest non-Dennis editorial apps I’ve seen). Google Streetview wowed everyone who saw it, because it’s really clear how it speaks to your own experience, your world, the things you know. It’s the first computer that’s an enjoyable computer.

You can have it anywhere in the house, you can pass it around between people, it doesn’t have the keyboard and the fans a laptop does so it’s not as intrusive, and it doesn’t force the same seriousness of purpose. You can look at it for a little bit, and then drift off, have a conversation, a cup of tea, the screen will dim, and you don’t need to remember to turn it off or anything, or give it special treatment. In that respect, it really is very like TV and close to being ‘just another screen.’ And that’s great, because at heart what computers do – or what they can do – is deeply wonderful.

We’re moving towards a world where a computer is just a screen and a wireless network connection – and of course ‘just’ implies the huge cloud/websites/web services/app store architecture that lurks behind that. Add in RFID/NFC/Everyware and most things in our lives will be computers.

While computers have definitely played a role in changing modern life, they’ve clearly also changed things for the worse: the fact it’s all too easy to be constantly contactable by work, the fact they require people to adapt to them and frequently make people feel stupid, awkward, foolish and scared. And we have PowerPoint to sit through.

And yet I think they can make up for that. There are so many positives to what computers do: free, easy access to information and opinions. It’s such a prosaic phrase and yet it’s an impulse people have spent their lives dedicated too, have died for, have founded countries for. And now we have a tool which makes it so much easier. And it’s not just the big, high flown stuff: computers make it easier to find that phone number, figure out where you’re going, find a nice restaurant, learn what happened at the end of The Wire, get music instantly. And it’s now easier for more people to get at more of these positives with something like the iPad.

At the end of my trip, after I’d been playing Marble Madness Mixer on the iPad with my seven year old Goddaughter, she asked “is this a computer?” And I didn’t know how to answer.

Yet it’s the reason why this is the case, the one that’s on the tip of your tongue – yes, Wikipedia – that reading A Terrible Beauty brings to mind. The book is divided into four parts, and within these, 42 themed chapters. They are roughly chronological, but if a later development, discovery or idea fits a theme, it will be mentioned ahead of time, giving a beautiful sense of the uneven march of history. That said, so far, so traditional narrative. What’s very Wikipediary (!) about the book is that the people mentioned are all picked out in bold type when they first appear, enabling you to zip through the text and start reading when someone’s name catches your eye. Despite the fact it all ties together very well when you’re reading sequentially, it’s startlingly easy to just open the book and start reading. That’s how I first got into it; I was staying at a friend’s house, and it sat on the bedside table in the spare room.

The page I opened it at was 530, with its piece on Germaine Greer, immediately presenting one of Greer’s killer lines:

“Her book, The Female Eunuch, did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of its thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud’, she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’”

So it continues, brisk but not hurried, economical without being threadbare:

“Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women (Greer is very tall herself). In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality.”

The conclusion to this section has stayed with me since I first read it, a sentence that completely embodies the book’s title:

“As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.”

It was this line that came to me today as I read two pieces about the future of computing and the internet.

The first was Nick Carr, writing about Cory Doctorow’s negative reaction to the iPad. Doctorow raged against the iPad, and its exceedingly limited (in his view) vision of computing. It is a common view among geeks. The iPad is far more closed than a traditional computer, in their eyes, outrageously optimized to funnel users into passive consumption of pre-approved content rather than the creation of new and exciting works.

Here is what Nick Carr has to say about their position:

“What these folks are ranting against, or at least gnashing their teeth over, is progress – or, more precisely, progress that goes down a path they don’t approve of. They want progress to, as Bray admits, follow their own ideological bent, and when it takes a turn they don’t like they start grumbling like granddads, yearning for the days of their idealized Apple IIs, when men were men and computers were computers… While progress may be spurred by the hobbyist, it does not share the hobbyist’s ethic.”

And here, in his conclusion, is the terrible beauty:

“Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”

The second post I read was by Clay Shirky, on the evolution of complex business models:

“About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now. To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, ‘It is not free, and is not going to be,’ Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users ‘just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online’, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.’

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.’”

Both Carr and Shirky’s conclusions feel true.

I would recommend A Terrible Beauty without hesitation; as I hope this post shows, it is an excellent book to think with, and brilliant for filling in the gaps in your knowledge.

(1) It’s pre Apple, too. Steve Jobs doesn’t even get a mention. Bill Gates and Paul Allen are limited to a single sentence.

2006 – 25 books, 28% non-fiction, and my book of the year was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
2007 – 24 books, 33% non-fiction, far fewer contemporary novels, and my pick of the year was Crime and Punishment.
2008 – 22 books, 54% non-fiction, all but one of the novels were contemporary. Best book I read that year was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

And 2009? Well, I read more books – 25 – than last year, with one DNF. The number of non-fiction books dropped; only six titles, 24% of the total, lower than ever before. Whether this is related to the fact this has felt like my best year in reading for a long time, I’m not sure. True, two of the non-fiction titles did belong at the bottom of the table – Jung Chang’s wearingly negative Mao biography and Philip Norman’s outdated and joyless Beatles book, Shout! – but the other four were among the best, with Ma Jian’s reckless Red Dust playing a big part in sending me to China on my sabbatical, Michael Lewis’s compelling The Blind Side introducing me to American Football and Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder  illuminating the links between art, science, madness and genius in a group of late 1700s scientists and thinkers.

There was also journalist Anthony Loyd’s second volume of autobiography. In the first, he is a heroin addict who decides the best way to get off the junk and get his life together is to do a quick course in photojournalism, and then go to Bosnia at the height of the civil war and give war reporting a go. The follow up, Another Bloody Love Letter, features moments considerably less sane than that. It is, however, suffused with more self-knowledge, more sadness and more righteous anger, all of which make it a terrific book to read.

All four of these non-fiction books are well worth reading. But 2009 was primarily a year for novels; I even managed to read one that was actually published in 2009 – Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply. It wasn’t one of my favourites though; although it showed up on a lot of year-end ‘Best of’ lists in the US, for me, Await Your Reply was the equivalent of an album with a terrific three song stretch and nine ho-hum tracks. I certainly don’t regret having read it, but it’s not the book out of all 25 that I’d leap to recommend. It’s good to see a well written (or, ‘literary’ in publishing terminology) novel which deals with identity theft, the disconnect between the web and the world outside, but you have to read a fairly turgid first half to get to the good stuff. I wrote at the time that ‘when the book kicks into gear, it is terrific, at least for a little while, Chaon managing to remove the bottom from the characters’ world and letting them fall a long way. As good as this part is, it struggles, like so many modern books, to end, and mostly fritters away the menace and meaning of these highlights.’ Looking back, I think that’s a fair judgement, at least in terms of reflecting how I felt.

So what were the highlights?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is another novel American critics have feted. It is really, really good, but it wasn’t, for me, not the best novel of the last decade – though that case is interesting put in this piece in the New Yorker. Difficult to say why; telling the story of the geeky Oscar and his Dominican family, their flight into exile in the USA and their struggles and triumphs with life, it is brilliant to read. Junot Diaz spent ten years writing it, and instead of creating some massive door-stop of a book, Oscar Wao is compact, powerful, funny, fast and the words are just really well placed. But it wasn’t, for me, the best thing I read all year, probably because it doesn’t quite intersect completely with my interests and just didn’t quite connect completely with me; not a problem with the book then, or the reader, just in their relationship.

So what was the best thing? Well, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a good shout at that. I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami since I read Norweigan Wood(1) about ten years ago (it helped I bought a lovely replica of the original Japanese version, a mock hardcover box that opens to reveal the story split between two paperbacks, red and green). It was only in 2009 that I read the book widely considered to be his best, and it didn’t disappoint. It brings together all of his obsessions, from shifting identities, the surreal nature of real life, loneliness, jazz, cats and how hard it is to know other people, especially those we love. The deliberate flatness of Murakami’s writing in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – which perhaps takes its cues from plastic surfaces, the easiness of consumer life and the coolness of post-60s love – is given depth and heart by the plot, which tackles cruelty in the here and now, and in the past, specifically World War 2. It’s a great book, and one of my favourite novels of the year.

The other would be The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I read it in one go – five hours while flying to the US in October. The story of a father and son, traversing a cold, barren wilderness is terrifying, exciting and hugely affecting; when I’m writing something, the main question I think of is ‘will the reader really care about these characters?’ The answer, in The Road, is undoubtedly yes, to a degree that in the book’s moments of peril, is beautifully, painfully unbearable.     

So those are my favourites; I did also really enjoy Emily Mitchell’s The Last Summer of the World, a fictional account of pioneering American photographer Edward Steichen, who lived in France just before the First World War. The plot runs a little predictably (particularly thanks to the flashback structure) but the topics – photography, memory, the world that will be burned in the war – give it an attractive melancholy and gauzy sadness. If you like historical fiction then it’s definitely worth picking up. If you like puzzles and philosophy, try The End of My Y – it’s a headspinning and ambitious time travel story.

Perhaps the biggest difference this year over previous years was the fact I started, from the summer onwards, reading eBooks. The presence of Melville and Jules Verne this year is thanks to my Sony PRS-505 eReader. It’s a beautifully engineered machine that I suspect will be outdated within six months. The interface is slow and the UI is lumpy and circuitous, but the eInk screen is as good as paper to read on. It’s also light and slim, and compatible with a wide-range of formats, so you can get reading material from a range of places.

The real downside is the computer software is dreadful, as is the shopping situation. Waterstones are currently charging £12.50 for the eBook version of Wolf Hall, when you can get the hardback from Amazon for a tenner and the paperback will then be about £6. Quite simply, that’s fucking stupid. The eBook is a tiny digital file – it doesn’t even (or doesn’t need to have) a cover graphic. The printed book is over six hundred pages long. Six hundred pages of real, actual, weighty paper. I ended up getting a friend in the US to register for the Sony US store, and I then buy books using their card (and pay them back via PayPal); this drops the cost of eBooks to $10, and unlike the Kindle store, they’re in the widely-accepted ePub standard. Even with my workaround to get the pricing right, I still had to contend with the fact the catalogue of eBooks is embarrassingly tiny. It’s very easy to find stuff which doesn’t exist in eBook format. Wolf Hall’s easy to find, but try looking for stuff from the 60s and 70s such as John Cheever, for instance. No Harry Potter, no Cormac McCarthy, either.

So there are a lot of downsides – all of them, worryingly, inflicted by the publishing industry on itself. But when it works? Getting books instantly, and being able to buy new books, which are in the press and part of current conversation (such as Wolf Hall) for a sensible price is glorious. How great would it be for, instance, if you could click on titles of the books I’ve mentioned above, see an extract, and then get the book straight away?

I think I’m right that eBooks are inevitable; revenues are growing *despite* all these obstacles being placed in the way, and the convenience factor plays a huge part in driving why people adopt new technology(2). This doesn’t mean that I think in ten years we’ll be reading eBooks as we do right now (i.e. ePub files on dedicated reader devices with eInk screens), or that paper publishing will be made obsolete, especially for mainstream novels and non-fiction – but the fact is people spend a lot of time reading on screens, instant delivery of new stuff, cheaply is a sexy premise, and getting novels onto those millions and millions of LCD screens is a huge opportunity to get a new audience excited about fiction.

—
(1) Apparently there’s a movie of Norweigan Wood coming out at the end of this year; stars Rinko Kikuchi, who was Oscar nominated as the deaf/mute/naked girl in 21 Grams.
(2) E.g. what most people like about DVDs over VHS is arguably not the quality of the picture, but the fact you don’t need to rewind or fast forward them.

Glims is a very useful free add-on that enables you to fix that, plus you can easily add Google UK as a search engine, and there’s a nifty full screen mode too.

Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.

1. ArsTechnica posted an excellent article on ‘the once and future Ebook‘ that’s worth reading start to finish. Suffers perhaps from some Apple fanboyism (I’m not 100% convinced as it claims, that the iPhone/iPod have such huge potential as Ebook readers, certainly not in their current state, and it seems a bit down on the Kindle). The article is quite right that Ebooks are inevitable, though.

2. Meanwhile, Google has launched a mobile version of Google book search, formating classic books for mobile phone browsers.

‘What if you could also access literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone?’ (And for free). Nice formatting in the iPhone browser, and something I’m going to try reading from in the next couple of weeks.

3. Official-looking Kindle 2 pictures; hopefully there will be an international launch this time. Sensibly, Amazon also appears to be considering opening up access to the Kindle software/infrastruture. This is actually the way I got hooked on the iPod (and then the iPhone) – I got iTunes for free, like it a lot, and later bought the hardware.

“A sureness and certainty and a sense of organisation to things.”  

But ‘rules are made to be broken’ says the Western saying; they’re perecieved as bad, as limiting. Not always: the Jesteress has borrowed her brother’s keitai, but forgotten the charger and now it has run out of battery. Her mum asked me this morning if it was on the NTT DoCoMo network, like her phone.

“Yes,” I replied. She then got her phone’s charger and – even though it’s a completely different model - plugged it in to bro’s phone.

“All NTT phones have the same charger socket?” I asked, surprised. “Yes,” she replied. “Of course.”

A good example of how rigidity can create convenience. Fat chance of Orange enforcing this in the UK though.

I’d been weighing up getting an iPhone for a while, ever since the new and improved 3G one launched. My existing contract with Orange featured rapacious data costs and distinctly rubbish data speeds, so the iPhone/02 combo of Exchange email, a decent mobile web browser and all-you-can-eat 3G data was tempting.

A couple of things put me off:

1. The iPhone’s camera looked rubbish, and I’m a big fan of mobile phone cameras – I remember paying to upgrade my phone back in 2002 just to get one of the first phones in the UK with a camera.

2.Several people at work told me the iPhone’s call quality was poor.

3. Crappy battery life.

Points 2 & 3 were quickly rendered null by the fact I couldn’t believe anything would be worse at these than my dreadful Samsung Windows Mobile machine…

And point 1? Well, I got the iPhone a week or so ago, and it’s all up and running now, synced with Exchange, hooked up to my number that I’ve had since the late 90s and… well the camera’s ok.

On the downside:

* There are zero controls over it (no white balance or exposure comp) which is annoying – although Apple could, presumably, add these in a software update.
* No flash.
* No video (also could possibly be fixed in software).
* It’s only 2 megapixel.

On the plus side:

* It meshes really well with the rest of the iPhone – it’s easy to email photos, for instance.
* It performs reasonable well in daylight
* And best of all, the speed at which it freezes the video into a picture when you press the photo button means you can create some nice mindbending pics like this one.