This Old Mac

By Ryan Vetter

It seems like just yesterday that all one had was an Atari, a phone book, and a TV. That was pretty much it before the dawn of Personal Computers. Sure, we had libraries, but nothing like what computers, and the internet, have brought to our homes. During this pre-information age time, we could only dream of having the amounts of information at our finger tips that we know take for granted.

The idea of the information age was certainly not ubiquitous. Only in the deep coves of Universities would you hear the term circulated. And as many predictions have failed to become reality, academics were spot on with their vision of a society perched deep in what they conceived to be the information age: a post-industrial age where knowledge is both pervasive and currency. Competition becomes even more fierce, since even common citizens have vast libraries of knowledge that can be called up in seconds, and at will.

The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is ever narrowed. Those who have only slightly better informational resources, and who are adept at organizing information, become wealthy and powerful. The speed at which information is ingested is also important, and can mean the difference between making or losing money on a stock. We now measure this speed in seconds, not hours or days.

We now find ourselves immersed in the information age. It has changed society in all of the ways that academics so accurately predicted decades ago. People are empowered. There are issues with digital copyright management. More and more people seem to exist somehow far removed from what is traditionally referred to as a society of people, yet they are all strangely connected.

Information rules us now: it drenches us every second of every day. It pours through our loins in a constant flow of energy. There is no escape. From news, to stock quotes, to the posted feelings of our friends, family, and even strangers, we have become necessarily part of the information upon which we ingest. Not only do we glean knowledge from such information, but we express ourselves through the same digital corpus upon which the knowledge is accessed. It is like one large, breathing thing.

Some may feel overloaded. Maybe its hard to concentrate, to stay focussed on any one thing for more than a few seconds or minutes. Information seems like a disease in this way. It grips us constantly, connected in every way.

We have a thought, and we can now call up pictures or videos that represent those thoughts. No longer do we have to rely on just our cloudy memories. Anything we think of is represented in some digital form that can be accessed immediately. In this way, we have become interconnected with each other, and with information, as it resides in the web of digital knowledge that is the internet.

How do we fight this “disease”? Through patience, organization and the right tools for the job. That’s why tablet computers will become our next, post-laptop tools to traverse this information age in ways we did not think possible. Touch screens, thin slate designs, and a backdrop of useful software are what is expected.

But why tablets? Why can’t laptops just do the job?

Laptops are not going anywhere, but there are many things that a tablet will afford an information ager that laptops just cannot.

The utility of tablets was, however, not entirely apparent to me until just recently. Sure, I have been waiting for a company like Apple to release a tablet for many years, but there is something to the form factor of a tablet that is superior to a laptop whilst ingesting information from the Web, for instance.

The light did not go off until recently. I sat, gazing off out the window, and realized that we are now finally immersed in the information age for good, and there is no turning back. Everyday brings more and more websites, more and more blogs and news sites to follow, and so forth. I feel we have reached an important threshold in this information age where knowledge has simply exploded, and news travels faster than light speed. How can I not only stay on top of all of this information, but stay sane throughout?

RSS Feeds for one, which many of us use. It is one tool to fight the disease of the information age: it helps organize all that information that keeps streaming in, from all of those important sources. So about the light and the threshold…

I have been on the Internet since about 1995. It was not until about four years ago that I noticed that I had to spend more and more time on the computer to keep track of everything, and to continually enrich myself with knowledge. Over the past couple of years, my computer use is now higher than I ever imagined it would ever be (better part of 10 hours per day). A threshold of sorts was, in my mind, reached at these useage levels.

But what I have been noticing is that there are longer periods of time during the day where I am reading, and not inputting as much information. Habitually, I am now reading my RSS Feeds and investigating knowledge leads from this reading in the morning. This takes about 2 hours each morning to complete. Sounds like a lot of time, and it is, but just barely enough to stay on top of all of that information coming in.

But this 2 hours is now being spent with my iPhone, and not so much my laptop. I read RSS Feeds on the iPhone, and explore knowledge leads via Safari. Using iData, and log ideas, information, etc., which then gets synced to my laptop later on. Why the iPhone? One answer: it is more natural to ingest information on a handheld slate computer than it is on a laptop.

This was not pre-meditated though, it just happened. I have been reading RSS Feeds on the laptops for years: it has only been a gradual, natural transition to the iPhone, unnoticed until recently.

Which is where the light went on. If I had a tablet with something like a 10″ screen, I would use it for 2 hours each morning to ingest all of that information. Touching all of that knowledge, interacting with charts, swiping pages, etc. This is much more natural than using a pseudo-typewriter. And this is not even scratching the surface on the other uses of a tablet (i.e. entertainment, research settings, travel, etc.).

But the light really revolves around how a properly designed tablet (none have gotten it right, yet) will help all of us fight this disease that we call the information age, and allow us to traverse all that information in a more natural, comforting way. Go iPad.