Sent from my iPad

First off, a few things to uh.... grease the thinky processes. This particular post is going to center largely on Marshall McLuhan and whatever else strikes my fancy that's tangentially related (perhaps the tagline on Apple products denoting what device it was sent from). So, to get the process started...

Part one of The Medium is the Massage record, up on YouTube. Warning: It's twenty minutes long. Additionally, I personally find it hard to follow sometimes. Perhaps that particular medium is not my uh... ideal educational method. It's still cool though.

Second, and most importantly, the Marshall McLuhan website, a little corner on the great series of tubes dedicated to the one man who probably would have appreciated all the little things it does more fully than those who live on it. He may not have known it, but his book largely predicted the internet. Huzzah for him.

So then. Over the weekend, specifically, last Thursday, I picked up an iPad. Now, normally this kind of self-indulgent blogging would be saved for something that actually had an audience, where I would likely either be derided as an Apple loving so and so (which is not a lie), envied (and I would envy myself were the situation reversed), or chided for having too much money and not enough brains or spending money that I rightfully probably shouldn't be (again, both options are likely right on the mark). However, this is a prime example of what McLuhan was arguing about, and I'm going to say that I picked it up to prove a point. Not because I happened to find myself in an Apple store and had that final barrier broken down (IE: Having actually used an iPad for more than five minutes at a time). Regardless, I now have an iPad, and a growing credit score.

So here's the thing. Much like in McLuhan's day, when the TV was rising to prominence as the One Social Media to rule them all, we again find ourselves in a transitional period. One that's lasted for over twenty years now. Way back when, the dominant form of communication was speech. These people thought differently, acted differently, and placed different emphasis on different ideas. Then, the written language came into being. McLuhan notes that text added a strict structure and linearity to thought, a symbolic representation of what had once been ephemeral and omnipresent. Now, thoughts that were deemed as worth keeping around were written, and the higher up a thought was kept, the more important it was. Written languages have arguably been the single greatest invention of the human mind, a complete game changer in a world where there was nothing like it before.

Text would continue dominating, although it would not go uncontested. The radio brought back the potential for high speed vocal communication, potentially bringing back a more sound-oriented society (it didn't). The telephone allowed people to speak with one another whenever they wanted to. The television actually put strangers within your living room, and while you couldn't interact with them, they gave you an entire world you could call your own and have a basis for knowing people at a deeper level (Such as by sharing favorite shows. Has anyone else seen Arrested Development?) Computers initially put the focus again on logical strings of words (C:/DOS
C:/DOS RUN
RUN DOS RUN), but then later shifted to a more visual manner of communication through GUIs. GUIs don't always make sense to every viewer, but those who use them adapt or die. In this case, 'die' means lose all your data and slam your head against the coffee table when you can't find that one very important report that you really, really needed five minutes from now. The internet took computers, and phones, and television, and smashed all of humanity inside of itself in order to create a terrifying frankenstein of all the media that had come beforehand and appear as something completely different.

And finally we've laboriously made our way to my point. Up until a few years ago, the internet was delivered in a manner that was deemed as relatively safe. It was sequestered to the domicile, the office, or to the laptop for the rare person that actually had one. The internet was safely locked away from the rest of the world, and it showed. Then, in June of 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. Suddenly, in addition to making relatively subpar phone calls, you had the internet at your fingertips. And not the specialized internet that Blackberries had been offering, where it was largely sequestered to text based affairs in the nether regions of news-sites and others who offered a gimped service, no. This internet had images. Videos. Funny men doing funny things. With few exceptions, if you could do it at home, you could do it on your brand spanking new iPhone. And consume people did. In a recent report, Quantcast noted that mobile web usage was up 110% in the US in 2009, 148% worldwide. Suddenly, we have a new medium (mobile web) that's delivering old medium (internet) information.

Which finally brings me to the most problematic phrase, "Sent from my iProduct". On the surface, it's not much. Upon seeing it, one might think "Oh, that explains any slight spelling errors" and then go over one's preconceived notion of Apple products and their users. It's more than that though. "Sent from my iPad" is a message to people who haven't accepted, who still think of the Internet as a static series of tubes. It may as well say "I've accepted that I don't have to be tied down by power cables and desks." or "I'm not at my desk, maybe, so unless you reply to this e-mail, I probably won't get your message."

Or it may as well say "I've accepted that the medium has changed, and I've begun to change which message I'm accepting. I've joined the Mass Age, with all it's links to the Mess Age. Where are you?"

Or it could just say "Whoops, I don't have a keyboard, sorry for the grammatical errors. By the by, I have too much money to spend on luxury products that can't do everything that cheaper products can AND I enjoy sucking at the corporate teat."

Personally, I prefer the other message.