Jeff Jarvis on How the iPad Destroys Creativity

It's way too early for this type of hand-wringing. It's not like native apps are fundamentally less capable of UGC than web apps, it's just that the iPad was released, uh, 1 day ago.

Media companies don't have anything against interactivity, they're just excited about the fact that Apple has had some success creating markets where people actually pay for a la carte content. The true old-world of limited distribution is certainly not going to come out of the app store—Apple is a gatekeeper yes, but they don't have any interest in enforcing an artificial scarcity on behalf of old media.

The hardware limitations are just v1 stuff. Remember when the iPhone launched without an SDK? People were shitting cinderblocks all over the blogosphere, but Apple took its time and came out with a killer product in due course.

I'm all for open platforms, but the way some of this stuff reads it's like Apple already has achieved a monopoly on general purpose computing with the iPad. Yes, it's too bad that Apple couldn't have been a little more open with the iPad, but realistically they are innovating more than anyone else in the market. We should be glad just to have them injecting ideas into the marketplace even if their platform remains fully closed. It's still better than Microsoft buying and killing anyone with a promising idea, or free software's inability to create a compelling end-user experience. When Internet usage starts to approach 50% iPad then maybe we have something to worry about, but for now it's just rabid punditry desperate to cash in on the hype.

UGC is overrated. He mentions this in his article: Twitter, e.g., is thinking out loud and not a lot more. Yeah, it's fun, but is it good for you? Sure, why not. Twitter's a conversation at least. But have you ever read a YouTube comment worth reading? And it's damn hard to find a blog, even a really good blog, where the "Comments" h2 tag isn't a sign to gtfo before you remember how stupid other people are.

I think there's a parallel to be drawn between user-generated content like comments* and what the Web has done to the magazine format. Compare say Slate.com with a really good old-media magazine like Harper's or the New Yorker. The former is throwaway, largely vapid, blog-format pageview fodder, terrible podcasts, or dull echo-chamber commentary on the real, long-form kind of reporting and thought perpetrated by the latter. Slate pushes more words than Harper's, it's probably fair to say (and scare-quote) that they "actively engage" more of their "readership" than Harper's, but this is not an unmitigated good. Sometimes it's good to stop and take a breath and think, even if it's just for the 1.5 seconds you lose having to hit the home button before you can switch to your IM client.

This isn't a categorical judgement on "content creation", but it's important to consider what exactly is meant by "content". Jarvis seems to be longing for the brave, relatively new world where you can add your blather to the bottom of the first page (~180 words, skip the rest) of a Time.com article on the Michael Jackson heirs. The iPad is perfectly capable of thoughtful aggregation and creation of content; what it doesn't lend itself to is millennial ADHD "multitasking" and throwaway content. (I think there's a breed of geek that has the idea that the internet really is a lot like the Matrix: you get images and text thrown at you for a while and all of a sudden "I know kung fu". No, you don't, you just wasted hours of your life passing your eyes over disconnected words that you will never remember, synthesize, or regain.)

If you're interested in reading a book or two, thinking about them a while, recording your thoughts, maybe make a drawing or two, a blog post, etc., the iPad is perfectly capable of aiding your schemes. If you absolutely must watch two TMZ video feeds (and firstpost on the comments thread natch) while updating your work/home/secondary work tweetdeck streams and copywriting top-ten lists for your blogs.com subsidiary, yeah, you're going to want something different, but I don't want to be your friend.

*aware of the irony thx

Sometimes I feel people writing this type of article decided to see the world through their window and ignore what goes around it.

I get the ways the iPad can be detrimental to software development and the perception of what constitutes legitimate use of a device, just as the iPhone was/is. However, to place it as an anti-creativity agent infiltrating our lives is either disingenious or misinformed.

There's no doubt different interests are at stake here, and that old media is trying desperately to feel in control again. But media consumption is but an use case for this and similar devices. To reduce it to that and ignore the amazing things people have been doing with their post-iPhone mobiles is to dumbly state only the issue of content distribution (written content, mostly) is relevant in this discussion.

Look at Everyday Looper, the many drawing apps, the games. You can argue any way you want about how it isn't an IDEAL situation, but there's vibrance in the community of developers, and a growing number of things users can achieve. I am not a musician, and I have been working beats. My drawing frustrates me a lot, but on my phone I feel free to sketch, and it allows me to spend my time in more creative ways than I would have a couple of years ago. And maybe, just maybe, all that arises from the perceived stability of the platform as opposed to Android (and its many versions): people can target it in code, people can use it and know it will be a thought trampoline, and that different trampolines will come out soon.

We all have our biases, and too easily frame situations as if our version of inside baseball were paramount to the fate of the world. While we do it, people will keep churning great ideas wherever they feel enabled to do so. Apple is kind of like New York, or Berlin, or Paris in that sense: there's much to dislike about it, but it provides enough of a cushion for creatives (including programmers), enough inspiration in the form of the works of others, to help make great things.

Anyone else find it interesting that that these days it is Apple vs Google and not Apple vs Microsoft. I almost feel sad for Microsoft :P

Giles Bowkett has written an entire blog post rebutting this point: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/04/ipad.html

> Equally important, it does not include a simple (fucking) USB port

There's probably a name for this error, but it's something like "I'm not thinking of what's behind the scenes, therefore there is nothing behind the scenes".

1 simple (fucking) USB port. A tweak to the case to allow it to be somewhere. Out of the way when you are holding around the edges, but also connected internally to the right places. A tweak to the power supply to provide +5V to guest devices and allow more power when the iPad is being powered (except if it's being powered by weak USB itself). USB host IO controllers internally and kernel modules. USB drivers for common things you want to plug in, and an interface to manage and update them (internationalised). A way around the problem of poor 3rd party drivers crashing your iPad. A user interface to expose the 'safely remove USB device' option. A file manager and file related APIs for apps. A print interface if it is to support printing. Available to any app.

You still wouldn't get, say, a wired LAN controller because there's no interface for working with multiple network cards. You might get a USB TV tuner, but you'd probably struggle with an external monitor driven by the CPU.

I'm guessing what he really wants is just USB mass storage for moving files around - and putting a USB interface but limiting it to do only that is rather clunky. Especially when he could do it wirelessly with the right software (App or Apple tweak).

> See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!)

and which doesn't exist and has no price or estimated release date.

He would have convinced me if the iPad didn’t include a kick ass web browser :)

Disgree that this is inherent to the iPad -- but strongly agree about the first generation of media-outlet-specific apps. Many are "worse than the web" -- less content, idiosyncratic controls, no outlinks, no permalinks for inbound linking, no commenting.

These bitter, narrow-minded opinions about the iPad's closed nature are boring to no end.

The closed nature of any machine or videogame console has never affected people from hacking it and developing for it to make it do what they want; the best example would be vast amount of "homebrew" software available for every damned videogame console from SEGA, Nintendo, Sony and others, that each, with time, has been broken wide open, documented, and made available for developing - and a system just doesn't get more closed than a videogame console.