Tablets and the elusive black box of computing
The Conversation last week included Roland Sussex wondering if digital tablets have become essential. His answer seems to be "no", since he observes they aren't very good for textual input and aren't sufficiently robust for use by children. He eventually comes to the rather inane conclusion that "for what they do well they are fine." For things they do badly, we still need other devices.
For my part, the answer is obviously "no" since I don't have a tablet and have yet to drop out of society, or even be inconvenienced in any way. I have a netbook that I find quite useful for reviewing lecture material and drafts while I'm on the train. Perhaps a tablet would be better for reading books and magazines (which I also do), but I do enough typing to feel that a device with a keyboard is the most appropriate tool for the job. See my comments on the article for my full argument.
I sometimes wonder if all the fuss about tablets (and cloud computing and any number of other buzzwords that have appeared over the years) is driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy in which everyone buys tablets because everyone says tablets are the way of the future. Did Steve Jobs anticipate the market for tablets when he introduced the iPad, or did the market buy tablets because a charismatic and influential figure anticipated them? After all, tablets of various sorts existed a long time before the iPad: Apple itself released the Newton in 1992, while Microsoft introduced Windows for Pen Computing in 1991 and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2002.
Now, it could well be that technology just wasn't up to the task of making tablets work in the days of the Newton and Windows for Pen Computing, and advances in technology have now made it the right time to try again. Sun Microsystems and others were eager promoters of "network computing" and "thin clients" in the 1990's, for example, but the networks of the time didn't have the capacity or connectivity to support what we now call "cloud computing". With increased network capacity and connectivity, the 2010's might be a more fertile ground for similar ideas.
Whatever the case, it's hard to see us escaping from the boring old paradigm of using the right tool for the job. Henry Jenkins refers to imaginations of a single, unified computing/communications device as "the black box fallacy" in Convergence Culture. As several of the comments on Sussex's article observe, it's not that tablets lack the technological sophistication of Jenkins' black box, it's that ergonomics dictates different tools for different tasks. And even if some future tablet -- or smartphone or wearable computer or microchip implant -- could somehow meet all of one's computing and communications needs, would it make a very good refrigerator?
