The iPad and New Technology Trends

Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert Comic Strip) has a great blog that I follow. He recently wrote about the iPad (which I still want with an intensity that burns like the sun).  He covers some of the great things he has discovered about the iPad and also notes a trend the iPad points towards:

Another interesting phenomenon of the iPhone and iPad era is that we are being transformed from producers of content into consumers. With my BlackBerry, I probably created as much data as I consumed. It was easy to thumb-type long explanations, directions, and even jokes and observations. With my iPhone, I try to avoid creating any message that are over one sentence long. But I use the iPhone browser to consume information a hundred times more than I did with the BlackBerry. I wonder if this will change people over time, in some subtle way that isn’t predictable. What happens when people become trained to think of information and entertainment as something they receive and not something they create? I think this could be a fork in the road for human evolution. Perhaps in a million years, humans will feel no conversational obligation to entertain or provide useful information. That will be the function of the Internet. Someday a scientist will identify the introduction of the iPhone as the point where evolution began to remove conversation from the list of human capabilities. And when the scientist forms this realization, he won’t tell his spouse because conversation won’t exist. He’ll put it on the Internet.

Although Adams takes his point to the extreme it’s interesting to note this divergence in the purpose of our electronic gadgets, with one being consumption and the other being creation.  The industry seems to have noted that by streamlining electronics to meet only the needs we require of them, they can produce amazingly compact items devoid of unneccessary bells and whistles. For the person that just needs 30 minutes of music for their daily jog, an iPod Shuffle is a lot wiser purchase than a full 80 GB iPod.  The same can be said with an iPad versus a laptop for those who mostly just consume material on the internet.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with simply using the internet for consumption. We all use TV, books and newspapers in exactly the same way.  I worry that Adams’ post comes across as slamming those who aren’t creating original content on the internet as some sort of leeches on the rest of us that do. That’s unfair. Like all other goods, the internet is a two-way relationship. Somebody creates and somebody buys.