![]() But right around Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4 last month, which distracted tech pundits from the iPad for a while, a curious thing happened: producer types embraced the “consumption machine.” They started productively downloading apps like Pages, for writing Keynote, for writing speeches and Things, for making to-do lists. I also felt hugely relieved not to have to pretend the outsize iPad was useful for on-the-go phone calls and e-mail - a charade that I’d bridled at with the undependable iPhone. Alex Payne, a tech entrepreneur, found the iPad disturbing: “a digital consumption machine.” On the great tech site Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow - while resolving never, ever to buy an iPad - took the trouble to remind us that a consumer is (in the novelist William Gibson’s acid words) “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.”īecause I do spend solitary, darkened days in hippo-potato mode, consuming media in Brooklyn’s equivalent of a double-wide, I figured I’d like the iPad. ![]() Producers are still imagined as lean, fierce and manly, where consumers are seen as feminized, passive and fat. Though the Web would seem to have blurred the line between content producers and content consumers, old antagonisms die hard. ![]() At its christening in April, the Apple iPad was declared an instrument for consumers of media - a sort of cultural spoon.
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