The iPad is like a morbidly obese child

“Let us say that making a lolcat is the stupidest possible creative act….Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second message: You can play this game too… The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about the iPad that bugs me so much. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus has finally shown me what is wrong with it: it’s incredibly difficult to make a lolcat on an iPad. Cognitive Surplus is a book about the joy of the ‘Publish’ button, the story how the internet has given hundreds of millions of people both the opportunity and the incentive to become creative. It’s the story of the coming victory of active, sharing media over passive, solitary ones.

Courtesy of *right-click* *save image as* (and Helge.at)

But the iPad transforms the web into a passive medium –you can consume video, pictures, sounds and words on it, but it’s extremely difficult to create anything. Even sending a Tweet on an iPad takes three times as long as it does on a Blackberry. Compared to a laptop or a netbook, it’s agonisingly slow to use.

There are two things that an iPad is amazing at:

1) Looking at stuff. It is absolutely the best device in its weight class for watching Youtube videos, or flicking through photos.

2) Symbolising its owner’s wealth and importance.

For anything else, it’s full of barriers: there’s no right-click, which means no ‘view source’, no ‘image info’, no ‘save target as’, none of those essential tools for a blogger to get the stuff they need; there’s no really accurate pointer, which means copy-paste takes nine times longer than it should; even typing is a chore. Worse still, in exchange for the hermetically sealed world of gimmicky junk in the App Store, you’ve closed down the infinite possibilities of the open source world. No GIMP, no WinAmp, no OpenOffice, let alone Drupal, Apache or PHP. Instead of Googling your kitten, copy-pasting it into GIMP, clicking the text tool, and writing a few rofltastic words, you have an endless fiddle with Apps, fat fingers and the iPad’s broken file management system. And if you can’t make a lolcat, the ‘stupidest possible creative act’, you can’t do anything.

Apple market themselves as enabling creativity, and perhaps once that was true. Apple gave non-technical people tools that were once available only to geeks, breaking down barriers in editing films and photos, and producing music.  But The iPad is a sad pacifier, as destructive to creativity as the television. If you truly embody the values Apple claims to promote – artistic, sociable, inspiring – you need to bin your glowing rectangular status symbol.

Because if they did an ‘I am a netbook, I am an iPad’ advert, the netbook would be Che Guevara, constantly on the move, stirring up a revolution, while the iPad would be  a morbidly obese child, endlessly hitting a single button in order to watch yet another 3-second Youtube clip.