So long Keyboard, and thanks for all the fun…
One of the lasts reports published by the Gartner Consulting Group concluded that “More Than 50 Percent of PCs Purchased for Users Under the Age of 15 Will Have Touchscreens by 2015″. That said, I’d like to talk about the mutation computers are currently showing.
Everything started with the iPhone. This tiny shiny have been a great
revolution in the everyday approach of interfaces and user’s experience. Freed
of it’s classical interfaces, keyboard and mousey per se, the iPhone
created an precedent in the way people, especially youngsters, understand the
websites and conceive the web.
After that, came the netbook revolution, with their incredible ease-of-use,
autonomy and mobility. They gave everyone opportunity to surf the web more or
less everywhere. Their cheap price also permitted to spread all around the
place.
The most recent form factor
ready to invade our life is the
internet-tablet. Even if tablets have already been pushed
on the market
round’ 2005 (remember that Windows XP Tablet
edition?), their high price
and low functionnality have been, at the time, a major break against their
spread. But since Apple, and it’s charismatic CEO, have decided that Thou shall
use a Tablet to surf upon thy Internet everyone is ready to sell their soul
to leave a fingerprint on an iPad.
The digital generation, the one that is currently between 3 and 15, also
called “Z Generation”, had all of their life surrounded by numerical technology
while mine, also known as the “Y Generation”, known the transition between an
analogic and paper based civilisation towards a numeric and globally cold
organisation.
Thus, could we consider that those poor toddlers and children will only get
their aseptic iPad collection and concious-less robots to remind them of their
childhood? Will they be kept away of old dust covered books with which they
could have imagined their world by themselves?
I do think so. And two recent pretty much viral videos have convinced
me.
A little girl, interacting with a iPad. The tablet seems even too easy for
her to use. She learn to use it in less than a minute:
The second one is the interface demonstration of “Alice in Wonderland” with the brand new animated version of the original drawings:
Can one kid out there choose for the original book? I seriously doubt…
So are librarians an endangered specie? I guess.
Nevertheless I believe that most of computers and internet terminals got different uses as the roles of people of the internet are clarifying.
- One type are people who are producing information and doing so in a much more professional way than it ever been. They are using computers are we indent them for a bit of time now. A keyboard and a screen, bigger and bigger as time pass. This is the big old kernel of journalists sitting in the redaction of prestigious press names like the NY Times or Le Monde.
- Another is the mobile reporter, with a tiny netbook or even his cellphone. His role is to gather information and to spread it as fast as possible. For example, people using twitter to report events are part of those.
- And the last one is the consumer. Those are consuming information as commonly as they are breathing. And they do not need any complex interface for their tasks…
And tools are trying to reflect those changes of habits. People not being emitter of information do not need a physical keyboard. At most they’ll type 140 characters (A Twit’s length).
People becoming more an more passive, interfaces might tend to shrink to nothing but virtual “Next” and “Back” buttons…
