Don’t Ask What Your IPad Can Do For You… Ask What You Can Do For Your IPad

The point of technology has always been to serve us, and so technology always existed as an extension of our selves. Marshall McLuhan makes the perfect summary of how this medium works : “The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothes are an extension of the skin.” Essentially, when our own biological selves do not suffice we create a medium, that is, an interactive technological interface, as an extension of our own bodies to suit whatever it was that our own selves were lacking. How might this work? Well, let us take the book as the example. Our DNA is the coding of how to duplicate certain amino acids and nucleotides that are crude copies of certain data, i.e. how to process proteins in chicken or fibers from wheat, or the color of the eyes and skin, or the rate at which the pinkie toenail grows. When this data was not sufficient the evolutionary process developed brains to store extra data that could not be stored in a genetic sequence. The primitive part of the brain holds instincts, emotions, and anything that is more or less built from genetic sequencing. When this was still not sufficient the brain was enlarged and developed the ability to acquire and remember learned information. This information was usually how to throw a spear or what a saber tooth tiger looks like and to stay away from one. Eventually society developed to a point that there was more information than could be passed down through oral tradition, and so came the advent of written language. The book itself is an extension of the eyes, a direct interface that correlates with a process similar to the eye. The content of the book is an extension of the brain and of memory. A library can be thought of as an extension of the Collective Unconscious.

Well, needless to say the process of creating books could not keep up with the amount of information being generated. So we developed computers and digital memory. The computer is not “like” a brain, but rather is an extension of the brain. As the screen is an extension of the eye, the keyboard is an extension of the mouth, the mouse is an extension of the fingers, and so forth.

McLuhan adapts an old saying by Winston Churchill : “First our tools are adapted to us. Then we adapt to our tools.” We don’t think of ourselves adapting the computer, but we have. We originally communicated information to another mind by verbally speaking the information. Then we were able to communicate across long expanses of time and distance through writing. If you are reading Shakespeare, then you are encrypting the information of a mind centuries old and across a big ocean. Now we can do so even faster, and even to other planets, with digital media interface. But we had to learn to read and write in the interface of the book, and how to encode that data. Today we have to adapt ourselves to read and write in the computer’s interface.

Most of us find the computer second nature, and that is because the adaptation of ourselves to the tool was provided early in life, say around the same time we learned to read and write. For a good majority of us, that is anyone over the age of 30, the smart phone and all its components is a stockpile of the Blinking 12 phenomenon (that is, when the tool is provided but no one knows how to use it or simply doesn’t want use it, much like setting the time on a VCR, in which case it usually just blinks 12:00). But the Blinking 12 phenomenon only exist for the generation that has to adapt to the tool at a point when the brain is less likely to program such abilities for second nature. It is the younger generations, those 20 and younger that are more applicable to program and retain such media interface, such as a smart phone or IPad as a useful extension of their selves. Welcome to the dumbest and most useless technological generation of the 21^st Century. Your tools won’t adapt to you anymore, you must adapt to them. To do the reverse is to become obsolete.

We were the parasites to our tools and fed off of them. Now they feed off of us. Maybe this is what advertisement is telling us : Adapt to our product or be useless.