Part 1: The iPAD iPhone Flash Adobe Apple Controversy – this new media author’s take: A Dangerous Retro Blacktop Paved Hole
Apple Adobe Rift
Silly me. I had it all wrong. Since the early 1980s, Steve Jobs and Apple have sold their wares under the moniker of “User Friendly,” and I thought they were referring to the fact that everyman (and woman) could make use of a computer to create stuff and to accomplish just about any task – without being a programmer. Jobs and I either meant different things entirely back then by the term “user friendly,” or else Jobs has quietly redefined the term while my back was turned.
For me the excitement of my first Apple IIE and Mac Plus, then SE was the fact that the world of creating had been simplified, made accessible and democratized. Suddenly anyone could paint a picture, write a book, create a presentation, be a typographer or animator – with the aid of this creator friendly little electronic box. The promise of computer technology was that anyone could create, and their ability to create would grow more and more sophisticated as technology evolved. The promise of computer technology was one of socially-just creation opportunity – anyone could create with these boxes. The promise of computer technology was that creators would make much happier citizens than couch potato TV and shopping mall addicted consumers.
But it has been three decades since Jobs and Apple introduced their first user friendly machines, and we are now in danger of allowing “user friendly” to take an evolutionary detour that could derail the early promise of technology: we are in danger of reverting to a society of bored alienated consumers of information and entertainment rather than a society of energized creators. When Steve Jobs banned Adobe Flash from his new iPhone and iPad, it was as if he had put up road blocks on the path to democratized creativity, and re-directed traffic 180 degrees down a dangerous retro blacktop paved hole, posting come hither roadside billboards screaming false messages of the “future” and “openness.”
will continue
May 24, 2010
Tags: Adobe, Apple, controversy, democratized creativity, ebook, Flash, iPad, iPhone, new media content, Steve Jobs, user friendly Posted in: New Media Writing and Technology Diary
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