“It’s important to understand who these people are,” Elgan writes. “They’re the same kind of people who said automobiles are just a fad, who said nobody wants to hear movie actors talk, who said graphical computing isn’t real computing.”
MacDailyNews Take: Cough – Dvorak – cough.
Elgan continues, “They believe themselves to be enlightened skeptics. In fact, they’re just the kind of people that always come out of the woodwork when something breathtakingly new emerges. They can’t see — refuse to see — the obvious possibilities in the new because it threatens their advantages in the old… The iPad-can’t-create-content insanity tells much about how far we’ve drifted off course as a creative animal.”
“In Japan, millions of novels have been written on cell phones,” Elgan reminds. “My great-grandfather wrote his Ph.D. dissertation with a #2 pencil. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Jefferson wrote their brilliant works with bird feathers. Yet the iPad’s critics say creation is impossible using a device that would have been a Pentagon supercomputer 20 years ago. The computers that today’s writers say are absolutely necessary for writing didn’t even exist 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Is that when they think literacy started?”
“The iPad screen is incredible. The Apple Bluetooth keyboard is one of the best keyboards you can buy. And Apple’s Pages app is perfectly adequate for writing. You also might want reference materials and Internet access. Of course, the iPad has that, too… For artists, the iPad’s touch interface removes a layer of separation and abstraction… The notion that iPad can’t be used for content creation is patently, provably, laughably false,” Elgan writes. “Those repeating this absurd notion owe their readers, listeners and followers an apology, followed by a correction. It doesn’t matter if you want the iPad to exclusively serve content, the fact is that people are creating content on it every day. And the avalanche of creativity apps hasn’t even started yet.”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]