ipad makes me squirm

I'm sick of latest-and-greatest products being presented like the arrival of the messiah to starry-eyed consumers. Some Apple marketing team must have said, "Hey! Let's hype it up like the arrival of Jesus. Let's posture it like the ushering in of the glorified state of ultimate human evolution." It's all about getting the next parcel of money from dizzy consumers fawning over the plastic and silicon marvel.

While the fools rush in, none pauses to think what the consequences of wholesale worship of computing gadgetry may be.

For one thing, the advent of the ipad will replace the Kindle, furthering the demise of reading and publishing. On one hand, ipad offers more features than the Kindle - wireless downloading of books, mall kiosks to printout and bind paper copies, bookmarking capabilities, resume your spot from office computer or cell phone while riding the bus, markup, highlighting, footnoting, on and on. But readers who would be content to read on a screen are arguably not really readers.

And all with the mysterious hype that Apple alone is able to generate. Bordering on religious. Or perhaps beyond that border.

So, as the publishing industry collapses (supposedly), we may be entering a phase where books become passe'. Then those of us with personal libraries will go underground. And in a generation, paper books will arise as the nostalgia, the new "retro" thing. It will be a flash of dying hype and corporate opportunism as literacy as we know it fades into the horizon. And people will be able to read only headlines, blurbs, logos, brandnames. And the mass of consumers will become puppets of corporate greed, working their pathetic jobs to produce money for corporations, like bodies in The Matrix, unable to think, only to feel and desire, only to lust for the latest product, kept alive as money-making batteries for the corporate elite, who can now arrange to have their officials elected to office, thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance.

Those of us who still think, who still read books, we happy few, the dusty timeless band, we will be dismissed at least by the masses as Luddites. We will have our personal home libraries, which will be coveted by a new younger generation when we are old. When technology reaches its physical limits, and people get bored with the latest and greatest, and Steve Jobs is no more. Maybe then the renaissance will occur.