A career or so in the past one of my teachers at film school said that he saw Hollywood movies change when editing equipment moved from the Moviola to the Steenbeck. The Moviola was built vertically, that is, the device had an upper reel and a lower reel, and the film moved between those two locations during viewing. The Steenbeck was a flatbed device, and the film moved from left to right across the table. For reasons that were not quite clear when this mechanical move was made, the pace of cuts, the construction of shots, and the overall feel of the movie changed.
After not touching an Apple device since 1992, I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the iPad. It has been an interesting few days. At first I thought of it as a netbook without keyboard or mouse, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is something new, something that makes me think of Moviolas and Steenbecks. I think that what is new is the conception of space that is implicit in the way the thing works.
First generation PC's showed a page. They were single tasking, text driven devices that allowed you to do some task, usually business related. The archetypical application was WordPerfect. It presented the user with a spare, blank screen that was ready for words. As I recall, as you typed it paged down, and after you had several pages you could page up to review what you had done. There were some applications that fudged this a bit. Spreadsheets existed in a potentially wide space, but even large spreadsheets seemed to assume a page by page format, as if the screen data conformed to how people needed to conceive of it. Space was two dimensional, with up and down the best options.
With the introduction of windowing systems and mice, and more specifically hypertext browsers, the screen added a new, third dimension of depth. Clicking took you into the screen. Underlined blue text implied another page waiting to be accessed (or deeper content waiting to hover over your page). Text boxes floated above the screen, links opened new browser windows that stacked on the existing screen, and unwelcome advertisements covered the screen. Tabbed browsing implied that there was something else, but more often than not, the link would open a new window, which would then add tabs.
As I have explored the iPad what I am starting to grasp is that inherent in the device is a conception of space that is less three dimensional, a la browser based windowing systems, and more two dimensional. It starts with the simple arrangement of icons on the screen, which are accessed by swiping left or right, but it is reinforced with applications like the Wall Street Journal (which appears to be generating a bit of buzz). It is not two dimensional in the old DOS/WordPerfect sense. Rather, it feels like a huge two dimensional space that can be scanned, read, reviewed up or down, right or left, as it passes under the window, in much the same way that a glass bottomed boat allows a window into the large space underneath the boat.
I am not sure what effect this will have on using the device for training - my original motivation was to look at the device for a potential training project. McLuhan said that each new medium starts with the content of an old medium, but then changes it to fit the needs of the new medium. Intel and Microsoft have announced pad projects. If this is indeed the start a new medium, the sooner we appreciate that, and begin to look at how it might be used for training, what will change, what will get better, and what will no longer work, the better off we will be.
R
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