Welcome to my first technical article. But this won’t actually be a technical article, but more of a lame editorial commentary. The big buzz this last week (4th week of January 2010) surrounds the revelation of the newest shiny techno gadget, the unfortunately named iPad. I believe at last count, approximately 27,543,876 pundits have weighed in on how this new device is either

• the greatest invention since the brain
• the work of Satan himself
• the savior of the publishing industry
• the end of the publishing industry
• incredibly lame boat anchor powered by a silicon chip

So now bear with me as I provide a little deconstruction and meta-commentary on this latest bit of manna falling from heaven (Heaven is in Cupertino, by all accounts).

This device was announced on Wednesday. So what did I do on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? Any brief minute that could be stolen from the task at hand I spent googling, finding and reading all the crap on the internet relating to this new tablet computer. Sometime about Thursday, it occurred to me that those sneaky Apple marketeers with their great shroud of secrecy and clever pre-release buzz-building are training me to use the damned thing.

What I mean is this: the iPad is the ultimate non-serious, time-wasting internet appliance. Up until now, people tend to use a computer for many things. Actual productive work being one of those things that springs to mind. But the same electronic device can be used to transport your consciousness away from socially useful and productive activities to less serious things like browsing the Facebook wall of your grade school buddy or seeing if Zappos has pink and green Chuck Taylor sneakers in your size. So for those of us who spend a good part of the day in front of a computer doing actual work, the siren call of ‘gee, I wonder if…’ is just one browser tab away from turning someone who formerly might have been a useful contributing member of society into a mindless drone bee who thinks that it is vitally important that we find out if there have been any pantyless celebrity paparazzi photos featured on Perez Hilton’s site in the last ten minutes.

So as I spent time reading about the iPad, the meta-thing struck me: This device will allow me to sequester all of this non serious time wasting activity to a single place. I can remove email and web browsing from my work computers. I can keep this thing in my man purse and check it out when I truly, specifically want to take a break. I won’t let the proximity of an email application or browser on my virtual desktop distract me from what I really need to be doing. And this, I think, is what may ultimately be the best, most socially constructive use for this product.

An analogy for the distractive and destructive quality of the internet is snacking. If you are like me, you might possibly have a weakness for salty greasy crunchy stuff. As in, the stuff is so tasty and satisfying on some primitive level that normal signals to the brain that keep evolutionarily less advanced creatures from eating past the point where it is healthy are muffled and in short order this signal blocking can turn a normal human being into a body that will eventually need to be buried in a large piano box.

So if you don’t want to grow to the size of a Smarte Car, what do you do? Leaving a super-sized open bag of potato chips next to your desk is not going to work. Putting the bag of chips in a cabinet two rooms away from where you work is probably a better strategy. Right now, doing ‘real’ work on a computer is like sitting in a Barcalounger in a room filled with large open bags of potato chips. And I think that ultimately, people who want to get more stuff done will quarantine all of the potentially time destructive internet related activities to a device that can be put away, out of sight, and retrieved only when they make a volitional, conscious decision to waste time.

So it may actually be a game changing device. But probably not for the reasons people think.