When the history of computing is written, our era may well be labeled "The Time of the Big Launch." Major innovations in personal computing live and die on the strength of their introductions, and rarely does a new device catch on over time, as would a car or a coffee maker. If the niche does not already exist, perhaps it never will.
But with the coming of Apple's much-rumored tablet device, we may well see history in the making, as the importance of the product's debut is dwarfed by what it actually does. Whatever this new machine is - a game-changer or merely a hip hybrid of a smartphone and a laptop - one thing is clear: We are witnessing an evolution of what we think of when we think about computing. It's no longer something that we go do; it's something that we are.
Hurdling over the formidable anxieties about tablet computing's kinship to the present, it's not so difficult to imagine how it could reshape the future. For one thing, the tablet model breaks with the desktop/laptop tradition. You don't sit in front of it as much as it sits in front of you. More significantly, it seems to cut against the corporate dream of devices that store little but interact mightily with warehouses of data, and mounds of social and commercial Web sites. The tablet could become an extension of self, not just in terms of portability but in how we actually live with it.
An all-in-one device for reading, playing, creating, learning and connecting, any upcoming tablet is likely to be svelte and feather-light, with the gesture-based, tactile interface of an iPhone. But this breed of computer is also going to be too large to cradle in the hand or stow in a pocket. Still, its success may depend less on its size than on its ease of use, its impressive array of tools and toys, and the immediacy of an interface that we stroke and tap with our bare hands.
According to Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland, College Park, a major advocate of human-centered computing, the first era of computing was about the size, power and capacity of machines. But the second era is about our needs and desires, as well as our access to information, ideas and a universe of essential social connections. A device that entwines itself with our relationships to others, that hearkens to our voice and responds to our touch, that attends to us wherever we go and whatever we do - such a device truly becomes an extension of our being in the world. Always on and always with us, it provides anything/anywhere/anytime connectedness to ourselves and our world. No longer merely a personal computer, it is now an intimate machine.
Such a device promises to become the hub of life, the witness of our lived experiences and the repository of our individual and collective memories. It might be the very thing that transforms the inchoate "everythingness" of cyberspace into the more useful and orderly stuff of our daily lives.
Still, the new platform may easily be an epic failure. It could simply disappoint, given the irrational exuberance surrounding its launch. It could even succeed brilliantly along many dimensions but fail one crucial test, something that in retrospect might not seem all that important. Remember the Betamax vs. VHS wars? There was pent-up demand for home taping of TV shows back then, and Betamax came up a bit short in that department. Only in retrospect can we see this march of technology - and the massive human endeavors that get trampled underfoot.
But our technological fumbles often reveal deeper, more intuitive longings. As we evolve our machines, new contours of thinking and being arise. Just as the developers of video recording devices discovered that we all want to be our own archivists, and that time-shifting creates a new freedom of consumption, so too will the competition to create the truly intimate machine uncover our hidden yearning for a companionable computer, a helper for the enormous intricacies of life.
The tablet hype has been fun to watch. But it's been dominated by first-era concerns about hardware and features. We co-evolve with our machines, hearing our own voices echoed in theirs. Let's think harder about what the transformation from personal to intimate computing means.
Nancy Kaplan is executive director and professor in the School of Information Arts & Technologies at the University of Baltimore. Her e-mail is nakaplan@ubalt.edu.