Ipad as a tool

The presentations today really intrigued me and I hope we read excerpts of these books, but that's not really what I want to post about. What I want to post about is Black Friday. Yes, oh joy, the day we brave bouts of materialistic insanity and nightmarish foot and road traffic to participate in that most American of consumer rituals. I journeyed to Walmart for toothpaste and a phone charger on that tragic Black Friday eve and my friend and I found ourselves adventuring further into the electronic section. I saw the station where the iPad was being showcased, looking like a sacred tablet on a white plastic pedestal. People were gathered around it (still, this long after its release, it is a wonder) reverently. After they left, I watched the presentation that was playing on the iPad under it's glass case. It was a commercial-like video of what the iPad can do, on the iPad. It featured a smaller version of the iPad on this video, like an iPad within an iPad, the screen on the screen. It was vaguely uncomfortable to me to watch apple's representation of the iPad on an iPad, it seemed out of place, it seemed pointless, and it seemed simultaneously silly and sly. Look, but don't touch, you of Walmart, at this expensive wonder under glass casing. Look at what it can do, but not what you can do.
The happy day itself, Black Friday, I found myself at Best Buy. The iPad was, again, displayed on white surfaces on a specific section of the store and was again the object of much attention and praise, but was also being handled by customers as a prototypical sneak peek of what their iPad would be like, if they were to buy one. I had seen both of these displays before, but somehow they never struck me odd in such a way (but in other ways). I don't know whether my unease with the disconnect between these two very different displays at the two very different commercial megamarts was to do with class distinctions implied in each or just the general discontent with the rampant consumeristic materialism that Is Black Friday. But josh's presentation and the idea of an incipient object reminded me of this and I felt the need to post this. The ipad as an incipient object is the dominating theme of my interaction with it and also the reason why I cannot fully commit to the ipad, so to speak; it seems to me, still, an object charged with this strange dichotomy of being both simply a new physical tool for information gathering and being some kind of hyperreal symbol of the future at our doorsteps.
I guess that's all I wanted to say, and if this post is too reminiscent of topics we've beaten to death, I apologize. It just seemed to me that those two weird scenes I had with the iPad that day made an abstract feeling I'd been having more present and tangible.


The above post was written on my ipad the day Josh and Kalee did their book presentations. I tried to copy and paste it from pages onto blogspot, only to find yet another thing the ipad cannot do. So, I emailed it to myself along with a reminder to post it. I forgot. But, I wanted to post it immediately and couldn't--so how does having an ipad affect my academic life? It helps me look up terms faster than a dictionary, it helps me conduct online research easily and portably, I no longer have to print out reams and reams of paper when I have a class assignment and I can easily fact-check and look up terms that I come across during class lectures. I can get texts so easily it frightens me. I do not take notes on it yet, but I will be attempting to go paperless next semester and see how it goes for me... but so far, I haven't seen the full effect of what the iPad can do because I haven't been able to fully commit to it. It has definitely made me appreciate the power of being connected, I can zone out better and I can focus in better with it, depending on my mood, but so far I have not been able to fully utilize it as a tool.