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Steven Johnson defends our digital age.

Steven Pinker defends our digital age.

A Defense of Apple and the walled garden from Neven Mrgan. The post would make more than a couple libertarians proud.

An incredibly insightful essay on the Internet (really technology and communication more generally) written by Douglas Adams in 1999 (via Kottke).

It’s just a tool. It can be used for good or for ill. If an argument is complicated and would take an hour or more to understand while reading a written article or a report, software and a projector can’t help. A clever slide deck can’t condense the learning experience so that it happens in 30 minutes. That’s just asking too much. Besides, thinking you can cure weak thinking from a speaker by taking visual aides away is terribly mistaken.

Most presentations would improve dramatically if presenters simply understood that the slides are for the audience and not them. Presenters need their own notes or script.

Also, Keynote is better.

UPDATED: Erik Voeten writes: “I wonder whether people are being nostalgic for something that never existed: the idea that the average meeting/presentation was once both interesting and informative.”

Steven Johnson:

a “generative” platform translates to something like this: a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents.

Sure sounds like the iPhone OS Era to me.

Amit Gupta predicts that tablet computing will kill laptops. I think this is probably right. Most of us need 4 screens. Before I said 3 screens, but now that I am consumed by launch day iPad lust, it seems pretty clear we need 4. Or at least I do. And by need I mean like water.

Once the iPad gets a good PDF reader/anotater I will stop killing trees.

Andy Ihnatko:

I’m already impressed as hell with the iPad. I think it won’t really shine through as the utterly refreshing new articulation of personal computing that it is until late this year, when these knockoffs enter the market and we can fully appreciate how hard it is to do this sort of thing right.

Penguin’s CEO John Makinson on his company’s strategies for the iPad (via mrgan). It seems clear that those who take an aggressive approach, experiment, and try many things at once are going to be more likely to find success. And I see demos like this and I just get excited for the thing all over again.

David Pogue explains why we should document our lives. The eventual reads are worth far more than the cost of the writes.