iVeil

Apple recently launched their latest gamechanger – the curiously named iPad. Since most of us never really left junior high, the name instantly led to many snickers, giggles and outright derision – maybe not undeservedly, it is a bit uncomfortable in the same way it’s uncomfortable when I have to go down the feminine product aisle at the grocery store to pick out the specific green/pink/yellow labeled Tampax product my wife has gleefully and purposefully added to the list. But after 25 years of marriage there’s not much that makes me truly uncomfortable so I’ll be able to handle a product from Apple named the iPad. (And if memory serves, those same howls were heard when Nintendo launched the similarly schoolyard friendly Wii and with $50+ million in world wide sales I believe they’re doing just fine – when the product is good, people adapt.)

I freely and unapologetically admit to being an Apple idiot – I love the experience that is the Apple brand from the products to the online and brick and mortar encounters. They’re not perfect and are notoriously controlling (could we please let Flash enabled sites out of the penalty box) but they’ve earned my trust after 25 years of delivering products that are both aesthetically pleasing and performance driven. After watching the hour plus announcement online I turned to my soon-to-be-college-bound daughter and announced “Well, I’ve just found your textbook – ALL of your textbooks - for the next 4 years.” So, yeah, I will be buying one.

But here’s what makes the iPad really interesting – and more unsettling to me. – the device (along with it’s black and white forefathers like Amazon’s Kindle) will further cloak in a digital mask yet another revealing aspect of what makes us unique individuals – specifically what it is we are reading.

Printed magazines, books, newspapers – these have always been outward labels that have given the passerby a small clue into the mind of the person engrossed in the publication. Whether that person was reading the New York Times or The National Enquirer, a Harlequin Romance or Shakespeare, the latest issue of the New Yorker or the New England Journal of Medicine, each title divulged to the outside world a sense of who they were and what made them tick. Which subsequently provided one with a sense of superiority (I would NEVER read that…”) or inferiority (“she must be incredibly smart”) or a sense of belonging (“I just read that as well”). There’s comfort and community in all of this as well as marketing of course. It may not exactly be word of mouth but seeing the title or masthead in someone’s hands certainly provides some form of endorsement. Not to mention a way to begin a conversation.

Laptops and digital readers are stripping this aspect of communication and marketing away. Why does porn have such a strong presence on the web? It can be hidden so easily from prying eyes – one can ogle privately. The digital reader has replaced the discretely wrapped in brown paper approach from a generation or three back. As communication has gotten more connected, sophisticated and complex – yet in many ways less personal - we have been able to shroud ourselves in more and more layers of digital grime. We’re able to conceal more easily than ever before and invent profiles and collect “friends” all because we are in a position to technically be able to do so. Yes, we are also able to reveal – hello Tiger Woods – elements of our character we may not want to just as easily but you have to really stumble – or be unduly scrutinized - to do so. Most of us enjoy the ability to be anonymous should we choose.

Let’s turn to a larger canvass. Bookshelves, be they in a home or office setting have always been more than mere storage for what we have read, intend to read or are there just for show (somewhere in the recesses of my brain I vaguely remember a “bookshelf kit” that could be ordered so you could impress your intended with an erudition you may not have earned). Bookshelves become insightful murals – portraits more revealing than almost any oil painting or photograph. While our eyes are often referred to as the “windows of the soul” – for me it’s the bookshelf - we get to survey an individual’s interests, dreams, politics, passions and fears then build a framework that supports a personality we believe them to possess. Record collections – they were called albums for those of you under 35 – had a similar power.

I was recently invited to a client’s home and as I walked into his townhouse I was greeted by a series of bookshelves that covered the entire surface of one wall – a 6 foot high and 20-foot long panorama of he and his wife’s entire reading life played out before me. Biographies on Lincoln and Dylan, social and business commentary by Friedman, Gladwell and Godin, designer’s treatises into architecture and furniture, books on impressionists, observations from sociologists and psychologists (there was actually a lot of “ology” on the wall) all formed the brushstrokes of their literary painting. Intermingled among the books were a few family photographs that seemed to echo sentiments of “we were at this stage of our lives when we read this or that”. I could have taken a camera, filmed the bookshelf and pictures left to right, set it to music and delivered an emotional and fairly complete depiction of their lives together.

Now take all of it – the books, the photographs and the music – the whole wall, every newspaper or magazine you read and stuff it into a 1.5 lb piece of aluminum that is a half inch thick and has a 9.7 inch, LED backlit IPS display. Everything we could formerly observe an individual reading in the airport, the park bench or the coffee shop is now concealed behind the ubiquitous Apple, Dell or Sony logo. Sure, the logo says something about you – but it’s not in the same way a Dickens, Vonnegut, Salinger or Angelou might. Plus the logos have co-opted all of that marketing power – it’s not what you’re reading, it’s what are you reading it on.

The technology is breathtaking and beautiful and I am on board – but as these advancements and new connections are being built there are also some pretty non-revealing walls being erected. People have always been a mystery and you can’t judge a person or a book by its cover – but at least there used to be a cover.