Touch me, read me, feel me – the cry of a new generation

She’s obviously taken to it like a duck to water, unlike me who’s felt like a lumbering hippo at times trying to find my way round this device.

When I was her age, the generation gap was mostly about music. My mother loathed John Lennon, especially when I would scream out the song “Mother” just to annoy her; I obviously loved it.

Today’s generation gap is driven by technology – it’s the difference between touching and typing. They touch, we type. They touch the television screen expecting it to respond. They touch the camera and expect to see their photos instantly. 

There is however no touching between her and her parents who are seated next to her. She is lost in her world, and they in theirs. Both mum and dad are asleep, probably glad to get some rest while she’s happily occupied for an hour or so.

In the Stone Age, they’d have said, “Go play outside with your seven stones.” Today, they say, “Go play with your iPad.”

Should there be an age limit to these devices? You need to be 17 to get a licence after all to drive a car. Anyway, I digress.

Across the aisle from her, I am alternating between my “Little Women” on my iPad – what an evergreen read, no matter the medium – and the inflight magazine on Jetstar. I don’t find much to read of interest in there because it’s so Australian in content.

This is another thing I’ve noticed about Jetstar flights within Asia – now that Jetstar, the Australian parent, is more active in our region, the inflight experience has become more Australian on some flights – the food along with the magazine. Only the flight attendants are Asian.

Inflight magazines. Now that’s from another generation, isn’t it? Most haven’t changed all that much. Some are better than others – Bangkok Airways’ Fah Thai stands out as one of my favourites. The ones that are better reads are those that have incorporated lifestyle content – there’s just too much travel content out there for anyone to stand out.

And now comes the iPad. This will change all forms of print media, inflight magazines, in particular, as more travellers carry devices which will become their own IFE – inflight entertainment.

The Kindle of course came way before the iPad. This week, Amazon.com announced that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader outnumbered sales of hardcover books. It sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books – and the pace is quickening. In the last four weeks, it sold 180 digital books for every 100 hardcovers.

With my new iPad, I downloaded WIRED magazine’s free preview. Chris Anderson, editor, said, “The iPad is our opportunity to make the WIRED we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements of video and animated infographics,” and added, “The tablet represents a grand experiment in the future of media.”

It is a good experiment on the part of WIRED. The text is clear. I can click on a video to see what they’re writing about. I can swipe to see an exclusive 360-degree view of “Iron Man”. An article on “Constructing A Song” allows me to listen to the different steps in which sounds are made and how a song is constructed.

Then there’s a mostly text-based article on “The Great Cognitive Surplus”, in which authors Daniel Pink and Clay Shirky talk about the revolution in how we use our free time.

Pink talks about a third drive – the first being biological, the second, responding to rewards and punishment. “We do things because they’re interesting, because they’re engaging …” And he adds, “I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active or engaged. That’s how we are out of the box.”

I was certainly engaged with the WIRED read. Contrast that with Vanity Fair, which I paid $4.99 for and what a disappointment. It’s one of my favourite magazines but translated literally onto the iPad, it is clunky, cluttered and confusing. The ads are a nuisance – they keep popping up and interrupting your read. I am going back to the print version for this.

It reminds of the first days of the World Wide Web and we merely reproduced our print content for the new medium. Today, we understand the medium better and content is customized.

Coincidentally, today, I watched a documentary on the evolution of the sit-com in America and it talked about how comedians like George Burns & Gracie Allen, and Jackie Gleason evolved from radio to television and stumbled as they got used to the new medium.

The more content producers adapt to any new medium that comes along, the more users will move away from the old.

As for that little girl, well, she won’t even have heard of print so for her, the world is just waiting to be touched. Hopefully, it will touch her back in a kind, gentle way.

Featured image credit (Two little sibling boys having fun together with tablet pc): Ockra/iStock