Ipad, the hand and the brain (iPadding around suite)

[René Micout]

I thought, this morning in my bed, at all I had read about the iPad on various forums French and foreign. It appears as a kind of unease, frustration. « Ah! Is that all? », « This already exists », « This is a big iPod Touch », etc. Yet, while basically in agreement with these thoughts, I can not bring myself reduce the subject to an assemblage of technologies already known and some already mastered. In this « thing » I sense something new, I do not know what, I wonder as Gilles Deleuze : « Where is the newness? ». What makes the bicycle a new objet (tool?)? The wheel? No, that existed for a very long time. The saddle? Legacy of the cavalry. The handlebars? The pedals? There is 2 French words for this object: « bicyclette » and « vélo ». The first one addresses the object of a technical (technological?) point of view : is a two-wheeler. The second « vélo » (from « vélocipède ») : go fast with his feet. The « bicyclette » is a technological breakthrough, the result of assembling of technical elements already existing anf already proven as the wheel and the saddle. The « vélo » is a machine (yet the same) that alters our relationship to the territory, which allows us to increase our power (puissance : Nietzschean sense). When the « bicyclette » is an « invention » of more aver the history of mankind, the « vélo » os one of the most amazing inventions of mankind.
In the computer world, Apple did not invent the computer, not even the micro-computer while the company was a pioneer in the field. Apple did not invent the technology icons/mouse, nor does the multitouch, but Apple has revolutionized the computer (and not only the micro-computer), inventing some technology but above all by creating new uses in assembling new technologies and linking closely to each other. Macintosh was not the first microcomputer « graphics/mouse », iPod was not the first digital Walkman, iPhone was not the first mobile phone. But, all these devices have radically changed the use to which it had previously. By changing scale, from the iPod Touch to iPad, Apple does, apparently, not a new machine (the same but greater), but create a new use. By removing certain elements : the mouse, the cursor, the distance between the hand and the brain is shortened ; increasing the size of a small fun object (a Walkman after all) our power is increased. The alliance between the hand and the brain is enhanced. The alliance between the hand and the brain is not what characterizes human in the animal kingdom?