CritiCommodity: An 'I' for I-Book

The new iBooks are beautiful. Sitting at my roommate's new Macintosh laptop, I almost wish that I never switched away from Apple. The iBook's translucent polycarbon plastic casing is soothingly, subtly textured, and its rubberized blueberry trim is smooth and soft. It's flared, curved outline and rounded edges remind me of a clam, and the white springs visible beneath its cloudy-clear keys look almost like veins. As I hold it in my lap, the iBook feels vaguely alive.

Life, it seems, is what computers so obviously lack. When people speculate about the impact rapid technological advances are having on our lives and culture, the same fears appear again and again. Will technology steal our humanity or enhance it? Will it change the way we relate to other people and to ourselves? Will we spend our lives responding to machinery and in the process lose our ability to respond to life? Clearly, computers have become vitally important to our society and are becoming increasingly important in our everyday lives, so these questions are not academic.

As the influence of computer technology and thus the questions it raises have become more widespread, computers have found an increasing place in the art world. And whether their ubiquity is celebrated or condemned, computers in pop art are rarely emotional symbols. Hard and analytical, they form a sharp contrast with the emotional confusion of humanity.

But perhaps, Apple says with the iBook, this is the wrong approach to the question of how people and computers should reconcile their disparate personalities. Instead of worrying that in the presence of computers we will become too isolated from each other, too unemotional, we should be finding ways to reduce these qualities in computers themselves.

Carried by its long fold-out handle, the iBook could be a sleek, flat fourth-grader's lunch-box. It is a laptop with a sense of humor--almost ridiculous in its rejection of more serious stereotypes of computer. Designed to live in someone's backpack, it can be handled with relative impunity. Colored like a pre-school toy, it can be considered with a modicum of flippancy and easy camaraderie.

Perhaps I am simply being drawn in by the Apple propaganda machine. When Jonathan Ive, head of Apple's design team, states his motto--"Sorry, no beige"--he sounds an awful lot like the giddy materialist, marketing style rather than substance. The goal here, after all, is to sell computers. But when Ive says, "We didn't start with engineering dictates. We actually started with people," his statement has more meaning than the typical car commercial. Computers live in our offices and our homes, and everywhere their gray sharp-edged packaging advertises their status as the "other." But computers are flexible beasts, and housed within Ive's "emotional human forms" packaging they could lose some of that alien aloofness. We could be more natural around computers. Perhaps instead of worrying that we will become too much like computers--too unemotional and uninvolved--we should work on making computers more like us. The iBook, at least, is a small step in the right direction.

You still may argue that computers are not the kind of thing we should buy based on how much we like to touch their cases or admire their colorful design. I would probably agree. But adding a little color to our lives, wherever we can find it, adds another little bit of humanity and happiness. And given the amount of time I spend staring at my computer screen (and its beige box) anyway, it would be nice if it felt like a more touchable, more animated friend.