A few weeks ago Paul Biba blogged about a hilarious Charlie Brooker video about how to report the news. Charlie Brooker is a kind of British Steven Colbert/Bill Moyers who analyzes current media obsessions with a cynical eye. (See his piece about mass killings and his pilot Newswipe episode and his take on American news media). Surprise! Brooker also writes regular columns at the Guardian too. Here’s his take on ebooks:
The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.
Here’s his opinion about the forthcoming iPad:
Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?
Unless one wants to carry a camera around with them in addition to whatever other devices one has, then a camera in an iPod Touch for example would be used for taking accident pictures, sending deposit cheques to my bank, taking pictures of my contacts so I keep the name and face together, copying articles in the library, taking the front license plate of the guy tailgating you, and a myriad of other things that I am sure would pop up if the camera were at hand rather than back at home. I am not going to pay $1800 for an iPhone, but an iPod Touch would nicely replace my Palm Pilot if it did have a camera.