It’s a computer device a little smaller than a sheet of printer paper, and about half-an-inch thin. That sounds a little on the thick side of thin, but thickness measurements of Apple devices have always been kind of fuzzy. The swept edges make Apple products feel a little more svelte than they actually are, and the iPad is the same in that regard. It’s very sleek.

The iPad is evidence of a trend in computing that is changing how computers integrate into our lives. This trend, simply put, blurs the lines between the computer world and the real world. It’s long been a criticism of computers that they separate you from your real, physical life. For most of the history of computing this has been true. Computers have become more accessible over the years, though. The 90′s saw the rise of cheaper, more useful laptops, designed to give you the experience of a desktop machine through a display, keyboard, trackpad (mouse), and speakers, all of which fit into your lap.

The trend that the iPad represents is a shift away from that type of thinking. This trend asks the question, “Would portable computers be more effective if they weren’t designed in the image of a desktop machine?”

Laptop computers will always have their niche, but I don’t believe they are the best solution for most situations. Think for a moment about what you use your computer for. You browse the web. You probably look at e-mail. There may be some word processing that you do from time to time. You also might use your computer as an entertainment device to listen to music, or watch movies and television shows. These activities cover most of what everyone — even complete computer geeks — do with their computers. We mostly do the same seven or eight things on our computers every day. Some days we do even less.

We spend a lot of money for the ability to do this small number of tasks. We buy machines like laptops to make the experience more convenient, but we end up paying a lot of money for a lot of features we don’t use. We’re also saddled with small inconveniences. Laptops mostly use a clam-shell design that requires opening first, waiting to wake the machine from sleep mode, and then making sure you have an internet connection if you want to do anything internet-related. After all this, you’re getting the same experience you got from your desktop: a separation from the physical world because you have a device that takes up your entire lap. Laptops don’t make it very convenient to spend just a minute or two on something.

Apple was very clear that the iPad would be a different category of computer, and I have to agree with them. Apple has avoided the pitfalls of previous tablet-computer-makers.

One of the criticisms of the iPad is “What makes this so different, anyway? Didn’t we have touch-based computers 10 years ago?” Tablet computers have been available for that long, but available technology is not the same as accessible technology. It doesn’t really matter how innovative something is if people can’t afford it. The high cost always associated with tablet computers hindered widespread adoption. The tablet computers of 10 years ago just weren’t innovative enough to begin to justify their high cost.

While there have been touch-screen computers before, few of them were designed to really leverage the touch capability. The designers of those past devices thought of your finger as an analog for the computer mouse-pointer. That makes logical sense, but it doesn’t make any sense from a usability standpoint. If you compare the size of your finger to the size of your mouse pointer, you’ll notice your finger is a lot bigger. This makes your finger less accurate than a mouse pointer. Interfaces designed for use with a mouse are not at all suitable to navigate with your finger. Your fingertip just doesn’t have the same kind of precision. There’s also the problem of humans having 10 fingers. Previous entries in the tablet computer market could only handle touch with 1 finger at a time. These problems made those devices difficult and frustrating to use.

The iPad, however, uses the same multi-touch technology the iPhone uses. This makes a lot of the common actions like pinching, zooming, and navigating feel very intuitive. You feel that there’s less of a barrier between yourself and the device. For example, how fast you scroll down a page depends on how fast you swipe your finger down the screen. It feels just like you’re reaching into the screen do to precisely what you want. The iPad feels pleasantly futuristic in a ‘Douglas Adams’ sort of way rather than a ‘George Orwell’ or ‘Terry Gilliam’ sort of way.

Those who have used one will know what I’m talking about. Those who have not should try to swing by an Apple store or Best Buy to play with one of the demo units.

The fact that tablet computers never achieved widespread adoption created an unfortunate problem with software availability. Companies didn’t put resources into developing tablet applications. It wasn’t worth it. This meant that even if you did have the money to buy a tablet computer, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do with one. By making the iPad extremely accessible, Apple has made the market for touch-based software large enough so other companies will pay attention, which means a lot more functionality for end users.

Apple also did a very shrewd thing by basing the iPad on their already-existing iPhone. Because the iPad is able to run the same software that runs on the iPhone, there already exists a large ecosystem of applications. Developers already knew how to create iPad applications because they knew how to create iPhone applications. They could also develop their iPad applications before they had the device in their hands because the software development kit was available when the iPad was first announced. By doing this, Apple solved the early-adopter problem.

Early adopters can often feel punished for their forward-thinking ways. They pay more for devices to get them earlier. They also tend to face long delays for new software or content for those devices.

This happened on a large scale a few years ago when the first Blu-Ray players were released. A long time passed before the number of movies increased to the point where people felt it worthwhile to get a Blu-Ray player. Getting an iPad isn’t like that at all. The iPad, out of the box, already has thousands of applications available for it. While only a few hundred applications take full advantage of the iPad’s large screen, more are being released every day.

The iPad is the world’s first computer that is completely, from hardware to software, designed around touch, and released at a price that will make it an easy purchase for many people. It is a significant step forward in reducing the impersonality of computing while increasing its accessibility. It’s a computer designed for those moments in your life when you just can’t be bothered to use a computer. That’s a good thing because it turns out quite a lot of people are in a constant state of not wanting to bother with using computers.

For those of you who’ve gotten an iPad, here’s a good place to start when looking around for apps:

Plants Vs. Zombies HD – This strategy game, previously released on Mac, PC, and iPhone, is by most accounts the best version of the game released. It looks beautiful. It’s fun, and it takes great advantage of the multi-touch.

Star Walk – This app transforms staring up at the night sky from an idle pastime into an educational experience. Holding the iPad up to the sky labels the objects you’re looking at, and the stars on the screen change as you change your angle, direction, or location.

Kindle – If you’re disappointed with the selection on the iBook store then you can use this Amazon Kindle application to read or purchase digital books from the Amazon store. This greatly increases the number of books available to you, and reading books on the iPad is a joy.

Netflix – This application not only allows you to manage your Netflix queue, but also allows you to stream movies and TV shows directly to your iPad.

NYTimes Crosswords – If you’re going to get one crossword application for your iPad then this is the one to get. The large screen captures the feeling of filling out a crossword better than any other attempt in the history of digital crosswords. Though, even though the application is free, you will have to sign up for a $17/year subscription from within the app to access the puzzles. I still think that’s a great bang for a buck

OmniGraffle – Clocking in at $49.99, this is one of the most expensive iPad apps out there, and I believe it’s worth it if you want to use your iPad to do real work. It allows you to outline, sketch out, or graph your ideas using multi-touch gestures. Your ideas can then be moved around to organize them, and then saved out as a PDF.

Apple Tablet The Saturday Evening Post

As a 20-something myself, I thought it would be interesting to profile the ways in which Facebook is changing how my generation communicates with friends and family.

I am part of the first generation that will never long for a high school reunion; Facebook has made it more difficult for me to lose track of old acquaintances. Whenever I go on Facebook, I see a stream of all the things my friends are currently doing. Even if I don’t speak to them for three months at a time, there’s still a “connection.”

In the past, this type of passive communication on a mass scale was impossible. If I wanted to stay connected to a group of 15 friends from long ago, I might have sent letters, but it would have been far from efficient. I would have written the same things to each of them. The personal content of these letters would have been small compared to the informational pieces that would be the same in the other 14 letters. Facebook makes your information a kind of boilerplate. It becomes a given, so conversations with old friends can be a lot more productive when I do see those people. In a way, I never really lose my connection.

That feeling of social ties is the magic of a service like Facebook. My family, like a lot of other modern families, is spread out across the Unites States, from Florida to California. I also have family members overseas. I’m lucky if I see my entire family once a year. Yet, with the assistance of Facebook, I can apply the the same efficiency of staying connected with high school friends as with my family. My sister, for example, recently had her first child. I have met my niece only a handful of times since then, but she is constantly in my thoughts thanks to a stream of pictures and updates about how she’s doing. It’s a lot like the old family Christmas cards except it’s happening every single day of the year.

The Internet has come a long way in the last couple of decades, and we’re seeing some noticeable generational trends. For instance, one of my friend’s aunts “friended me” on Facebook, and I noticed that she had three times the number of Facebook friends as her nephew, despite the fact that she has only recently started to spend more time on the Internet. She spends more time on Facebook than he does. Yet he is part of the younger generation that grew up using the Internet.

The beauty of Facebook is in the packaging of the service. Almost every facet of Facebook is technology that existed from years before: e-mail, instant messaging, photo galleries, personal Web pages, RSS, etc. Facebook has taken these function, which young people have been able to do for the past decade, and made them more user-friendly, more accessible—for young and older generations alike.

Facebook is the second act in the people’s Internet Revolution; the first being America Online, which spurred the adoption of the Internet in the homes of ordinary Americans. In a similar fashion, Facebook is spurring the adoption of Internet use in demographics that have been dismissed as the non-Internet users. It gives people a reason to be online in a way that simply checking e-mail, the 1996 equivalent, did not. Facebook is active in a way that the general population may find more rewarding.

Instead of waiting for items to roll in addressed to you personally, as in the case of e-mail, you can take the initiative to find out about your friends without having to speak to them directly.

The ability to communicate (or not communicate) with your friends in different ways also heightens the ‘stickiness’ of the service. For example, it tells you who else is using Facebook right now. You can then exchange instant messages with any of them. There’s always one more thing to check, see, or do on Facebook. It’s like a never-ending dinner party and all your friends and family are invited.

Whether or not Facebook is a festive Christmas card or more of a raucous dinner party is up to the user (or non-user). Suffice to say, even if the Facebook service goes offline tomorrow, services like Facebook have changed the way we communicate in our society.

The Facebook Generation The Saturday Evening Post

If you are of the population not fortunate enough to have seen St. Elsewhere, it was the first of the modern ilk of medical dramas. What separated it from its predecessors was the reality with which it treated its subject matter. The television portrayal of doctors until that point was more in line with what we think of as super heroes. The patients always got better, the doctors never made mistakes, and everyone, as Garrison Keillor might put it, was above-average. The thinking of the time was, “Who wants to turn on their television only to be depressed? The advertisers certainly wouldn’t like that.” That strategy worked fine for many years, but it turned out not to work on the slightly-more-cynical younger generation. St. Elsewhere followed this new direction, and almost the entirety of the current hour-long medical genre owes its place on TV to “a show that ruined television.”

Welcome to the Multiverse

How does a show like this, with all the good it did for its craft, end up ruining television? The answer comes in two parts. The first is that St. Elsewhere was a very popular, and it continues to be well-respected among people who make decisions for television. The show did numerous crossover episodes where characters from one series appeared on St. Elsewhere or vice-versa. Crossing Jordan, Cheers, Boston Public, Chicago Hope, The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and Homicide: Life on the Street are among the shows where this happened. Outside of this, there are shows that reference St. Elsewhere in a way that makes it clear they are intended to be in the same world. The hospital’s PA system on St. Elsewhere was used at various times to call doctors from other series, even though they were not appearing in that episode. The reverse of this was used on the Canadian show, Degrassi Junior High, where doctors from St. Elsewhere were paged through the school’s announcements system.

The crossovers don’t stop there, though. For example, you’ll notice that St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers at one point. This happened in an episode when characters from St. Elsewhere visited the Cheers bar. Cheers, being as successful as it was in its day, ended up creating crossovers with other series on its own. Cheers begat Frasier and another short-lived spin-off called The Tortellis. Since a crossover or spin-off is essentially a signal that the shows happen in the same television universe, all shows connected to Cheers in that way are also connected to St. Elsewhere. The same goes for all the other shows that St. Elsewhere crossed with. They are all, through common characters, happening in the same television universe.

In all, there are around 280 shows linked to St. Elsewhere. The oldest is I Love Lucy, which traces its lineage in this order: I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mad About You, Friends, Caroline in the City, Frasier, Cheers, and finally, St. Elsewhere. Current shows such as Lost, ER, CSI, Law & Order, and Heroes all have their own lineage tied to St. Elsewhere.

Life is but a Dream

The second part of the answer is the bit of trivia mentioned in the opening. In the final moments of the series finale of St. Elsewhere it is heavily implied that the entire series had been a dream of one of the characters. Dr. Donald Westphall discusses his son, Tommy Westphall, which includes this bit of dialogue:

“I don’t understand this autism thing, Pop. Here’s my son. I talk to him. I don’t even know if he can hear me, because he sits there, all day long, in his own world, staring at that toy. What’s he thinkin’ about?”

The next part, the answer to that rhetorical question, shows Tommy Westphall shake a toy snow globe containing a model of the show’s hospital, while real snow begins to fall over the real hospital.

This is the moment that may have ruined television. St. Elsewhere takes place in the same universe as over 280 other shows, and that universe was revealed to be entirely in the mind of Tommy Westphall. So the next time you watch I Love Lucy, Cheers, CSI, Lost, Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, Law & Order, or any of the other shows connected to St. Elsewhere, keep in mind and take solace in the fact that they are at least two layers of fiction removed from our reality: They are the fictional creations of Tommy Westphall, an already fictional character. Most television, as it turns out, is more fictional than you would have thought.

If you’d like to explore Tommy Westphall’s multiverse on your own, this excellent site has complete documentation of the phenomenon that continues to be updated by contributors. You can take a look at the diagram of all the shows, and check the key to see exactly how they link together. If your friends are good enough at television trivia, you might be able to play a game of Six Degrees of Tommy Westphall.

The Show that Ruined Television The Saturday Evening Post