Hasta La Gadget!

Nov 08

Fighting Words: Defining “Mobile” and “Computer”

Posted in: ipad, Miscellaneous, mobile, Today's Chili

The easiest way to stop an argument is to contest the meaning of words. That’s what debate coaches teach, and it’s what lawyers, philosophers and clever toddlers do every day. It’s also what Mark Zuckerberg did last week when he was asked about developing an app for iPad at the company’s “Facebook Mobile” event.

“The iPad’s not mobile,” Zuckerberg retorted. “Next question.” When the crowd murmured, he added, “It’s not mobile! It’s a computer. It’s like a different thing.”

“I think Apple would disagree with you,” said Mashable’s Ben Parr. “Well, sorry,” Zuckerberg responded.

A moment later, he walked it back: “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be rude towards Apple there. I mean, look, we all love Apple products here, and we want to work with them, and all that; I just want to keep the event focused on what we’re doing today. I think that the iPad is not a mobile platform in the way that a phone is, and that’s what we’re talking about today.”

I’m left wondering whether the perceived rudeness (towards Apple, not the reporter) wasn’t about Zuckerberg not answering the question, but about him refusing to call the iPad mobile and calling it a computer instead.

In the tech world, there are plenty of perfectly ordinary descriptive words that also function as insults: “netbook” (applied to a lightweight notebook), “feature phone” (applied to an entry-level smartphone), “cable company” (trust me, fiberoptic IPTV companies do not like being called that).

You can also cut someone down by denying something a label. “Open-source” is a good example, but I’ve got a more surprising one. When Barnes & Noble unveiled Nook Color, I was surprised to see how many commenters at Wired.com were absolutely certain that (as jaxruffian66 put it) “No e-ink=not a reader. End of story.” I had no idea that we’d already completely defined what an e-reader was, based on the presence or absence of one specific technology. I don’t quite know what we’ll do when Pixel Qi, Mirasol and color E Ink screens show up.

Is “mobile” like this? Is being a mobile device inherently something good, so that not being inside that clique is something bad? What exactly was wrong with the word “portable” for tablets and laptops? (Netbooks used to be called “ultraportable”; now, you’re more likely to hear them called “ultramobile.”) Is there any consensus about what does and doesn’t constitute a mobile device? Or even whether it necessarily refers to a hardware device and not a platform?

One irony of Zuckerberg’s statement is that “computer” usually is used as an approbation, not an insult. Tablets like the iPad aren’t “real” computers because (the argument goes) they don’t have keyboards — or don’t allow users to access the filesystem, or whatever line you want to draw.

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wonders whether the presence or absence of a keyboard still defines what we think of as a computer, or at least a PC. That term, too, is changing: It very rarely means a specific platform anymore, Windows instead of Mac or Linux, but instead a personal computer (including those running Mac OS X or Linux) rather than a tablet or smartphone.

Or consider “social network.” This could be entirely offline: just a set of people and their relationships to each other. Then it became synonymous with dedicated sites that provided online social networking, then activities of people using those sites. Eventually it migrated to “social networking features” of other websites, services and objects, and finally just became “social”: like “mobile,” an entire field of activity, including both hardware and software, commerce and anthropology.

Like “mobile,” “social” is good. Social is where everything is headed; it’s the future. Nobody wants to be left out of the future.

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