Being social has never come easily for me. I blame it on a combination of natural introversion, compounded by being on the wrong side of juvenile cliquedom and outright bullying. The lingering psychological effects of both often manifest themselves as social anxiety, and have left me ill-equipped when treading the waters of social interaction. At least, this is true in meatspace. Socialization is a lot easier when you have the luxury to do it from behind a screen, at least for some of us.

I think of this when I read people arguing about how online social interactions aren’t real, that they’re unhealthy, or dangerous. These are part of a long narrative about how technology isolates us, how screen-intermediated interaction is false interaction. It’s an attitude that extends back to the rise of the telephone in the home, and even extends to social criticism of novels and other forms of solitary entertainment. If you’re not directly interacting with your fellow human beings, the argument goes, you are not being human. Never mind what you, the human, would rather do with your time and reserves of social energy.

For myself, and many others, technology provides a way to satisfy the natural desire for social contact that even exists in the most shy and introverted among us, and it lets us do it on our own terms. A screen provides a form of safety, a screen name a form of anonymity. When the real world all-too-often forces us to be someone we are not, technology gives us the freedom to be who we are. It also gives us the freedom to be many people at once, to try on identities at will, and find the ones that suit us best. The ability is a double-edged sword, as shown time and time again by anonymous harassers and the Joshua Goldbergs of the world. It’s important to not lose sight of what we gain by choosing our identities, instead of being tied to a “real” self so Facebook can better target ads.

I know that, had I not discovered IRC as a socially isolated teenager, I would have been in a far worse place at a delicate and dangerous time in my life. Had I not found a diverse message board for a now defunct comedy site, I would never have met the love of my life, and my partner for over twelve years. My online social life has been as much of an emotional rollercoaster as anyone’s social life in the “real” world. I’ve been on the inside, and on the outside of circles. I’ve made friends, and made enemies. I’ve broken hearts, and had my heart broken. That most of these interactions occurred through a screen does not make them any less real, and any less emotional. Most, of course, because these online social interactions formed the bridge to real world socializing, bypassing the screaming monster in my head that worries if the other human beings will eat me alive.

This is what critics who decry online social interaction miss. They operate from the assumption that extroversion is the only correct way to be, that social anxiety either doesn’t exist, or can be cured though forced socialization. It’s true that technologically mediated social contact is different from what occurs in “reality,” but for those of us for whom “real” social interaction is fraught with peril, it’s often a lifesaver. More importantly, online social interaction does not preclude “real” interactions. Technology opens up doors for so many of us. Let’s not close them based on some antiquated notion of the “correct” way to interact with each other. To do so closes the door on so many who need that help—myself included.

“I spend so much of my day having information pushed at me, yet I spend almost no time to actually process it. Doing so would require a pause in the flow of information. And I’m afraid of what I might miss.”

— The Death of Thought — 500ish Words — Medium

Some excellent thoughts on constant connection by M.G. Siegler. Something that hits home as I sit and write out a description for this while a podcast blasts into my ear…

“[C]reating or hacking something requires much more than manipulating code, and much of those other elements are greatly enriched by the presence of people based in the arts. You need to know what you’re hacking, and why — the context of your project, the guiding vision, the overall strategic plan. You need to conduct research on the project’s viability, its scope and functions, your capacity to make it happen. You need to write and edit content and make your project visually accessible. You need to figure out how you are going to get people to use your project — not just by advertising, but by considering factors such as accessibility, user experience, even the assumptions made by your project about its users’ needs. These are skills that people in the arts can bring to tech teams, products and the industry overall.”

— Let’s Lose The Arts/Tech False Dichotomy Already — Medium

An important read, especially in regard to the gendered divided between arts creative work and technology work. For an example of this in practice, just look at the stereotypes of “front-end” versus “back-end” developers. I’m also pleased to see Tiara take the arts side to the carpet for their reactions as well. The world needs more than programmers.

This past weekend, I sat, and refreshed my Twitter feed as a whole host of people I admire from the Internet gathered in Portland for the XOXO Festival. Some were speaking, others just attending. They include: C. Spike Trotman, Virginia Roberts, Merlin Mann, Zoe Quinn, Myke Hurley, Anil Dash, Alex Blumberg, Dan Benjamin, and a bunch more. I’ve eyed XOXO longingly for the last couple years, but the buzz around this year’s was tremendous. Even despite #Gamergate nonsense trying to flood out the #xoxofest hashtag, Twitter was the best way to keep up from three hours ahead and a continent away. Lucy Bellwood’s livesketches, though I only saw them after the fact, were also incredible.

One of the things I find so compelling about XOXO, despite both never having been, and being unlikely to go (cross-country travel and accommodations are not cheap) is that it’s only nominally an “arts and technology conference”—the focus of the talks is on the human side of all of it. They’re chock full of personal stories, and that’s important. The talks from 2014 that stick out at me, from watching the videos are Anita Sarkeesian, Justin Hall, and Darius Kazemi. (So much Darius. I need to re-watch that.) Of 2015’s talks, Spike, Zoe Quinn, and Anil Dash’s are at the top of my list—in particular Zoe’s exploration of the nature of Internet Trolls—a topic she’s very, and unfortunately, well qualified to discuss.

Probably the closest I’ve come to an experience akin to XOXO is the recent, inaugural Facets Conference in Brooklyn this past year. I wrote my thoughts on the event back in May, and I swear by them. There is, all-too-often, a human story that gets lost in technology, and the tendency of technology people to focus on the object and the occasional, high-profile creator thereof. We get hagiographic biographies of rich CEOs, and lip-service to what their creations can enable us to do.

Every speaker at XOXO, and every speaker at Facets, used technology to make something. They picked up a megaphone, and used it to find a voice that would have, perhaps otherwise, not been heard. Wanting to be heard is an inherent human desire, after all. We write, we speak, we draw comics, we code, we make physical goods, and we want others to see them, touch them, maybe pay for them. Technology gives us the leverage to get our things in front of potentially millions of people with a lower, and lower cost of entry.

Every post, every podcast, every app, every piece of home-crafted jewelry is a lottery ticket for potential future success (Darius Kazemi again!). And success doesn’t necessarily mean striking it rich. One talk that looks interesting, at least from Lucy’s livesketch, is Bryce Roberts, who “wondered if another [VC] model was possible, helping to fund long-term, sustainable independent businesses without selling out.” After my own experiences with Venture Capital, this really speaks to me (as regular readers might know. Just flip through my writings on the business side of technology to see. This is a relevant one I’m proud of.

Perhaps one day, I’ll make it out to XOXO. Or, perhaps Facets will become the East Coast XOXO. (It’s certainly off to a killer start.) Even staring at it from afar, through a Twitter feed, and anxiously waiting for the videos to go up, I’m inspired to pick up my megaphone again, try to find my voice, play a lottery ticket, and get heard. It’ll take time, but as Veronica Belmont says, “Time means nothing on the Internet”. I know these people are all speaking my language: let’s make things and tell stories. We have the tools, let’s use them, instead of fetishizing the companies that make them.

Well, the Apple announcement has come and gone, and my predictions for the iPad were almost completely off. There’s a stylus, but it’s a fancy one, and there’s no handwriting recognition, at least not yet. In fairness, rumors had suggested adding Force Touch to iPad size screens was running into yield issues, so I could claim I’m not wrong, it just happened yet. I’ll fall on the sword here, though. Regardless, the new iPad Pro does establish Apple’s direction for the iPad line, and it’s the first big leap towards tablets replacing the traditional PC for most tasks.

There’s a lot of chatter from people in my circles about how they can’t do their work on an iPad, or an iPad isn’t suited to the work they do. They’re not wrong! The modern iPad, even the iPad Pro, isn’t the right tool for a lot of people. But it’s getting there. To figure out how we get to a tablet-based future, it helps if we take a step back and see how we got to where we are.

In 2015, every traditional personal computer on the market—including the Macintosh—traces its lineage to the original IBM PC. I’m oversimplifying here, especially since the Macintosh had its own strange evolutionary track, but even the sleekest, tiniest, laptop carries the legacy of those 8088-based tanks. We’re talking about machines that were optimized for keyboards, text display, minimal, wired networking, spinning discs, and all sorts of other things. The intervening thirty-four years have added a lot on top of the original personal computer architecture, but that legacy support is still there.

The iPad, though it builds off of the iPhone, is a fundamentally new way of computing built up from scratch to optimize touch input, solid-state storage, ubiquitous wireless communication, and rich graphical interfaces. At launched, it jettisoned a ton of the legacy of the traditional personal computer. Now, we’re seeing Apple add in a number of features we associate with modern desktop computing: keyboard shortcuts, multi-tasking, increased connectivity, and access to the file system—sort of, via the iCloud Drive app. It’s easier, and more effective, to add and adapt the best features of modern desktop personal computing to the tablet paradigm than the other way around (cf. Windows 8).

Between 1990 and 2010, the tablet evolved from a clunky, modified PC with all the attendant baggage, to a sleek, touch-optimized slab of glass with limited functionality, executed well. In the last five years, those limitations have been slowly whittled away. There’s enough processing power in modern tablets to rival desktop computers, owing in no small part to jettisoning a lot of the legacy overhead of the traditional personal computer. The next step is going to be leveraging that power to create tools optimized for the tablet. And this… well, this is the tricky bit.

Creating high-quality, professional applications is hard and expensive. Tablet computing applications don’t sell well, particularly at high, professional prices. With the long upgrade cycle in tablets, many tablet owners are still running devices that lack the power and capabilities needed to do high-performance computing tasks. So, we keep using our traditional personal computers, offloading passive, low-power content consumption tasks to our tablets. Without a compelling cause to upgrade, people muddle through, nobody makes groundbreaking apps, and the tablet future is continually deferred.

The next two years are going to be very interesting for the tablet space. The iPad is leading the way in terms of not only device power and capability, but iOS 9 is the first version of the OS that takes greater advantage of the iPad’s form factor. I don’t think Android tablets will take too long to catch up, at least on the software side. Consider the Apple and Google dichotomy when it comes to hardware and software: Apple believes in Smart Glass with a Dumb Cloud, while Google believes in Dumb Glass with a Smart Cloud. Benedict Evans coined this idea in terms of smartphones, but it could lead to a very interesting tablet arms race going by 2017. If this happens, we could hit a tipping point where tablet sales pick up, increasing the market, and increasing the incentive to make great, tablet-optimized software.

The further out we look, the greater the unknowns, of course. As technology becomes more deeply integrated into our lives, the legacy of the personal computer architecture, hardware and software alike, is going to weigh us down. We’re ready for a change in the way we do things with technology in our lives. It’s not going to happen all at once, of course. The pieces are only just being put into place now. The next decade is going to be fascinating as we figure it all out, and the more I look at it, the more I feel that the tablet will be at the center of our computing world.