In an attempt to bring all of what Lanier had said in his manifesto to a single, graspable idea, the one notion that lingers in my mind is lock in; everything else that he mentions seems to stem from it either directly or indirectly. Although Lanier references the internet in his discussion on juvenilia (chapter 14), I’d like to extend the idea to what has been happening to the smartphone industry over the past couple of years: particularly, the widespread introduction of touch screen technology.

Could it be that technological infantilism neoteny that’s ingrained in the human species would have anything to do with the fact that the entire smartphone manufacturing business had suddenly turned to producing a technology that, in my opinion, is not yet at a stage ready to be introduced to consumers? Moving past the cool factor—which I also believe to be the sole factor to drive sales in this case—there is not much merit in touch technology at the state it is in now. The minimization of the learning curve should be the top priority of designers, yet instead, learning how to type using touch technology is introduced as an extra step that end-users need to undertake in order to use these new devices.

The idea of innovating and adopting the QWERTY keyboard into touch technology, in itself, is the epitome of lock-in. The QWERTY keyboard arrangement first appeared in typewriters in the second half of the 1800s and was designed to minimize typebar clashes. While seeing the full QWERTY keyboard crammed into the tiny surface of a smartphone is impressive at first, I wonder if the same level of ease still stands when typing, considering the technique changes dramatically compared to the computer keyboard. If the the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ might apply to regular keyboards, is QWERTY still the best method when we only have the benefit of our opposable thumbs when typing?

Instead of seeing crafty marketing schemes that try to persuade me to buy toys and that a touch keyboard is actually good for me, I’ll be more curious to observe how an introduction of a new redesigned keyboard would affect the future of how we interact with smartphones and other similar technologies in ways that are more innate to us by being in tune with the way we are designed to function.

QWERTY, Lock-In and Path Dependence
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/qwerty.html

Onion News Network: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA