GoodbiPad: Pushing Technology Capabilities and Habits (For Me)

Our class’s work on the iPad this semester has been both enjoyable and beneficial to our examination of journalism and democracy in America. With the continuing expansion of technology, news can be delivered and consumed on a huge variety of platforms, and the iPad gives users a mobile, user-friendly device with access to countless media and applications. The iPad introduced me to many useful apps that expanded my ability and options for news consumption, with Flipboard probably being one of the most useful in its function as a news conglomeration program. Flipboard allowed me to access a wide range of news stories from a variety of topics and sources, and fit perfectly with the touch screen page-turning presentation that the iPad allows. Our discovery of the “news-creation” app Storify also showed us some of the great possibilities for utilizing different media to share stories, and the iPad is a great platform to access the social media, videos, and text sources that can combine to make a unique and powerful presentation. Overall, the iPad’s combination of a user-friendly interface with access to a multitude of forms of media made it a useful and enriching tool for our class and for our overall news consumption.

On the other hand, one personal trend I did notice with the iPad was that I probably did not use it as much as I should or could have for all sorts of tasks, largely because I normally and habitually do so much news consumption on my laptop. I have not gotten into the habit of reading news while “on the go,” and I never developed the habit of frequently taking my iPad out and using it while away from my room. While the iPad is a great and innovative device, ultimately I feel like it does not offer many large-scale capabilities that are not available on a laptop. This observation likely occurs to me largely because of my own technology-use and news consumption habits, and there is no doubt that the iPad’s portability and combination of technology and media capabilities make it a very useful device. I very much enjoyed my introduction to the iPad this semester, and I feel that there is a high probability that I will be using a tablet again extensively in the future, whether professionally, leisurely, or both.

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