UGC is overrated. He mentions this in his article: Twitter, e.g., is thinking out loud and not a lot more. Yeah, it's fun, but is it good for you? Sure, why not

UGC is overrated. He mentions this in his article: Twitter, e.g., is thinking out loud and not a lot more. Yeah, it's fun, but is it good for you? Sure, why not. Twitter's a conversation at least. But have you ever read a YouTube comment worth reading? And it's damn hard to find a blog, even a really good blog, where the "Comments" h2 tag isn't a sign to gtfo before you remember how stupid other people are. I think there's a parallel to be drawn between user-generated content like comments* and what the Web has done to the magazine format. Compare say Slate.com with a really good old-media magazine like Harper's or the New Yorker. The former is throwaway, largely vapid, blog-format pageview fodder, terrible podcasts, or dull echo-chamber commentary on the real, long-form kind of reporting and thought perpetrated by the latter. Slate pushes more words than Harper's, it's probably fair to say (and scare-quote) that they "actively engage" more of their "readership" than Harper's, but this is not an unmitigated good. Sometimes it's good to stop and take a breath and think, even if it's just for the 1.5 seconds you lose having to hit the home button before you can switch to your IM client. This isn't a categorical judgement on "content creation", but it's important to consider what exactly is meant by "content". Jarvis seems to be longing for the brave, relatively new world where you can add your blather to the bottom of the first page (~180 words, skip the rest) of a Time.com article on the Michael Jackson heirs. The iPad is perfectly capable of thoughtful aggregation and creation of content; what it doesn't lend itself to is millennial ADHD "multitasking" and throwaway content. (I think there's a breed of geek that has the idea that the internet really is a lot like the Matrix: you get images and text thrown at you for a while and all of a sudden "I know kung fu". No, you don't, you just wasted hours of your life passing your eyes over disconnected words that you will never remember, synthesize, or regain.) If you're interested in reading a book or two, thinking about them a while, recording your thoughts, maybe make a drawing or two, a blog post, etc., the iPad is perfectly capable of aiding your schemes. If you absolutely must watch two TMZ video feeds (and firstpost on the comments thread natch) while updating your work/home/secondary work tweetdeck streams and copywriting top-ten lists for your blogs.com subsidiary, yeah, you're going to want something different, but I don't want to be your friend. *aware of the irony thx