Research

Professor Matt Ratto comments

Apple promotes the iPad as “The best way to experience the web, email, photos, and video.” Does this promise come with any societal drawbacks? Professor Matt Ratto of U of T’s Faculty of Information discusses Apple’s ‘closed service,’ and the drawbacks that come with it.

What is Apple really selling?

Let’s use the iPod as an example. When the iPod came out, there were already tons of music players on the market. It wasn’t novel in any sense, but what iPod offered was a seamless system that bridged consuming music, purchasing music, and saving music. It wasn’t the iPod by itself that people were buying, but really a combination of the iPod, iTunes, and the iPod store.

Similarly, Apple’s iPad is not a device, but a service. An interesting question to ask is: “Will people accept, as they’ve accepted with the iPod, the closed service that Apple offers?”

What do you mean by closed service?

By using iTunes and the iPod store, iPod gives us the capacity to take our digital content with us or save it on our computer. But at the same time it restricts our ability to share music by locking down easy music transfer onto someone else’s iPod. Apple, through the iPod-iTunes service, gives the music industry greater control on how people use music. And the situation’s the same with iPhone. Every single iPhone application is vetted through Apple. Apple controls and monitors all resources.

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

I’d say that’s potentially a bad thing, as we’re putting a lot of trust into a single company. The important question is: “Whether or not a single company should be able to determine how we use, share, develop and produce media?”

You describe your research as focusing on “how hands-on productive work can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technology and society.” Can you elaborate?

I think most of us have difficulty thinking critically about the relations between society and technology and I often use the iPod as an example. When I ask people about digital rights management and how Apple controls our access to music, I typically get two distinct responses. On the one hand, many people don’t care about the closed system because that’s how they’d listen to music anyway – the iPod-iTunes service ‘fits’ their needs and therefore they don’t worry about Apple controlling their behaviour. On the other hand, more technologically sophisticated individuals might recognize this control and will use their hacking skills to break away from it. Although they resent Apple’s attempt to control, they don’t worry too much about it because they’re able to work around any restrictions.

The problem with both these perspectives is that neither are critical perspectives, in that they focus on individual, instrumental use. These perspectives don’t address larger questions like: “What happens to a society when access to media is controlled by one or two large conglomerates?” and “What happens to our ability to create new media if our media behaviours are pipelined by restrictive technologies?”

Critical making, the work preformed in the Faculty of Information’s Critical Making Lab, is about exploring relations between digital technologies and society through scholastically-engaged prototyping. In the Lab, we build alternative visions of something like an iPod or an iPad while thinking about individual, cultural and institutional processes that aren’t currently implemented by existing technologies. Although we build devices in the lab, our goal is not necessarily direct technological innovation or marketable objects. Instead we’re building artefacts that give us the capacity to think and communicate alternative critical perspectives on technologies. By doing so, our goal is to link critical scholastic perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to the actual material work of technological development.

For more information on Professor Ratto or the Critical Making Lab, visit criticalmaking.com

Tags: Behind the Headlines, Matt Ratto, new media, Society