This baby is stumped by her new toy. Her chubby hands push and prod the pages, but no matter what she does, the magazine doesn’t work for her.
In the minute-long clip, “A Magazine is an iPad that Does Not Work,” a father films his daughter attempting to use an old-fashioned print magazine like a touch screen. While it’s negotiable how much content this baby gets from either the iPad or the magazine, it’s clear which one she prefers more.
“For my 1 year old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work,” concludes the video’s overlay text. “It will remain so her whole life. Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS.”
The dad, to whom we have reached out for an interview, wrote he recorded the video as a tribute to Steve Jobs.
But numerous blogs say this video provides proof that for the next generation, print is already dead.
“We guess it’s only natural that [babies] examine items that don’t respond to touch — and then move on to the things that do,” stated the Huffington Post.
“On one level this is cute, but on another, it could speak to the incredibly powerful way the technological innovations of the past 15 years or so will affect the next generation of human beings,” wrote Erik Limer on Geekosystem.
“If you’re exposed to a tablet interface that works as effortlessly as the iPad, why wouldn’t you expect the same from the real world?” Gizmodo questioned.
The baby/iPad phenonmenon is not new to the Web. More than a year ago, a video showing how instinctively a toddler took to the iPad received a lot of attention.
What does this mean for the future of books—or the future of babies for that matter? Whatever the significance, it sure is cute.