Vanity Has Nothing To Do With The iPad

Blake Eskin worries that the iPad’s shiny screen will add a previously nonexistent sense of vanity to reading:

Does reading become a more narcissistic activity? Do we project ourselves more deeply into the narratives we read? Flipping though a celebrity magazine, does it put me on the same plane as Alicia Keys? What happens when you get to the encounter with Kurtz in “The Heart of Darkness,” turn off the iPad, and find yourself staring at your own face? The horror! (And what about movies: What happens when, as Marlon Brando lurks in the shadows in “Apocalypse Now,” you find yourself not only sitting on the couch next to your wife, but staring at her, and seeing her stare at you?) Will the iPad inspire a wave of literary-theoretical treatises in this vein?

Here’s why the answer is ‘no’: because the iPad isn’t the first device people have spent a large amount of time on with a shiny surface. I’m on my computer or watching t.v. a lot of the time and let me tell you, I don’t think that much of myself. Why should I? If anything, I’m staring at those screens because I don’t want to see myself. That’s not going to chance with the iPad.

–Daniel Strauss