I’ve had an iPad mini for all of twelve hours. This post is a collection of my initial impressions. It’s worth noting that I’m not an Apple enthusiast. My only other Apple device is an iPhone 8, and I do most of my computing on Linux. My mini is the entry level Gen 6 model: wifi only with 64 gigs of storage. I also bought the cutest iPad mini case on earth.
In her fabulous book of essays, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino describes the perils of our current internet culture: There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet … and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly - no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound.
The first rule of no-social-media-club is that you shut your yap about no-social media club. For years I’ve wondered why 99% of articles about quitting social media are written by people who haven’t quit social media. Sure, they “quit” for a week, a month, or in rare cases, a year. The Pew Research Center says that 30% of Americans don’t use social media at all. Where are their thought pieces?