The tools we use are only as good as those of us using them. There’s no denying that tablet computers and smart phones are among the greatest tools ever invented. They connect us to a dramatically large number of people and an astonishing amount of information–potentially. But I don’t think I’ve ever been sitting next to someone using a tablet when they weren’t watching some cruddy sitcom, updating their Facebook page or reading a dopey magazine. And considering the screens keep getting smaller and print books scarcer, where are we headed? If these new gadgets are just about ease of function and not introducing ourselves to better content, we’re talking more about a mirror–and not even an honest one–than a looking glass. Will it just be the same crap on a different screen? But others are more sanguine. From Kevin Kelly’s “Tools Are the Revolution,” in 2000’s Whole Earth Catalog: 

“Tools make revolutions. ‘When we make a new tool, we see a new cosmos,’ says physicist Freeman Dyson. He was probably thinking of microscopes, telescopes, and atomic particle accelerators. But even the workaday tools reviewed in this issue can alter our perspective. A tool—any tool—is possibility at one end and a handle at the other. Because tools open up options, they remake us. A really fantastic atlas of the world  is literally a new world. A whisper-quiet ultra-efficient electricity generator and a wireless Internet let us see ourselves as more nomadic than perhaps we have seen ourselves lately.

There are many ways to change the world, but I think the most direct way, the way being pioneered by artists, hackers, and scientists—third-culture citizens—is to adopt new tools.”