From Fresh Air from WHYY, on National Public Radio
Steve, Myself And i: The Big Story Of A Little Prefix
By Geoff Nunberg
Steve Jobs did his last product launch last March, for the iPad 2. At the close, he stood in front of a huge picture of a sign showing the intersection of streets called Technology and Liberal Arts.
It was a lifelong ideal for Jobs, the same one that had drawn him to make his famous 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC for short. That was where a group of artistically minded researchers had developed the graphical user interface, or GUI, which Apple's developers were to incorporate into the Lisa and the Macintosh a few years later...
And then there was i-. The prefix had actually been around for several years before Apple adopted it for those gumdrop-colored iMacs that Jobs introduced in 1999. According to Apple's ad agency, i- was meant to stand for "Internet," with overtones of "individual" and probably the first-person pronoun as well....
It isn't just about computer science anymore, either. That isn't where you go to find out how technology changes people's lives, and where it fails them, or how to make it less intrusive and more humane. Those are the questions people are taking up at the Schools of Information that have sprung up at research universities like UCLA, Toronto and Washington — iSchools, for short. It's a different i-, but it too stands in for a connection between technology and the social world.
I wound up at the one at Berkeley, surrounded by another bunch of anthropologists, historians and legal scholars, with techies and humanists to fill out the ends of the lunch table. But nowadays it isn't odd to find technology and liberal arts intersecting on the campuses of Google and Microsoft, either. Jobs knew better than anyone that it's a bit trickier to make the final leap to Artistry. But we're closer to his interdisciplinary vision. As Victor Hugo might have put it, nothing is as powerful as an i- whose time has come.