I've been in digital media for 20 years, and the iPad and the tablet technology are the biggest things I've seen since Netscape in 1995.
My father is 91 and in a nursing home. I downloaded a whole ton of family pictures that I had digitized, brought them to the hospital, and showed them to him on my iPad. My dad was just totally.... You see, it's got a recorder on it, so my dad actually got to tell me the stories of the photographs of the family. That's a personal thing, but if you think about it in the context of cultural history and think about the potential of what this thing can do and the fact that we now can walk around with all this material that we can show people and share, it's huge.
A year ago I would have laughed at myself for thinking that this would make such a big difference, but it's just so easy to use. The best thing is that when you go to a nursing home and you're showing these photographs and getting people to talk about them, it's so cool. It's not the technology; the technology is an enabler. It's actually the content and the communication that's the cool thing about the potential for these things.
It's funny, because I worked in CBC archives for many years, and I'll tell you that if we can get archives onto these things and start getting people to talk about some of the images and to tell the stories behind some of the history that's sitting around, it would be a very cool thing.