We can all agree that if the previous decade were to have a gadget to represent it, it would be the iPod. Everybody loves listening to music, but nobody wants to carry a rucksack of cassettes or compact discs. The iPod meant that people didn’t have to snack on music anymore: they could take the whole fridge with them – and that’s cool.

Better yet, new ways to get music appeared. Purchasing so much never involved so little. Listening to so much never involved so little – and the trend bled out to other media, too. It’s not only music that you can gorge yourself with – but videos, images, and now books. Now that these things take no physical space, the human appetite is for media is revealed: it is bottomless.

Can the mind become fat? Probably not. An argument could be made that the effect of information saturation can be a paralysing one – filled with so many ideas that you might not know what to make of one of them. But most people would say: “the more you know”. It’s a good thing that people can spend hours on YouTube, Wikipedia, or any other of the millions of websites with something to learn.

But let’s be real: most people use these things for diversion. Funny videos, flash games, and instant chatter. It’s no surprise: this is the course that hardware and software design over the last decade has taken us. You’d be crazy to think the tools didn’t guide the hand.

Endless consumption – even of media – is not a good thing, and there is a lot of pleasure to be found in making. It’s a pleasure that a lot of people have discovered, and even made a living out of. But without expertise, making things with a computer is daunting for most, and it’s completely a hardware and software issue. Our filesystems and inputs are built around the creation and organisation of documents and spreadsheets.

But if forward-minded organisation put their weight into it, people could be encouraged otherwise. If software were less puzzling and more channelling, it’s hard to imagine people could hold off. Garageband is a good follow on that. Hardware could definitely make some pleasant strides with a more human(e) method of input. Just look at how well the iPhone has done.

As before, the technological revolution of this decade won’t really be the parts that drive it, it’ll be what’s done with it: a little less taking, a lot more making.

But who would be crazy enough to do something like that, a week from now?

Edit: Evidently not Apple, bugger.