"Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities"
About this Quote
The anxiety here isn’t about gadgets; it’s about gravity shifting. Davidson is flagging the moment when “the web” stops being a place you visit on a desktop and starts being a set of ever-present surfaces that mediate daily life. His phrasing, “come of age,” treats devices like a new generation entering adulthood, which is a sly way of admitting that publishers and designers are the ones who’ve been acting immature - clinging to one-size-fits-all pages while the audience quietly migrates.
The specific intent is practical and a little managerial: optimize content for different screens. The subtext is more consequential: control. “Presenting our content” assumes content has a rightful owner and a proper way to be seen. But once information flows through tablets, phones, and “Internet appliances,” the rules are written by constraints: screen size, touch interfaces, bandwidth, operating systems, app ecosystems. Optimization becomes less an aesthetic choice than a bargaining process with platforms.
Context matters: this is the early-to-mid mobile turn, when responsive design, device fragmentation, and the fear of looking broken on a new screen started to reorder newsroom and brand priorities. Davidson’s concern anticipates today’s reality where format often dictates message. If your headline is cut off by a notification, if your video autoplays or doesn’t, if your article loads slowly on cellular, you don’t just lose polish - you lose the reader. The quote works because it frames a technical problem as a cultural one: attention is now conditional, and the condition is the device.
The specific intent is practical and a little managerial: optimize content for different screens. The subtext is more consequential: control. “Presenting our content” assumes content has a rightful owner and a proper way to be seen. But once information flows through tablets, phones, and “Internet appliances,” the rules are written by constraints: screen size, touch interfaces, bandwidth, operating systems, app ecosystems. Optimization becomes less an aesthetic choice than a bargaining process with platforms.
Context matters: this is the early-to-mid mobile turn, when responsive design, device fragmentation, and the fear of looking broken on a new screen started to reorder newsroom and brand priorities. Davidson’s concern anticipates today’s reality where format often dictates message. If your headline is cut off by a notification, if your video autoplays or doesn’t, if your article loads slowly on cellular, you don’t just lose polish - you lose the reader. The quote works because it frames a technical problem as a cultural one: attention is now conditional, and the condition is the device.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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