Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
August 24th, 2009 | 16,875 views | 8 Comments » | TweetI just read an interesting opinion column about technology illiteracy over at TidBITS. The author, Adam Engst, argues that as technology becomes easier to use and hence more transparent, society has lost the ability to converse about technology.
With that, comes a generation of people who can find information on the Internet proficiently, text message at ridiculously high speeds, and do any number of standard computing tasks (word processing, email, IM, etc.) fluidly – until something goes wrong, at which point they become completely helpless and haven’t the slightest clue how to fix the problem on their own.
At this stage, these people will probably throw away their “broken” iPod and buy a new one, or bring their computer into the shop for costly repairs. Even if they realize that the problem is fixable, they lack the vocabulary to express the problem clearly and so they find themselves unable to coax Google into giving them useful search results that help them to fix their problem.
Here are some highlights from the article, but I recommend reading it for yourself:
Dissatisfaction is the mother of exploration – only if Safari or Internet Explorer isn’t meeting your needs do you have much impetus to learn about and switch to Firefox. So the better technology works, the less we’ll learn about how it works.
I’d argue there was a more insidious effect from the loss of manuals – it caused an entire class of users to become technologically functional while remaining technologically illiterate. When I asked my mother-in-law, Linda Byard, what browser she used, she became somewhat flustered and guessed at Outlook. This is a woman who uses the Web fluidly and for all sorts of tasks far more sophisticated than simply browsing static Web pages. And yet, the fact that she used Internet Explorer to do so escaped her.
. . . Being fluid with technology doesn’t mean you understand how it works or can fix it when it breaks. Being able to dash off text messages on a mobile phone demonstrates fluidity; being able to troubleshoot a dead Internet connection down to a corrupted preference file or flaky cable demonstrates understanding.
Before Apple, before the IBM PC, we had mainframes and minicomputers that we interacted with via dumb terminals. You couldn’t do all that much, and you were sharing resources with many other people, but you also didn’t have to worry about things going wrong as much, because when they did, the computer operators would fix them.They were the gatekeepers, the wizards who controlled access and could say who was allowed to do what. Personal computers were supposed to democratize computing so anyone and everyone could do their own work. While that’s come to pass in some ways, it seems to me that we’ve returned to the days when you need a wizard to solve problems or do anything beyond the norm. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable situation, since those of us who grew up with personal computers are finding that we’re the new wizards.
via TidBITS Opinion: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
Update 10/07/2009:
I just stumbled upon a cool video from Google that attempts to explain what a web browser is to non-techies. Props to Google for mentioning Chrome competitors Firefox, Safari, and even Internet Explorer in the video! I love Google!
Feross, it’s been at least 8 years since we’ve talked, but I liked your response to the article. I can’t pretend to be nearly as educated with computers as you, but even I’m surprised when my friends have troubles with their computers, and the second I bring up vocabulary like display drivers, etc, I get blank stares.
With companies like Apple making things simple enough for my little sister to use, not that that’s wrong, people stop learning why and how their computers are working the the first place.
[...] also read a really interesting post by my friend Feross (read here) where he talks about technology making things so easy that people no longer have the vocabulary to [...]
SEAN!
I guess it just makes people who DO understand their computers (like us) that much more powerful and productive.
Conversely, it makes people who DON’T understand their computers that much more dependent, unproductive, and weak (which isn’t very good for society as a whole). If you don’t understand your technology very well AND you are unwilling to learn, then you can’t make your technology do what you want, and you’ll be helpless and easily taken advantage of (think online phishing scams, fake “you have a virus!” pop-ups, and the like, which harm so many people every day).
To some extent, you’re right. It’s awesome that my 5-year old cousin can use the computer to surf the Internet and play games, without help from anyone. Yet, it doesn’t mean that people should just STOP learning about the most important tool (other than their brain) that they will ever use during their lifetime. It’s something that’s really worth learning.
By the way, it’s great to hear from you. We haven’t talked in so long! I still remember how all of us used to play two-touch football on the field outside Mr. Harrington’s room. And I think in 4th grade you and I flushed an army man down the toilet and made it overflow!
Those are good memories.
[...] came across this opinion post by Feross on technology illiteracy by accident today, which in turn linked to the original article on TidBITS Opinion by Adam Engst; [...]
I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. While it’s cool that some people know what a device driver is, it’s more important that they accomplish what they want to (printing a document) without HAVING to know what a devide driver is. The aim of technology should be to be seamless and transparent to the user – technology nirvana is that “it just works.” Think of electricity, the telephone, etc. Very few people need to really understand how these services are produced or provided – this doesn’t diminish their value in the slightest. To go to the browser example – why should I care which browser I’m using, or that I’m using a browser at all? It’s an evolution. Increasingly, the use of browsers makes my OS decision irrelevant. The objective of the technologist is not technology for it’s own sake – it’s to provide something of underlying value to someone who needs/wants it. One of my favorite examples: why do you buy a drill? It’s not because you need a drill, it’s because you need a hole.
It’s funny how “tech savvy” people entered the age of illiteracy.
“To browse through” means exactly that. SEARCHING for websites. You type in an address and the WEB BROWSER connects to a system which looks up the IP address for said name. So a WEB BROWSER lets you connect to a location specified by numbers, by using words/other characters (IP vs. Domain Name). And an invisible back-end system does the translation.
The “illiterate” users in this video are interpreting the NAME of the device correctly. The MEANING “tech savvy people” chosen for the device is therefore correct, but WE interpret the function of it in a wrong way.
Now what is a “search engine”. An engine “powers” something. A search engine is a specific device for browsing the content of nodes in said “web”.
So not only can you use a “search engine” to find DOMAIN NAMES of sites, but also the content hosted by said sites.
And while a DOMAIN NAME is individual (unless it is categorized by a specific “container”, e.g. .com/.edu/.de/.info/.tv), content with the same name can be found through it, independent of the site’s name (for example, searching for images called “this is me” will let you find millions of images with the same name, but coming from 1 or more sites).
So a WEB BROWSER searches for a SPECIFIC “phone number” of a specific “Average Joe”, while a SEARCH ENGINE searches for INDIVIDUAL “Average Joes” (and their content, information about them), independent of their “phone number”, or who “hosts” said information about them.
This is similar to the word “umbrella”, derived from “para sol” (in Polish for example, it is called “parasol”). It is supposed to protect you from RAIN though, not the SUN.
So the words we use can be misleading.
Haha, this is actually quite insightful. Thanks for the comment!
We should create a UII (Unified Idee Identifier) for the “illiterate” inventors. ha ha
Because that’s how I stumbled upon your site here.
I thought some weeks ago, how cool it’d be to quickly hack together something similar to Google Instant.
Search for a video and in order to speed up the BROWSING (lol) process, preload the “nearest neighbors” in the search results.
So I typed “Youtube AND Google Instant AND similar -I know Steve Jobs already invented it” into Google (gotta love operators
) and landed here, through you YInstant site.
So we are complaining about how people are too lazy to learn what drives their technology or how it works, or what it is even called.
Wait ’til the “semantic web” and you will see the average IQ drop by 50%.
“Like, you know Google, like gimme that thing that like plays videos and where I can like find LOL Cats and stuff”.
All working via voice, because nobody will be able to type or read text by then. ha ha
“Technocracy leads to Idiocracy”