[wordup] Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

[Adam Shand]

It's an interesting article but something doesn't sit right with me  
about it and I'm going to need to think about it more.

As Adam Engst says at the beginning, the video from Google asking  
"What is a browser?" is flawed as anything another other then a lark.   
In my experience even asking "What program do you use to access the  
Web?" would have produced much better results, and if you'd given them  
a multi-choice selection I bet most of them would have been able to  
tell you the name of the browser they use.

Also I think I disagree with the premise that we're getting less and  
less technically literate.  Perhaps I'm in an usual situation but I'm  
constantly running into people who are surprisingly knowledgeable  
about computers, who aren't "geeks" but have learned as part of their  
job or hobbies.  For example lots of digital musicians end up knowing  
quite a lot about how computers work in order to do what they do.  I  
also think that there are huge numbers of exceptionally bright people  
who know absurd quantities of information about computers, and there  
are more and more of them every year.  However is the rate of adoption  
among relatively technically illiterate people is much higher.

</musing>,
Adam.

Via: David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail...>
Source: http://db.tidbits.com/article/10493

18 Aug 2009
Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
by Adam C. Engst

Not long ago, Google produced a video that's making the rounds on the  
Internet. In it, a Google employee asks people in Times Square in New  
York City a series of questions, such as "What is a browser?", "What  
browser do you use?", and "Have you heard of Google Chrome?" (Chrome  
is Google's new Web browser; it's available for Windows and in pre- 
release test versions for the Mac.)

Among the geek set, the video has gotten a lot of play because most of  
the people in the video - who appear to be functional adults and who  
use the Internet regularly - come off as highly clueless. According to  
the video, only 8 percent of people queried that day knew what a  
browser is.

The video is clearly not a scientific study, and suffers from horrible  
methodology. It's likely, for instance, that simply asking "What is  
aWeb browser?" would have produced better results, and the middle of  
Times Square is undoubtedly not where most people are thinking about  
the names of programs on their computers. But let's leave aside such  
criticisms for the moment.


What's Your Browser?

Instead, let's take the results on face value and consider their  
implications. What does it say about the technological world in which  
we live that 92 percent of the people asked could not identify the  
name of the program they use to access the Web? If other statistics  
are to be believed, browsing the Web is the primary use of computers  
today, so that's saying these people couldn't name the program they  
use more than any other.

Worse, some of the answers on the video reveal that they don't even  
know what a program is. A number of them identified their browser as  
"a search engine" and "Google." When asked which browser he used, one  
guy said "the big E," undoubtedly meaning Microsoft Internet Explorer,  
which has a stylized lowercase letter E as its icon.

When the best someone can come up with is a vague recollection of a  
program's icon, it says to me that we've entered a "post-literate"  
technological society, one in which people have lost not just the  
ability to read and write about a topic, but also the ability to speak  
about it, all while retaining the ability to use it.

As someone who earns a living crafting text to help people learn how  
to use technology, I found myself profoundly troubled by Google's  
video. After all, if someone doesn't know what browser they use, or  
even that a browser is a program on their computer, how could I  
possibly expect them to be interested in buying my company's "Take  
Control of Safari 4" book (written, with infinite care, by the  
estimable Sharon Zardetto)? How could they even learn of its  
existence, if they had no idea that Safari is a Web browser or that  
they were using Safari?

(One concern that I don't explore further in this article are the  
implications of a post-literate technological society for marketing  
technology itself - will even technology marketing be forced to rely  
solely on pretty pictures and emotional appeals? In fact, are we  
already there? Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads help customers identify with  
the actor playing the Mac but give little solid information, and Apple  
conceals many technical specifications about the iPhone.)

But perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree, and Google's video in fact  
shows that we've taken great technological strides. TidBITS editor  
Glenn Fleishman, when we were discussing the video, suggested that  
it's a good thing that the Web browser has become so ubiquitous that  
people need not know what it's called to use it effectively.

(Linguistically, this same devolution has happened with the Web  
itself. Although it's TidBITS house style to capitalize "Web" - a  
proper noun that's a shortening of "World Wide Web" - it's commonplace  
to see even professionally edited publications lowercase the word,  
thus de-emphasizing the fact that it's a unique thing. I think they're  
wrong: "Web" should always be capitalized, as should "Internet.")

 From a usability stance, I think I agree with Glenn - it's a good  
thing that using the Web has become so easy that a myriad of people  
can do so without even knowing the name of the tool they use to access  
it. Most people just use the browser that comes bundled with their  
computer, and despite the issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer over  
the years, Firefox has garnered only a bit over 20 percent of the  
browser market since 2004 - largely from the small subset of people  
who know what a browser is.

On a platform like the iPhone, it's even easier to see this trend  
toward obscuring the identity of the browser. Although Safari is the  
iPhone's Web browser, and its icon is clearly named, applications like  
Twitterrific can display Web content internally, and others, like  
Mail, can open a Web link in Safari without ever informing you that  
Safari is displaying your page. It would be difficult to quibble with  
someone who didn't realize that their iPhone browser was Safari, when  
in fact, much of the time they would be viewing the Web via some other  
app that piggybacks on top of OS X's WebKit core.

Tied up in all of this is the fact that if what's bundled with your  
computer or phone just works, you don't need to learn much more.  
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 can't say that's entirely a bad  
thing.


When the Thing Breaks

But I remain troubled by this post-literate inability to talk about  
everyday activities and the tools used to perform them, using the  
proper nouns that are not only generally agreed-upon by those in the  
know, but with which the graphical representations of those tools are  
clearly labeled. What happens when something goes wrong, and such a  
person can't connect to the Internet at all? Can you imagine the tech  
support call?

"Hi, this is tech support. How may I help you?"

"I can't get on the Google."

"OK, what browser are you using?"

"I told you - Google."

"Let's step back for a second. What program are you running on your  
computer to access the Web?"

"I don't know - I just Google when I want to find something."

"Perhaps we should go a bit further back. What icon do you click on  
when you want to use Google?"

"The picture? It's blue and kind of round, I think."

"OK, that's probably Internet Explorer. Can you load any Web sites  
other than Google?"

"If I can't get on Google, how can I load any other Web sites?!"
I could draw this out further, but it's not far-fetched (TidBITS  
staffer Doug McLean confirmed that my contrived dialog was painfully  
reminiscent of tech support calls he took in a previous job). In  
essence, the caller and the support rep don't share a common language.  
They may both be speaking English, but that's as far as it goes, and  
as soon as domain-specific words like "browser" come into play,  
communication breaks down. A good support rep would undoubtedly adjust  
his questions upon realizing that there's a terminology barrier, and  
like Captain Kirk meeting an alien, would attempt to build up some  
shared terminology based on visual appearance before attempting to  
solve the problem.


Generational Problem Solving

If I asked you to tell me something about the caller in my fabricated  
script above, you might fall back on stereotypes and describe the  
caller as being elderly, or at least as someone who didn't grow up  
with technology and therefore has come to it, perhaps grudgingly,  
later in life. But what if I told you it could be a college student?

My neighbor Peter Rothbart teaches music at Ithaca College, and he's  
been noticing a disturbing trend among his students. Although they're  
capable of using the digital music software necessary for his courses,  
he says that many of them have trouble with the most basic of computer  
tasks, like saving files in a particular location on the hard disk.  
Worse, if something does go wrong, he finds, they have absolutely no  
idea how to solve the problem.

These aren't the sort of kids who are befuddled by high school -  
they're students at a well-respected institution of higher education.  
(It's the alma mater of Disney CEO Robert Iger, for instance.) No,  
they're not computer science majors, but they're not being asked to  
program, just to use off-the-shelf music software and perform  
commonplace tasks. And now those commonplace tasks are not only  
something that they apparently have never had to do, but lack the  
skills to figure out on their own.

Could this inability to solve a problem with a device with which they  
are otherwise familiar be a result of losing some ability to talk  
about it? I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible to  
troubleshoot without terminology, but it's less radical to suggest  
that troubleshooting will become more difficult without being able to  
communicate effectively with people who are experts in the field.

Not all that long ago, when adults had trouble getting something  
working on a computer, they would sarcastically say that they needed a  
teenager to explain it to them. That was largely true of those of us  
who were teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s, but if Peter Rothbart's  
experience is at all representative, today you'd be better off finding  
a 30- or 40-year-old geek to help.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that all young people are  
incapable of solving technical problems or going beyond the basics. My  
friend Dave Burbank, whose full-time job is as a fireman in the City  
of Ithaca, is also a serious geek known for taking hundreds of photos  
on his kids' class trips, posting constant updates via Twitter, and  
updating a photo Web site for the trip before turning in each night.  
His 15-year-old son Istvan is currently a 3D animator at Moving Box  
Studios in Ithaca and is perfectly capable of maintaining a technical  
discussion on the evolution of backup media and other such geeky topics.

In other words, there will always be geeks, and in my mind, that's a  
darn good thing. The technological sophistication of those people of  
my generation (I'm 41 now) who were interested in technology created  
the meme that young people were fluid with technology. But what we all  
missed was that 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.

So what will most members of society do when something on their  
computers or smartphones fails to work? Let's not pretend that  
problems won't happen - technology may have become more reliable over  
time, but the rate at which things go wrong even for undemanding users  
is still shamefully high.

Just recently, my father called because his iPod wouldn't show up in  
iTunes. After some back and forth, I suggested that he reset the iPod,  
and when he went to use it, he realized it was indeed entirely frozen.  
A hard reset brought it back to life and resolved his problem, but had  
he been on his own, it's possible that he - or at least someone less  
experienced than he is - would have concluded it was broken and bought  
another one.

This isn't a new concern. In 1909, E.M. Forster wrote a piece of early  
science fiction, "The Machine Stops," in which he imagined a future in  
which face-to-face contact was considered bizarre, humanity lived  
underground, and the "Machine" fed all our needs. Of course, one  
day...the machine stopped. More recently and amusingly, consider the  
Pixar movie "Wall-E."


Cars and Computers

The obvious analogy in today's world, and one that several people have  
suggested in response to our discussions, is the car. At one time,  
knowledge of keeping a car running was a kind of patriarchal rite of  
passage. Failure to monitor oil levels, radiator fluids, and other  
factors could lead to a dead horseless carriage.

Few people know how cars work these days, and even those of us who do  
have a basic understanding of them can't really work on a modern car.  
If the car stutters when accelerating, or sometimes won't start, most  
of us simply take it in to the repair shop and get it fixed. Problem  
solved with the application of money, and of course, since cars work  
relatively well these days, much less monitoring is needed. When was  
the last time you checked your car's fluids?

Like so many automotive analogies, this one sounds good, but suffers  
under scrutiny. In part, repairing cars has become a specialty not so  
much because intelligent people couldn't understand what's wrong or  
figure out how to troubleshoot it, but because the training and  
equipment necessary to diagnose problems and effect repairs have  
themselves become highly specialized. Gone are the days when you could  
fix a car with a few screwdrivers and a set of wrenches. The shops all  
download data from the car computer for diagnosis.

But the more serious problem with the analogy is that cars are single- 
purpose machines - they do one thing, and they do it moderately well.  
Thus, the type of problems they can suffer, while troubling,  
frustrating, and sometimes seemingly inexplicable, are still  
relatively limited in scope, more like a household appliance. How  
often do you have to check the inner workings of your washing machine  
or refrigerator?

In contrast, computers are general purpose machines that can perform a  
vast number of wildly different tasks, such as browsing the Web,  
reading email, writing a book, developing a company budget, tracking a  
database of customers, composing music, editing video, and so on.

We have up-and-coming geeks like Istvan Burbank, but even bright young  
men like Istvan have their limits. While I'd happily ask him to fix a  
Mac that's not booting, I'm not sure he'd have any idea how to help if  
I showed him a PDF where the text on some pages appeared darker and  
bitmapped when viewed in certain PDF readers (even Adobe hasn't been  
able to fix that problem reliably for me). There's a limit to how much  
any one of us can learn, but there's no limit to what a computer can do.

In a way, this is an odd situation for those of us who grew up with  
the personal computer. 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.


Technological Illiteracy

So how did we get here? I'd argue that Apple - and we Macintosh users  
- are perhaps more to blame for this state of affairs than any other  
group. After all, no one has championed usability like Apple, with the  
Mac's vaunted ease-of-use. For years, many Mac users scoffed at  
manuals. "Why would anyone need a manual when the program is so easy  
to use?" they'd ask. It was a fair point, for the users of the time,  
who were highly interested in the technology, well versed in how it  
actually worked under the hood, and amenable to poking and prodding  
when things didn't go right.

But then we got our wish, and ever more companies started writing  
software that was easy enough for most people to use without reading a  
manual, at least at some level. That was the death of documentation, a  
phrase I first coined more than 10 years ago (see "The Death of  
Documentation," 1998-05-04). Of course, it was really the death of the  
manual, and technical books have remained popular, in part because of  
the lack of the manual (how else could David Pogue have made a mint on  
his Missing Manual series?).

Even still, back when I started writing technical books in the early- 
to-mid 1990s, the average computer book would sell about 12,000  
copies. Today, despite a vastly larger audience (though with much more  
competition), 5,000 copies is considered acceptable.

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.

As the conversation proceeded (and keep in mind that my father-in-law,  
Cory Byard, helped design personal computers for NCR back in the 1980s  
and now consults on massive database projects for Teradata - Tonya  
didn't grow up in a technologically backward household), it came out  
that Linda had stopped reading about how to use technology when  
manuals gave way to inferior online help.

She didn't stop learning how to use various programs, but without any  
sort of formalized instruction or written reference, she lost the  
terminology necessary to talk about the technology she was using. Of  
course, she had Cory around to fix anything that went wrong, and she  
said that the same was true of all her peers too - there was always  
someone technologically adept in the family to deal with troubles.

Although it's harder to pin this loss of technological literacy on the  
lack of manuals when looking at schoolkids, the problem isn't  
necessarily being addressed there either. When my son Tristan was in  
second and third grade in the public schools in Ithaca, NY, the  
closest he was taught to computer skills were typing (not a terrible  
idea, but tricky for kids whose hands aren't large enough to touch- 
type properly) and PowerPoint.

Although some level of presentation skills are certainly worthwhile,  
why would you have second graders focus on something that's guaranteed  
to be different (if not entirely obsolete) by the time they're in  
college?

I'd argue that some of the basics of technology - the concept of a  
program as a set of instructions and the essentials of networking -  
would be both more compelling for kids and more useful for  
understanding the way the world works later in life.

When TidBITS contributing editor Matt Neuburg tried to teach a group  
of his friends' kids REALbasic one summer, he found himself frustrated  
at almost every turn - they lacked the conceptual underpinning that  
they could make the computer do something. And more important, they  
didn't care, since they were accustomed to technology just working. It  
wasn't until he got them to draw a stick figure and, by changing the  
location of its parts repeatedly, make it walk across the screen, that  
one of them said, "Hey, this must be how my video games are made."

And networking? No, you don't need to know it works to use the  
Internet, but isn't it wondrous that an email message sent to a friend  
on the other side of the globe in Australia is broken up into many  
small pieces, shuttled from computer to computer at nearly the speed  
of light, and reassembled at its destination, no more than seconds  
later? Wouldn't it be fun to act out a packet-switched network with an  
entire class of second graders and the pieces of a floor puzzle? Or at  
least more fun than PowerPoint?

Luckily, this lack in the public education system isn't uniform. Glenn  
Fleishman's son Ben is about to enter a public elementary school in  
Seattle, where the beginning curriculum teaches kids about opening,  
saving, and printing files; later, it moves to task-based - not  
program-oriented - computer projects. That's much better.

But I digress.


Illiteracy Stifling Innovation?

My more serious concern with our society's odd fluency with a  
technology that we cannot easily communicate about is that it might  
slowly stifle innovation. Already we're in a situation where browser  
innovation is almost the sole province of Apple and Microsoft, with  
contributions from Mozilla, Google, and maybe Opera.

Iterative changes from the incumbents can be worked in, since everyone  
will be forced to accept them, but does it become harder to convince  
most people to try a ground-breaking new technology because it's  
different, because it's talked about using strange new terminology,  
and perhaps because no paradigm-shifting new technology can by  
definition be so easy to use that it doesn't require some level of  
training? I fear that might be the case.

In the dawn of the computer age, the stakes weren't as high and the  
market wasn't as large, so I'd suggest that companies were more likely  
to take risks on innovative technologies that might appeal to only a  
small subset of the population. Today, with everyone using technology,  
I suspect that business plans and funding proposals all assume a large  
potential audience, which in turn causes the ideas to be vetted more  
on their business chances than their technological innovation.

Put another way, there have always been technological haves and have  
nots, but since there was no chance of selling technology to the have  
nots, technology of the past was less limited by the literacy of the  
audience. Since the technologically illiterate are not just buying  
technology now, but are the primary market for it, that has to be  
affecting the kind of ideas that get funding and are being developed  
in a real way.

Plus, think back to the point about dissatisfaction being the mother  
of exploration. We geeks may be willing to belly up to the new  
technology feeding trough since we're never satisfied. But once  
technology reaches a certain plateau of working well enough, if this  
lack of technological literacy is indeed a more general concern,  
spreading technological successes into the population as a whole may  
become all the more difficult.

I'm fully aware that my musings here are largely hypothetical and  
based on anecdotal evidence. But I think there's a new technology on  
the horizon that could serve as a test of my theory that anything  
sufficiently innovative will face an uphill battle due to the  
technological illiteracy of the user base: Google Wave.

For those who didn't see Google's announcement of Google Wave (we  
didn't cover it in TidBITS at the time because it was a technology  
announcement, not a service that people could use), it's a personal  
communication and collaboration tool that's designed to merge the  
strengths of email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking  
services. (You can read more about it at Wikipedia.)

On the plus side, Google Wave has the power of Google behind it, and  
Google could potentially merge it into Gmail, thus introducing it to  
146 million users nearly instantaneously. But Google Wave will  
undoubtedly be quite different from Gmail, and will require a learning  
curve. Will that hamper its adoption, since email and instant  
messaging and other service work well enough that people aren't  
sufficiently dissatisfied to learn about and try Google Wave? Only  
time will tell.


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