What my 4-year-old taught me about technology

http://gigaom.com/2011/10/25/5-things-my-4-year-old-taught-me-about-technology/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29

by pitdesi • 15 years ago

42 25 15 years ago

gigaom.com

gbelote• 15 years ago

It's very interesting hearing about young kids trying to interact with "old media" like they would an iPhone or iPad. Swiping a billboard, tapping a magazine cover. To me, these aren't obvious ways to interact with the things I've gotten used to all my life.

pbhjpbhj2• 15 years ago

I've been using computers since the days of tape drives. Personally, I've tried to use a touch screen on occassions only to find it's a regular computer screen.

I think there needs to be some recognised international symbol that touchscreens could show to indicate they can and should be touched - pointer icon (index finder extended hand symbol) with emanating circles appears to be the de facto standard. They do rather lack affordance.

I've never yet tried to pinch zoom a magazine cover or whatever though.

Reminds me of the Star Trek movie scene when Scotty picks up the mouse and talks in to it.

Causification4• 15 years ago

There's already an international symbol for touchscreens: fingerprints.

polymatter• 15 years ago

I can definitely relate to the death of linear TV. I don't often watch TV. But now I can't bare normal TV because of all the damn breaks that completely destroy the atmosphere or the show I was watching to sell me stuff I don't want.

loungin• 15 years ago

I honestly can't wait for its death. TV could be more enjoyable given the technologies we have today (watching what we want to watch, and only paying for the content we actually watch).

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Same here. I haven't watched live TV in years (I watch scene releases, so waiting for the on-demand video services to develop wasn't an issue).

The only time I see live TV now is at a friend's house, and sitting through advertisements is absolutely excruciating.

Causification4• 15 years ago

Touchscreens bring people closer to technology, but they also separate people from understanding technology. It's great that we have a whole generation of people with iphones, but we also have a whole generation of people who think that if it isn't in the app store, it can't be done, who crack the glass on their iphone and throw the whole thing into the garbage.

A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything, and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks. Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a stylus to using a finger.

As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a long shot.

Derbasti2• 15 years ago

And programming computers is yet harder yet gives the user even more power. I think the dichotomy between power and usability is a false one. Technology should help people with their tasks. If this can be accomplished with a touch or speech UI I see nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately, it is completing the task that matters. If I think about it, most tasks that require CLI interfaces are not necessary on an smartphone to begin with. And that might be a good thing.

We, the technocratic elite, will shape that world. We will be its masters, magicians amongst men. We will derive more power out of technology than regular users. But the price will be that in order to gain this deep knowledge we have to devote an awful lot of time to learn the arcane spells and invocations that are all but useless for most real world tasks.

We choose to master technology. Others choose to master science or stock markets or carpenting. To them, technology is a tool. In very much the same way we will be ignorant of the intricacies of their world.

Causification4• 15 years ago

The lower the understanding of the average user, the less variety there is in a given product category. Desktops came in all shapes and sizes, until everybody bought one and suddenly they were all beige boxes. If you've strolled through a brick n' mortar lately, you probably noticed that most laptops look virtually identical nowadays. Tablets came in all shapes and sizes, from the ten inch slate ala Stylistic, to the convertible laptop, to the hybrid in the form of the TC1000 series, to the five inch chunkers like the OQO and the Sony UX series. Now they're all minimalistic squares of shiny, fingerprint-ridden black plastic. PDAs had a whole ecosystem of designs, so many you could find one that exactly suited your needs. Folding, sliding, with keyboard and without, slates, anything. The smartphone revolution destroyed that. Now you can pick from a shiny square of black plastic with one button or a shiny square of black plastic with four almost-buttons.

Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have the option of a microsd card or removable battery.

adrianN• 15 years ago

I don't think it's a bad thing that people no longer need to understand technology to reap its benefits. If I would have to understand all things I interact with daily at the same level as I understand how computers work, I wouldn't have time to learn anything that actually interests me.

wlievens2• 15 years ago

This seems to be a trend, at least in my perception: the more universal technology (the internet, mobile devices, ...) gets and the younger people become immersed in technology, the less they seem interested in how it works. The shortage in engineers and programmers seems grow while less and less people want to study these technical professions. At least where I live.

Why is this happening? Doesn't make sense to me.

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

I'm not so sure that's true. You also need to account for the fact that as technology get's more universal, more people use it. So the same amount of "core geeks" could be using technology, but the ratio of "core geeks" to ordinary users is decreasing.

sskates• 15 years ago

That's like saying people who don't understand how rsync works are losing out on the full experience of Dropbox. For the 99% of people who aren't programmers, first time ease of use is orders of magnitude more important than learning how to be a power user.

GertG• 15 years ago

Sure, new generations interact with media differently. But isn't this article reading way too much into a 4 year old liking to touch things and not having patience? I'm sure I also threw a tantrum every time commercials interrupted my favorite tv shows. (Still do, occasionally.)

cbs2• 15 years ago

But isn't this article reading way too much into a 4 year old liking to touch things and not having patience?

Very much so. Young children are still learning the basics of physical interaction with the world and how the world works. Its is incredibly short sited to give a child lots of exposure to touch-controlled devices and then delude yourself into thinking you've found some sort of insight when they assume that other things might have touch interfaces. They don't have enough knowledge about what things are to reason and infer about them like we can.

goatcurious• 15 years ago

Yes - the article is making an obvious point but its a huge point. How about this: my 2.5 year old niece is more adept at handling a touch phone than my mother! Thats crazy! The perceptive power of today's kids is mind boggling (maybe it always was but today's technology affords them a chance to express it more powerfully)

What my 4-year-old taught me about technology

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