Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

http://db.tidbits.com/article/10493

by spudlyo • 17 years ago

22 20 17 years ago

db.tidbits.com

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

Aside from the fact that saying post-anything makes me cringe, this was good. I see a new law on the horizon:

"Anything sufficiently innovative will face an uphill battle due to the technological illiteracy of the user base."

It may need to be phrased more neatly though. ;)

jbm• 17 years ago

Kudos on the post-anything sentiment; to steal a quote from a monster, whenever I hear post-something, I want to reach for my Browning.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

to quote another famous person, "Post-industrial Barbarians"

Alex3917• 17 years ago

This post was ridiculously good, I hope more people vote it up so that it gets wider exposure.

gruseom• 17 years ago

Really? What do you think is good about it? I took a look (based on your recommendation - the title itself turned me off) and all I see is overblown non-sequiturs.

Locke16892• 17 years ago

An interesting post, greatly harmed by this little note:

(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.")

Linguistically, no one cares. This is so unimportant a point that it just points out how pedantic the author is. Just because someone doesn't know the origin of a word doesn't mean that they can't use that word correctly and to good use. That's like complaining that people spell the word "medieval" instead of "mediaeval" and trying to argue that it must then be impossible to understand the Battle of Hastings.

salvadors• 17 years ago

sigh. It's "mediæval", people. How can you expect anyone to agree with your analogy if you can't even get that right?!

Locke16892• 17 years ago

I know what an ash grapheme is, but I'm also lazy when it comes to Unicode. Thanks for looking that up for me but I can no longer edit my post.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Yep. Complaining about the natural evolution of language is a sign that you're being a crank.

But at least language cranks are good for a laugh, because in the throes of rationalization they invariably make up these hilariously broken rules. Today's rule seems to be that "unique things should be capitalized in English usage", which is certainly how the World should be. Why, my Mother would cringe if she saw such terrible usage.

Or maybe I'm misstating the rule: It's "if your word was once part of a proper noun, its proper-nounishness should be preserved henceforth". Which means that whenever I accidentally drop my Sandwich, or a Hamburger, or even a Frankfurter on a pile of Xeroxes I should use a Kleenex to clean up the mess. And you have to really watch out for those backformations, lest you write Crap when you really mean to write crap. (Though it looks like "crapper" -- or should I say Crapper? -- might in fact be derived from a proper noun, if the following link is 100% correct... which, frankly, is not too likely.)

http://www.theplumber.com/crapper.html

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Complaining about the natural evolution of language is a sign that you're being a crank.

+1 (coming from a reformed ex-crank).

Gormo• 17 years ago

Ironically, it's also completely wrong. "Internet" is a common noun, hence the article "the". You can find another network which can be considered an internet (such as Internet2, which has a proper name).

Same with "web". We say "the web". Which one? The world-wide one. No one says "I am using Web", except characters in SNL sketches.

larryfreeman2• 17 years ago

Enjoyable article, I would suggest a different interpretation of the Google interview results.

The Google video data suggests to me that we are in a "pre-literate" technological age (assuming that we judge literacy by a person's knowledge of standard web technology). I'm not clear that there was ever a time when people in general knew this stuff. (I still get a kick when I hear nontechincal people describing a web address: "H-T-T-P-colon-...")

Nontechnical people often don't know terms like 'browser' because they don't have to. The reason why IE has such strong market share is because most people use Windows and they just use the browser that comes with their computer.

I say "pre-literate" because as technology gets easier to use and applications become more relevant to people's lives, then people will know much more than they do today (simply compare the twenty-and-under crowd to the fifty-and-over crowd as an example of what's coming). If current trends continue, then the next generation will continue to be more technically savvy than their parents.

rationalbeaver• 17 years ago

My anecdotal experience leads me to argue to opposite case. As the article notes, "the better technology works, the less we'll learn about how it works."

My grandfather (almost 90) knows what operating system and browser he's using because he bought his first PC in the early 80s when you had to mess around with DOS. My dad is the same way, as am I. My sister, who is 6 years younger, has no clue. By the time she started learning to use a computer, most of the technology had already become invisible (for example, she never learned how to use a modem because by then we had DSL - always on).

Now, my sister is certainly web savvy, very comfortable with cell phones, texting, social networking, etc. But she's got no clue about any of the underlying technology. She doesn't need to know, because it just works. So I agree with you that upcoming generations will be more comfortable with the uses of technology, but I think that most of them will be clueless about how it works.

larryfreeman2• 17 years ago

It sounds like your grandfather was and is technical.

I'm talking about trends about nontechnical people. The question for me is whether nontechnical people are getting more technically literate.

Literacy to me is about the deeper patterns. For radio, think AM/FM/Satellite and radio waves. For the telephone, think electricity and sound waves. For television, think about the broadcast spectrum and channels. These concepts become part of the literate vocabulary only afer the technology gets better established and people get better informed.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

For the several millions of people Internet = Facebook. For tens of millions - Internet = Google.

What browsers you're talking about?

csomar• 17 years ago

So we are not facing this problem only in Tunisia, but also NY have the same.

Casual people don't know a lot about computers, worse I talked few days ago with someone that studied Computer and Multimedia (as they call it) and he don't know how to use a web browser (even don't understand it).

But this can turn at your BENEFIT

1- If you are working for a developer (let say an application) he'll check the code and then know if it's good or bad. Casual people won't and then with poor programming knowledge you can make more.

2- programming with Flash is easy, casual people don't know the difference between Flash and HTML; you can design their site with Flash and charge more money than your competitors do.

3- Culture of fear: They are always afraid from viruses and spyware which makes a huge profit to Anti-virus companies and you also.

Many advantages to pull from those people. It's like doctors, when patients don't know medicine.

10ren• 17 years ago

Who defines what words mean? The people who created them, or the people who use them? I can't see any pressure to reverse the trend shown in this video, and so I predict that "browser" will come to mean a search engine (but don't worry, there will remain a vestigial secondary technical meaning of, a kind of software application for accessing the web.)

But it does illustrate Chrome's positioning challenge: how can google have a browser, when it is a browser?

decklin• 17 years ago

I was with him until he blamed the Macintosh. If "basic computer skills" are things like saving a file in a particular path, what is bad about an interface that makes that abstract concept more accessible to most people?

(But I guess I'm thinking of the original, spatial Finder, not the current one. I am not an Apple user.)

dant• 17 years ago

I think the core argument here is that if the majority of the users don't understand the implementation details of the software/hardware they're using, then selling them new stuff might actually involve spelling out the benefits in practical terms that users can relate to. I really can't see the problem with that.

I also can't see why the Car analogy is somehow invalid because cars only do one thing. For years having a car was essential for living in many (not all) modern cities, without a car you couldn't get to work, visit family or buy groceries. It was an essential tool for living in much the same way as computer will be in coming decades. People did not generally understand the inner workings of fuel injection, anti-lock brakes or catalytic converters, but that didn't mean engineers weren't able to introduce those things. They just had to articulate the performance/safety/economy/environmental benefits in terms that people understood and cared about. The same will be true for computers.

tedshroyer• 17 years ago

If Chevy or someone made a new motor and asked most people "What engine do you use?", it seems like there wouldn't be many people that knew what was in their car. Average people care about features like "miles to the gallon" for cars or "has email" for their computer. They don't care about the name of the part that does it. They just want to hit accelerator or double click on something that brings up their home page.

Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

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