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The Widening Tech-Savvy Gap
When things malfunction, the vast majority of Americans try to fix it themselves. (And no wonder. Tech Support is synonymous with anxiety and indifference). Almost half -- 47 percent -- say the first thing they do when a piece of equipment fails is try to repair it. Another 21 percent have a friend or family member look at it. Only nine percent take a broken purchase back to the place where they bought it. Then there are the 3 percent of Americans who say that when something breaks, they simply buy a new something. This last group may be rich, but it's also smart; its members are most likely tech veterans who've spend years struggling with customer service, poring through complex warranties, waiting on hold for support and assistance, an oxymoron if ever there was one.
The survey of nearly 3000 adults, commissioned by American Demographics magazine and published in its March issue, reveals other intriguing details. Though fewer than half of Americans with computers say they fully understand how to operate them and all their features, there are differences by region. Northeasterners are the most confused, Midwesterners the most computer-confident. When attempting to learn their way around a new purchase, 89 percent consult instruction manuals, poor saps.
Adults under 35 are, not surprisingly, more skilled at confronting tech problems. For example, 77 per cent of those surveyed age 18 to 34 are confident in their ability to operate their VCR, while 54 per cent of adults older than 35 said the same. Young adults are also more proficient, says the survey, when it comes to using cell phones, stereos, remote controls, microwaves and computers. Separated, divorced and widowed Americans are more involved with high-tech than other singles and married people. This may be because they have more time, or are perhaps more focused on using tech to connect with other people.
Television, meanwhile, continues its long reign as Americans' most beloved and comprehensible technology. In fact, for years TV has not gotten its due as one of the monumentally successful technologies of all time -- cheap, reliable, easy to use. More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard.
Asian-Americans use the Net more than any other group. On any given day, says American Demographics, more than half of all English-speaking Asians (53 percent) go online, compared to a third of all English-speaking whites (33 percent) and a sixth of all English-speaking blacks (17 per cent). On the other hand, 65 percent of African-Americans say they know and understand the features of their mobile phones, compared with only 42 percent of whites and 56 percent of Hispanics. One might have predicted, though, that women are more open to reading directions than men.
The survey is significant for several reasons. It shows that responses to tech are different among different age, geographic and ethnic groups. It confirms the idea that tech industries are peopled by smart geeks still too far removed from the ordinary concerns of average Americans. It reminds us that Tech Support is a scandal. It reinforces the notion of tech elites who alone understand how the new tools of the Info Age really work, while most people struggle to use them. New tech tools from computers to cell phones may seem ubiquitous, but in fact, they are not. Tech triggers different responses in different people, depending on where they live, how old they are, and even their race and ethnic origins.
For pointing out the obvious...
There is nothing new here, this has happend sence the dawn of time. The young have always been the ones to adapt, use, and have fun with the new stuff the quickest. This is just a rehash of an old theme. This is life and nature at work, this is not technology.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
who'd have thunk that TVs are still #1? Just push the "power" button. They tried getting tricky with that kooky "program+" thingee, where you just punched in a series of numbers for any given show, and it would record. It seems that left quietly.
And could anyone find the source for this article online?
That's upside down. The problem is not that most people never aquire the level of tech-savvyness to build their own PC. The problem is that they try nevertheless. With IP protection laws, we'll see a lot more single-task gadgets which will not require technical skills. Problem solved. The other route would be to educate everyone to the point that they can handle their tech stuff, but that's like expecting everyone to understand in detail how their telephone system or their cars work. They don't need to and they don't want to and unless you want to make a problem of that, everyone will be happy: Specialists get paid to fix things and users don't need to worry about complicated stuff in which they aren't interested.
That way we will all be as valueable as an astronaught, instead of be as valueable as an office clerk.
The more esoteric that our jobs are, the more difficult it will be for common joe blow to steal our jobs, the more money we will make.
As much as I'd like everyone in the world to be computer savvy, in a capitalist world,
people get paid for their knowledge, their skill, and their ability to apply it.
By giving the common man your knowledge, all they have to do is have skill and apply it, this means you'll be without a job when you are fired and replaced by joe blow.
Your salary will be 30k a year because YOU taught everyone how to do what you do making your job as valueable and making you as important as an office clerk or mc donalds burger flipper.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Stats don't always say what you think they are reporting. Especially when done in the form of a survey.
For a good breakdown of how people understand their own skill level take a look at this journal article. It does a good job of graphing people's self assessments against their actual performances.
The point is that just because a population is not confident about their skills as a computer user, does not mean that they are lacking those skills. Conversely, it is the confidant ones who lack the knowledge to be able to rate their own performance.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
If the people Katz seems to be trying to advocate for are really so upset that they don't understand tech, why don't they get off their butts and start figuring it out? I bet it's because they don't want to. If years go by and some people get left behind, so be it. How is that our fault?
I can definitely relate (as can most of the people reading this, otherwise they probably wouldn't even be on slashdot) to the feeling that there is almost a class separation between those in the know, and the Star Bellied Sneeches. The real question is, is it just a feeling, or is it really happening?
You could compare the technology gap between yourself and your non-tech savvy friends or parents to the same gap that probably existed when your parents were your age figuring out how to use the radio. But is it the same? Probably not. Computers are FAR more complex oranges than TV apples, and when there is so much knowledge to be gained, there is so much of an opening for a knowledge gap.
As someone else pointed out, this same gap exists between most people and doctors or lawyers, etc... The obvious difference is, you don't hire a doctor to come to your house and show you how to operate on yourself. There is very limited action needed by an end recipient of a doctor's or lawyer's care, where as with a PC you are simply shipped out the door of the computer store with a confusing manual and your 10 year old kid who will probably be hacking into NASA before you figure out how to check your email.
But then, even if the computer companies packed manuals 10 times bigger (like they did for DOS) than they need to, very few people read it, and those who read existing manuals are usually disappointed. Having written several manuals myself, I can state from experience that a user will even call up and complain that there is no help for the subject, and when you calmly walk them through the available help system that clearly defines the process set in place, you can leave that user with the comforted knowledge that they won't read the manual next time either.
Hence the acronym wars that start: RTFM, FAQ FAQ which of course used to be a list of answers to "Frequently Asked Questions" and now has turned into more of a required document listing something more like: "Questions we think will be asked frequently"
So what can we do??
Keep all information proprietary and share nothing creating an atmosphere of mystique and intrigue and separating even further the technologically skilled from the technologically billed?
This worked for a while, as the "Three Geeks in a Garage" companies skyrocketed to fame and fortune, but by now the big wigs have caught on. They've known how to keep geeks under their thumb doing their homework for centuries, and if we keep away all the information all it does is lock you even more securely in the niche carved for you in today's businesses.
I say do whatever you can. Educate those who you help, and help those who want to be educated. Make customer service a priority, not an afterthought.
Someday the phrase: "I hate computers" might just be a thing of the past...
One area of technology where really good repair manuals exist is automobiles. Any standard repair on a standard car is documented right down to the exact foot pounds to apply to the wrench. But do the mechanics who love cars work from the manuals? Mostly, no.
It has not much to do with loving or hating a technology; it's about cognitive mode. Most of us do reasonably well learning by seeing; only a minority handle manuals well. The current generation of computers - despite the GUIs - favor those who do well with manuals. Much of the strength of Linux is in the succinct quality of the INSTALL and README docs in most program tars. RTFM is the mantra of a technological niche built by-and-for those who do well by manuals.
But that particular sort of verbal (supplemented by diagrams) intelligence isn't the only smarts people have; it's not even the only sort of smarts that might serve a tech-lover well. For instance, do you want your high-tech battle system manned by nerds-with-manuals or by those with a good seat-of-the-pants feel for the system and quick reflexes? Some folks have both, but for the most part those good with manuals are in the ground crews, and the kid in the cockpit is smart about - and loves - tech in a different way.
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
As someone who has done tech support in the NE, MW, and West, for off and on 15 years, my own experience agrees that the MW is more tech savvy than the NE. Lots of farmers and do it yourselfers vs. lots of self promoting egos. Hmmm...
But I must say this for the NE, on those inevitable calls where strangulation of the user is reasonable, if you boil over and tell them off, they usually stop and listen to what you have to say. The inverse of the Nice Only folks.
So why is the NE (along with the Bay Area) such a concentration of high tech if it is so techno-dumb? I don't see high tech companies flocking to the mid west. Also, what about all those little schools like Harvard, MIT, BU, NE, etc that are in the NE?
Who did they survey, the illiterate?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
That as people grow older they want to put up with constantly changing technology less and less? And it doesn't matter if it's cell phones in this century or automobiles in the last. Eventually technology always passes by a persons WANT to keep up with it.
Comparing TVs to the internet is also completely meaningless. TVs require virtually NO internevtion to operate it's by it's nature a passive activity. The net by it's nature is an active activity. A person does not choose one BECAUSE of the other. They choose one because of what they WANT out of it. Even if you had a computer that was 100% functional without flaws all the time, getting anything out of the net reqires one to pay more attention. It's work. Hell even 100 channels of TV are too much for some people to want to wade through.
And I'm not talking about ignorance or stupidity. I'm talking about WANT. Some people don't WANT to deal with technology on any level no matter how flawless or "easy" you make it.
YOU'RE the one whos elitest. This entire article is one giant freudian slip! You actually think that everyone on the planet HAS to be completely up to date with the latest and greatest. That's bullshit and that's your elitism showing.
This article says loads more about yourself than any other point you tried to being up.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Having worked in retail selling PCs and then having worked for a large ISP doing tech support and writing technical support content, my opinion of the matter, whatever it is worth, is that no one has realized the basic fact that support works only when both sides meet at the middle.
First of all, companies spend too much on supporting the least profitable customers. There are, unfortunately, some people who are just too stupid to use certain technologies. That may not fit in with the idealism of the present age, but it is a fact. At the same time, savvy users are often denied the online resources / self help data which is cheap to provide. No one should ever have to dig, for example, for IP, DNS, etc. setttings for their ISP. The ISP I use doesn't have a single page written with the basic numbers that I need to configure a PC, but they'll spend countless hours writing "How to use e-mail" documents and supporting users who delete their WINNT directory "because they're using Windows 2000."
Learning to use technology requires the affirmative and volitional use of brainpower. The worst disservice you can do to support a person is to tell them what keys to press, and in what order, without telling them why. This may be a short term fix to get a customer off of the phones, but it results in countless followup calls which make hold times longer, support more expensive, and therefore services for expensive. A little user education goes a long way. Consumers should be expected to open up their minds and learn about the technologies they use. If a 3 year old can use a PC - and many, many do, there is no reason why a full-grown person cannot spend a little time in the evenings educating themselves in whatever way they are most comfortable with.
"I don't have the time." What this means is, the individual would rather watch Survivor than spend 30 minutes in their evenings learning a little bit about the technology they use. Well, that's *their* problem. In the end, the decreased productivity they experience, all of the time saving measures they cannot avail themselves of, etc. far exceeds the simple initial investment of RTFM. How often I've watched people in my own office lay out little bulletins and brochures using scotch tape and scissors when they could have done it in a fraction of the time using only the most basic functions of Word. It's not as if you have to be a computer geek, just a reasonably educated computer user. Anyone who has ever put the time in ought to know that the investment pays off, frees up time, money, and resources.
Paranoia about support boundaries. Several companies I've worked for have paranoia about supporting products beyond the most rudimentary tasks. An example of this is setting up a Linux system to work with an ISP. Write the damn documentation, put it online, and then put a disclaimer on it saying, "Use this information at your own risk. We don't support it and are not responsible for anything that happens to you including spontaneous combustion if it all goes awry." Whatever the company's legal department is happy with. Some companies do this now and it makes life easier and saves a phone call, which costs companies so much money.
So much time has been spent catering to the user's ignorance that consumers are not expected to take some effort to learn about the products they buy. Every time something is dumbed down to the point a monkey can use it, inevitably two things happen:
Ideally, ample online/self-help resources ought to be provided by every company that manufactures a product, because it is cheap; in fact it costs almost nothing. You spend the time hiring some technical writers or knowledge engineers to put together a knowledge base or support web, then just have a few maintainers on. Agents can then use this information for support, and so forth. This is infinitely cheaper than doing phone support.
Then, there ought to be tiered pricing for support, depending on the issue. Phone support ought not necessarily be free. People who expect companies to bend over backwards for them have no conception of revenue models. Support is *expensive*. There is no reason, for example, a company should be forced to support someone who will not crack open a manual. What this does is drive up wait times, resulting either in customer dissatisfaction, or the company has to hire more tech support people, which costs money, cuts into profits, resulting in the expense being passed onto the consumer.
But consumers want everything dirt cheap. That's Capitalism. What they don't want is the very basic reality that you get what you pay for. Take low-margin industries like PC retail. Sure you can buy a bargain basement clone with who-knows-what in it, but somehow when it works like crap, the indignant dissastisfied-customer attitude doesn't impress me. Support and quality ought to come at a premium. If customers didn't buy technology like they buy clothes pins, like "they're all the same," maybe they wouldn't be bitten so hard by poor support and low quality.
Inevitably every customer I've dealt with has some "10 year old whiz kid" in the family who *thinks* he knows everything about computers. Occasionally this is the case, but more often my experience has been that for some perverse reason it has become *fashionable* to be a computer nerd, and so a lot of people who know how to mouse around in Windows call themselves experts for the supposed status it brings (I went to school in the 1980s and the opposite could not have been more true). All technology is not build the same. All companies are not built the same. Sometimes, yeah, you get what you pay for. Deal with it.
Learn to read manuals and use the library and especially online resources. Or else get someone to teach you. Or pay for the support that you require that so few others, who have the ability to learn on their own, do.
I had no one to teach me about computers or technology, or how to work my VCR. I had to sit down and learn it, and it didn't take up all of my free time; I didn't have to dedicate my life to figure out how to stop the damn blinking 12:00 on my VCR. It took 5 minutes. 5 minutes people are not willing to spend. And in 90% of the cases not because they are working 24/7 and don't have a single second to figure it out, but because they are lazy and would rather indulge themselves in whatever banalities pass for entertainment in the world these days. I am not sympathetic. There are so many resources available to people, and the time required to learn the basics of anything so considerably small compared to the time-saving benefits and payoffs, that I don't see why I should care about this gap.
Somewhere in America there is an idiot whining about the fact that he has to learn to cursor around the menu system on his VCR, while an 8 year old is installing FreeBSD in his free time.
Welcome to the 2000s. This is life. I wonder if people whined about having to learn to read following the invention of the printing press and the onset of the Enlightenment, and eventually the industrial revolution.
Carry your own weight, or get out of the road, maggots.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
From that page:
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42. It incorporated several major innovations in computing including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions.
On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer or the ABC.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Honestly, does anybody know what he's rebelling against? Generally Katz's stories have gotten progressively worse but this is something that truly feels like it came out of left field? I was unable to determine the point of this rant. Tech support never any help?... I've almost always gotten quick and concise help. The whole industry a failure?... uh huh, whatever. Maybe Katz feels he should run the whole show. Then we could have an industry as pointless and convoluted as this rant.
Personally, I think it starts somewhere in grade school (and perhaps even before):
There are kids who only do what they are told to, there are kids who extrapolate on what they are told to do, then there are kids who get the other kids to do what they were told to do to do it for them (whew!)...
Anyhow, most people fall into the first and last categories. They are trapped there, by their own ignorance and apathy. Call them the Sheep and the Lazy.
In reality, they are one and the same. Whether it is how to program a VCR, work a computer, or fix a leaky faucet - not a single one of them will take the time to learn to do it themselves (which is probably a good thing - it keeps those who are in the second category gainfully employed).
Those in the middle? They are the artists, the thinkers, the tinkerers, the inventors, the mechanics, the programmers - they are the people who ask the questions, find the answers, and then apply those answers toward the search for the truth (which inevitably leads to more questions, more answers, etc).
I don't think I will ever understand completely why there are individuals without curiosity and drive to expand their knowledge about the world around them. With time on this planet so limited, it should almost be an instinct to want to know more. The travesty for anyone who does exhibit curiosity about the world around them is that they also know that one day, in what is really only a blink of time, that the quest will end - whether they want it to or not.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Why should the tech industry think "long and hard" about how most folks can use a TV more easily than they can a computer?
One part of me thinks that bringing computers out of the garages and labs was a BIG mistake. This part of me says, "Computers are for techies, not for the general masses." Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be further ahead if we hadn't sold out?
..but then I supposed I wouldn't have my Palm Pilot. I dunno. It just seems a bit unrealistic to expect everyone everywhere to understand computers. They are NOT "magic TVs".
Furthermore, I do not want my computer to become a "magic TV." I want my computers to continue to be my own jumbles of circuit cards and twisted wires and strange humming noises that my wife points at and says the word "that".
I don't want to be coddled by layers and layers of metaphor and "cuteness". I want my machines to be powerful tools that I can use for work, study and pastime. I don't want them "dumbed down".
Then again, I sure like my GPS and digital camera. I don't think I'd have these toys if I still had to buy wire-wrap sockets and ICs to fix my Altair 8800. So, once again, I'm not sure.
Did we sell out?
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.