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Public Confused by Tech Lingo
the_helper_monkey writes "The BBC has an article about how tech jargon confuses the public. It's based on a survey done by AMD asking the definitions of words such as megahertz, MP3, and Bluetooth. " I was recently reminded of how big a deal this is while trying to help my tech novice brother select a computer. If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
I pointed out on the .NET thread that our company, prior to my arrivial here, paid waaay too much for a website recently because of a misunderstanding in terminology.
One of the owners wanted the website to have a domain name that ended in ".net" because he felt that ".com" was associated with the US, and he didn't want to be associated with them (this company is an offshore company).
That in itself is kind of funny, but then when the company he hired to do the programming was asking him what type of server he wanted it on and what language. He had no clue, but told them that he wanted the ".net" on it.
They thought he wanted ".NET" and started it up.
At some point the misunderstanding was seen on their side, but they just ran with it, seeing that he was pretty clueless and then overbilled us.
Fantastic.
He isn't totally clueless, he does know a tiny little bit - but that makes it worse.
He just throws around buzzwords and it is a bit embarrassing/hilarious.
His current thing is that he wants a PDA that plays MP3s, and that has a phone jack directly into it that will let him dial-up and check his e-mail, but also record conversations, but it can't be a Handspring product "because those are crap, and did you see that Palm is buying them out" as he told me.
He was asking me the other day which he should try to get, "64K or 128K" in his MP3 player. I acted like he wrote "M" for megs and left it at that.
He makes my days much longer than they need to be - otherwise, I would be doing more programming and less trying to get crap done for him.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I work for a Canadian Graphics Board company (bet you can't guess which one... hint it's not Matrox)and you'd be surprised how many people call tech support cause they can't get their new 500$ AGP card to fit in their 500$ computer which only has PCI slots
"Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second." Megahertz doesn't only apply to microprocessor control clocks, it merely means 1 million cycles per second. This could be used to describe atoms, radio, or anything else that cycles really quickly.
As an elementary education major I can tell you you're being a bit optimistic. The current generation of teacher wannabes know less about computers than many people in their parents' generation. It is pitifull to think the person who was trying to figure out who had the better system, the one with 2.3 GHz or the one with 3 1/4 something or another (they were refering to the only number from the tech sheet they could remember, the size of the floppy drive) and nobody in a class of 20 knew any better. These people will be teaching your children soon. BTW this was at Middle Tennessee State University which is credited as having one of the better teacher education programs in the region.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Is anyone else reminded of that stupid architect from Matrix Reloaded? As though using more syllables implies hyper-intelligence.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
..bypassing the high priests of tech. Those people hate MS for undermining them.
I don't think that's the case at all. Remember, Apple was the company that brought the computer to the mainstream. Others followed, Commodore, Atari, etc. IBM brought the PC to the business world. M$, rode the wave much later. M$ commoditized everything via Windoze and later Office. This thing's been going on longer than M$ can take credit. It's just shifted, that's all.
M$s' crimes have a lot more to do with other things than bringing the common Joe into the fray, all of which are well documented and don't need to be brought up once again.
However, like American cars, we still don't get it like the Japanese do. They are the tech masters in not only production, but assimilation. Even the old folks are ooh'd and ahh'd buy the latest little gadget.
The average U.S. mom and pop computer users wanna do only a few things:
- send/receive email
- im
- maybe buy something at amazon (all hail the patent!)
- maybe print out some pix via email
That's it. In my experience, they care about very little else. So, my moms p2-350 still suits her just fine.
I was in a store with a friend who wanted a PC and the guys was telling us 'oh yah, you want a 80-gig drive, 256megs of ram, and a 2ghz cpu at a minimum'. I was like, 'For what?! To run a gene sequence server outta your house or something?' He didn't know what gene sequencing was.
Excuse me for being from the 8-bit old school days, but what the hell is the average mom and pop or 'un-educated' computer user need the above for email, im, amazon (all hail the patent!), and photos?
Exactly..
I agree. In fact, I find the most important vocabulary for new users to learn is GUI terminology - i.e. window, menu bar, scroll bar, tab, pane, etc.
Whenever you are trying to help a newbie over the phone or via email or IM, the biggest obstacle seems to be accurately communicating where they are, what they see, and where to go. Given that GUIs are built upon metaphors to the real world, this terminology should be the easiest to learn but often that is not the case.
How many of the comical tech support stories that have become ingrained in the mythology of the information age revolve around difficulties describing visual interfaces?
What do you recommend we use? If people are confused by tech terms, what units should we use? "This will hold up to 40,000 Word documents?" The number of MP3s? This might help some people, but frankly, it's about as accurate as measuring the area of a closet based on "Things it can hold" -- if you have Word documents of things like Shakespeare's complete works, you're going to fit way fewer Word documents on a computer than if you had 1-page letters to friends. Bytes make sense, and they're the true limit. There's no limit that you can fit, say, the 40,000 Word documents -- it's when you run out of bytes that you have a problem. I guess what I don't understand is what you'd have us use instead. A lot of stores now have things that will say, for example, you can store up to 24 hours of video on hard drive X, or 30,000 MP3s. But throwing away the 'real' terms entirely will cause havoc, as people don't understand why they could only fit 5,000 MP3s, each an hour-long speech, onto their hard drive that was supposed to hold 30,000. We need to help them to understand -- not ramble about how a byte is 8 bits, but rather something more like "Well, the average MP3 is about 5 megabytes -- five million bytes. This hard drive will hold up to 80 gigabytes -- eighty billion bytes..." You give the example of the medical profession, and how few people actually understand many of the terms. My doctor does what I recommend people do with computers -- he'll use a medical term, but then explain what it means. If he told me "You have a condition where you have to watch what you eat or you'll die," and then I tried to explain this to another doctor, he wouldn't really know what I was talking about. But if he told me (fortunately, this is just an example) "You have type 2 diabetes. This means..." and gave me a (concise and easy-to-understand) example, I'd know the term, _and_ understand what it meant. My doctor's always done this, and it gives me great confidence in his abilities, and is frankly kind of neat to learn about things, rather than having overly simplistic terms used. The key isn't to stop using tech terms, the key is to explain them in a way that makes sense to ordinary people.
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suwain_2
But the interesting thing is, most people think that "horsepower" and "torque" are the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about horsepower as being the same as speed off the line.
It comes down to the fact that metrics are used to sell, even when they're not a "pure" representation of what the buyer is looking for. Just like you can have gearing on a car that's contrary to the performance patterns you're looking for, you can have a high GHz CPU with a lousy memory or I/O bandwidth. The metric looks good, but the product may not be. Otherwise all the Corvette drivers would be buying 500 horsepower tilling tractors, since they've got the horsepower per dollar advantage.
People buy cars and computers for what they think they'll use them for. Someone looking for simple transportation doesn't care about horsepower. Someone looking to impress their friends will get a high horsepower car. Someone who wants performance will look into torque curves , unsprung weight, gear ratios, and, yes, horsepower.
Similarly, people buying a computer so they can "have that internet thing" shouldn't really care much about CPU speed. Developers might care more about performance, and check disk size, memory, etc. Gamers will want to know that they can tweak CPU Input voltage, and will want to know how many cycles they lose for a secondary cache miss, etc.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
In other news, a poll shows fewer than 5% of the public knows what "Dual Overhead Cam" means. Or could correctly define horsepower other than "what engines are measured in." Neither could they tell you what fuel injection was, what a transmission did or where it was situated in their car.
This news stunned advertisers that have been using these terms to sell cars for the past hundred years. Ford motor company has recently launched a campaign to educate the public as a result of these figures. Experts remain skeptical about the effectiveness of such a campaign, citing the fact that this is 100 year old technology, and saying "if the public doesn't get it now, they never will."
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
When I was in school, I was the "bright kid" in my class, and as a result, I was picked on endlessly by the other kids. This was sanctioned by the teachers. Once, I had mentioned that there were more than one ice age, because for show and tell I'd brought in some fossils from different periods. I'd gotten them from my father's cousin, who was a geolgist at a university in Virginia. The teacher called me a liar, and brought the science teacher over to explain to the class that "there was only one great ice age, everyone knows that". Then the kids picked on me for hours, as always.
Elementary and middle school teachers seem to *always* be clueless, and not just about computers. You seem pretty sharp, like the exception that proves the rule, so don't think I'm targeting you here. I'm saying, in general they seem to be on the dumb side (at least mine were). One, Mr. Gilbert, once failed me for using the word "alas"! He screamed at me, "A sixth grader does NOT use the word ALAS!!!" I had to spend a half hour explaining it to the principal, for cryin' out loud. Ridiculous.
The state of "education" doesn't matter, though. My kids are going to learn the way I did: my father used to bring me physics and science books that he got cheaply at work. I did the schoolwork I had to, to get through elementary and middle school, and I learned everything important on my own, by reading. I understood electromagnetism, geology, biology... All before I was in high school. I didn't need a teacher to tell me about it. Luckily, in high school I had some good teachers, and I learned a lot more.
The thing to do is make sure you spend time with your kids, teaching them what you want them to know -- personally. Don't depend on some stranger to show them the light. Remember, "if you want it done right, do it yourself"...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!