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Developer's View: Real Life Inspirations Or Abstract Ideas?
StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.
"Hey, lets make another Facebook, only more betterer!"
I'm 28 and haven't seen any sign that my fellow Millennials are any fundamentally better with computers than Generation X or the Boomers. In fact, I've found that my grandmother who is 82 and doesn't even have a computer has more common sense about how she would use one if she bothered to buy one. For example, when I told her of all of the people I knew who got viruses by not updating their OS when automatic updates have been available for at least 10 years, if not about 12-14 (Windows ME?) or by clicking on every link and file attachment they're sent, she asked how stupid could those kids be to be that lazy and trusting. You can make excuses for them like phishing, but the fact is that more often than not, it's just laziness or unwillingness to learn to do any better.
The inventors are a handful of people at any time. The rest are consumers.
Once, if you had a computer you had to know its ins and outs. Same as people who once drove cars or flew planes. Nowadays cars just work and people barely know where to put the fuel in, cue people putting in the wrong fuel. No owner of a Spyker would ever have done that, they KNEW their car and its needs.
There will be new inventions made by old and young people but what they all have in common is that they don't just consume whatever tech is available in their time but think about and think about what is lacking or missing. The man who made lighthouses saw how his wife was cooking and made a better stove. Simple as that. Could easily have been her son as well. Or a grandpa watching his granddaughter. Inspiration comes from looking at the world and not just assume but to question. And no, kids are NOT better at it. If they were, they would be far harder to teach.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm working on creating a digital mouse trap.
You're just trying to bait us into making a cheesy reply.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
When the electric guitar was first invented, it was played just like an accoustic guitar but with amplification. Later, artists like Jimmy Hendrix came along and played it like it was a fundamentally different instrument. I think that a similar cycle is likely going on with the web, as the original article says. Like the electric guitar, the web has ways of "playing it" that are fundamentally different from the non-web counterparts. The best innovations have come and will come not from porting non-web faculties, but inventing new ones that could not exist without this medium.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Anybody who uses the phrase "digital natives" without a heavy dose of irony can usually be safely ignored.
Are there cases where dragging physical metaphors into computing is brutally-old-and-busted? Sure; but making MP3 players with UIs consisting of elaborate(but non-resizeable) bitmaps renditions of 1970s stereo gear was a moronic idea back in the 90s, just as it is now. Outside of agonizing over-literal nonsense like that, 'real life inspirations' seem to take two forms, neither obviously outmoded:
1. Remnants in name only: Your email client likely still has an 'inbox' and an 'outbox' because, at some point, somebody actually had two boxes on their desk. Guess what, it doesn't matter. The computerized abstractions have gained so many features(instant search, threading, sort-by-whatever-you-want, etc, etc.) that they bear almost no relation to their physical counterpart. They have to be called something, so the legacy name is harmless enough.
2. Borrowings that make sense because people want them: Y'know why stuff exists in 'real life'? Because people wanted them it. If they wanted the dead-tree version, they will probably want an electronic one, as well. Once that gets built, it will eventually be polished(having features added and archaisms removed) until it moves into category #1.)
This argument also seems to implicitly overstate the number of things that are somehow fundamentally digital. There are a lot of (mostly failed) ideas involving the dissemination of information in surprisingly modern ways within the constraints of antique media. Making variants of these ideas actually not fail this time will be a change; but it won't be one fundamentally tied to the internet(in anything other than an economic sense).
I'm working on creating a digital mouse trap.
Easy, just put a slippery glass mirror in its way. Whether it has a ball or an optical sensor, the pointer won't move an inch.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm sorry, but the college kids that I've been around don't strike me as being particularly internet savvy at all. For all this hype about "They were born on the internet, they were raised at its tit, etc." they actually strike me as being no more tech savvy than any other generation. Sure, they all have Facebook profiles and play a lot of those Farmville-type games, but they still have to call someone to set up a router. They still have to ask me how to do a complex google search. They still seem to know fuck-all about internet security. My brother-in-law had to call me in to fix his laptop after my Generation-Y super-internet-savvy niece infected it with about every phishing virus known to man. The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
So where exactly are all these Generation Y ubermensches I keep hearing about? Because I sure haven't met many of them. There are geeks in that generation like any other, but, as with all generations before them, most of them seem pretty clueless about tech.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.