Digg ThisTechnology can be a beautiful thing.
With technology, we can get messages to the important people in our lives in a mere instant; we can pay our bills and balance our checkbooks somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes; we can take pictures, sort them, doctor them, and print them in minutes, where before it took a week or more; we can publish our thoughts, interests, and discoveries almost instantly.
The younger generations have adopted the new technologies eagerly. They see what can be done — they also see how things that supposedly can’t be done be done.
The older generation (older than mine, that is) has adopted technology better than my generation has, as well: they have more time to learn how to use it to do the things that they always wanted to do but never had the time: investing, genealogy, photography.
My generation, well, hasn’t done so well, truth be told: we’re the generation caught in the middle of a sea of change.
I have frequently been reminded of this lately, as I have taken a part-time job (no, no information on where — my own restrictions) to help pay the bills, as business is slow for me right now. I am on the “front line,” as it were, and I take many phone calls and talk face-to-face with many frustrated computer users.
And for some odd reason, the worst of the bunch are people from my generation.
As I see it, judging from hundreds of conversations over my years of selling said technology, I think most of the problem lies in the idea that: a) we don’t want to look stupid, so we don’t ask until a problem is far larger than it ought to be; b) we don’t want to feel stupid, so we don’t ask for instruction until a problem is far larger than it ought to be; c) we think that if so-and-so next to us can do it, so can we — regardless of the fact that so-and-so next to us admitted they didn’t know how to do it and sought training to learn how to do it.
People want to make mountains out of molehills. They want to make things far more complex than they really are, perhaps in effort to make what it is they are trying to accomplish that much more difficult, that much more of an accomplishment than it really is.
And therein lies the rub: it’s precisely this attitude that creates the issues, the strained relations, the arguments, the mis-communications, and the exasperation experienced when the technology doesn’t accomplish what we set out for it to accomplish.
Or, even more precisely, it is what happens when we shut ourselves off from learning new things, or from having the attitude that we are able to learn new things.
Folks in tech support and customer service have an acronym for this particular disposition, and it isn’t always used in a positive way.
It does, however, completely and thoroughly describe the syndrome, and if you remove the judgment from the term (which, for some reason, is extremely difficult for people in my generation), it accurately describes the situation (be sure to link through the two links provided here; wikiedia has a great, if not too short, article on this): PEBCAK.
