I find the excuse “I’m just not technical” a little strange. This phrase was hammered home ad nausium on last week’s episode of The Apprentice by the almost totally ineffectual Lucinda, and I’m not sure I really buy it anymore. Even Nick Hewer pointed out that the actions being performed in the latest task - copying some images from a digital camera to a PC - were really not complex.
The problem of being “non-technical” has nothing to do with technology in my opinion, but has almost everything to do with listening. Because people feel left behind by an industry that is a) moving incredibly fast and b) runs just about every aspect of their lives, I think they switch off and become unable to follow instructions.
I think it has a lot to do with fear: of the unknown, of the damage they might do if they click the wrong thing, but computers are very good at coping with that and just as pencils have rubbers so do computers have undo options and recovery functions. I do have sympathy with this, but I think people are perhaps a little too quick to jump to the “I’m not technical” argument.
As a web developer I often get calls from clients saying “I got an error and I don’t know what to do”. I ask them what the error was and they can never tell me in the first instance because they don’t take the time to read the message, but when they do read the message they almost always know how to deal with it. However bugs in software or problems when two perfectly well-written programs butt heads can throw up unexpected errors and at that point the non-technical card can be played quite legitimately.
Maybe the NUT’s comments on the importance of teaching technology at a young age will help to improve this mindset, but there is another side to early adoption, which is over-reliance. When I was at uni even my technology-obsessed brain instructed my feet to walk to the library and seek out a book on a particular subject. Yes I might use the library’s computer to find it, but I always knew that what I was looking for could be found amongst the thousands of tomes this relatively small library held.
When I was in my second year a lecturer told our group that some first year students had come to him complaining that they couldn’t find the information he’d tasked them to collect. When quizzed on this they told him that the Internet was down or they couldn’t get into the computer room or some other guff of that nature. When asked why they didn’t think of going to the library, a light bulb seemed to go off in their heads. This demonstrated quite clearly to all attending that 12 months had obviously had a massive impact on the way technology was taught at or regarded within schools and colleges.
There is an important balance here, and one which the NUT seem aware of, between being able to “work” a computer and becoming so reliant on it that all other forms of research seem archaic or pointless because obviously you can find everything you need on Wikipedia!
Actually a law student friend of mine told me that he delights in pissing off his mathematician mates by changing some of the results of equations on Wikipedia and watching the look of consternation on their faces when they discover that the numbers didn’t in fact add up and that for once the Internet was wrong.
I tried that once myself in an article about Bruce Forsyth but my less-than-subtle amendments were quickly spotted and rectified. Better luck next time.
