21 October, 2004

The great unwashed, the stupid, idiot users, technophobe, luddite.

These are all names I have heard in the last two weeks to describe people who use computer based systems. Maybe I’m not a very good technical person but it seems odd that we write other people’s intelligence off so quickly. As a, reasonably experienced, web designer I’ve seen some interesting technical solutions put in place to save ‘the users’ from themselves and other less technical solutions shelved because they might confuse “the users”. Basically it all sounds like crap to me and in my experience I find people call themselves “computer illiterate” to get out of having to use yet another useless system that doesn’t do what it’s meant to.

I like to believe that most people are pretty sound and reasonably intelligent, capable of learning new concepts and changing methods to make things easier. The problem is not with people but with the systems. For the most part computers don’t make life easier, they make shit harder or the same but different (which equates to harder due to learning a new system). I am wondering if people have become so distrustful of computer based systems now that anything new is treated with a certain amount of cynicism…or maybe it’s an age thing.

I have doing some tutoring work at the local Polytech, teaching broadcasting students how to make a simple web site. I went in with a some what cynical view on the whole thing as I was going to have less than an hour with each group of 4-5 students to get them going…and most hadn’t had any experience with the web beyond the Polytech intranet (which you could argue made them geniuses having seen the design of the intranet) but so far this is the quickest group of people I have ever taught. They picked up the fundamental concepts of HTML incredibly quickly and clicked with the concept of content and style being separated. They even understood the concepts of content, presentation and style being separated despite not having to. The final ten minutes of each session saw some reasonably unrestrained and fearless experimentation with the CSS file and some fascinating questions which left me somewhat amazed and provoked my own thoughts a bit. If this is indicative of the future broadcasters things might be looking up…as long as they can maintain it I guess.