As I left State College four weeks ago, I looked forward to long days of catching up with old friends, watching the fifth season of The Simpsons on DVD, and making fun of my little brother and sister whose public school breaks weren't nearly as long as my own. The joke was on me, though: I spent the better part of the holidays as a pro bono technical support technician for my friends and family.
The celebrated science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The fact of the matter is that technology has always been complex. Today, however, it seems that understanding the full capabilities of technology is truly beyond the reach of those people who are unable to spend inordinate amounts of time fiddling with settings and configuration files.
That's where I come in. Many of the more technically savvy among us have probably noticed already that people love to ask us advice about how to install software, set up a surround sound system or buy the right plasma TV. When I was younger, I used to love the attention I would get for being able to solve people's problems. While I still do really want to help people, I'm beginning to feel marginalized -- typecast, if you will -- into my role as digital Mr. Fix-It.
If there's a problem with a printer not printing, a network not networking or even a light bulb not lighting (it only takes one of me to change it), you can expect my cell phone to be ringing.
I don't think this problem affects only people who have a long-standing interest in electronics and gizmos. It seems to me that almost all the students I talk to these days have a pretty impressive knowledge of how to get things done on the computer.
By virtue of our being here, we have shown that we survived the trial-by-fire of signing up for classes on eLion, getting readings on ANGEL and awkwardly using Thefacebook to ask people to be our friends. There's no doubt that our technical proficiency has gone up. The problem here is the same as it is with everything else: our parents.
Perhaps it's cliché to say that our parents aren't quite as hip or "with it" as we are. That's fine -- I don't intend for this column to ever go beyond the most superficial analysis. In general, our parents, grandparents and other relatives are busy, hard-working people who don't have time to troubleshoot TiVo or even find out why a Mac program won't run on a PC. Therefore, the duty falls squarely on our shoulders.
I can't recall how many times I've written detailed, step-by-step lists for my parents on how to work with their digital camera or back up their data. The problem, of course, is that computers are so flexible and multi-faceted that I can't write out everything that could conceivably be different every time my mom sits down at the computer. People need to understand the conceptual metaphor behind the machine, not a hundred-point list of which buttons to click. But because that's pretty hard to do, it seems that a lot of people are just as happy to wait until I come home.
There will no doubt come a day when the things that confuse people day will become as trivial as putting gas in a car or watching TV. As time goes on and technological designs go through ever more iterations, an end result is something usable by the many. A lot of magazines and newspapers seem happy to simply hawk the latest gadgets, without giving second thought to how often these devices fail, wasting people's time and money in the process. In this column I intend to look at technologies and trends that are truly important -- ones that can truly make computing both easy and enjoyable.
