Cras wrote:
I'm not sure why many people expected much else. There are people who drive hundreds of miles every day but couldn't ever change a set of brake pads. People who work at a laundrette but would never be able to fix the machines. Why are computers any different? Every field has levels of expertise and the general population rarely goes beyond "can use, don't understand, can't fix" in almost all of them.
I probably could change a set of brake pads, if I had the right tools and a suitable place to undertake the task. But it's not something I would usually consider doing, partly because I'd be concerned about whether my vehicle was safe to drive if I'd done that myself. I do change a wheel if I get a flat tyre, but a lot of drivers these days just call the AA/RAC/Green Flag for this.
My dad used to try to fix anything that broke. His car, the washing machine, the TV (in the days when TVs were repaired by a local repair man, rather than just scrapping them and buying a new one, as happens these days), he'd have a go at anything, which was why our house had so many items held together with blobs of Araldite. The idea of plugging in a diagnostic tool to interrogate the on-board IT system in a car would have been totally alien to him.
When I worked in IT in the civil service, I used to write batch files for colleagues to ease certain repetitive tasks for them, was always opening a command prompt on their PCs to get some bit of information about files that they couldn't easily obtain from within Windows, etc. I have no idea about the file system on my iPad, or whether there's the equivalent of a command prompt on the thing.
I did a Btec in computing because the department paid for it, but never really felt I got anything useful from the programming/coding modules because there was no direct need for me to have those skills for my job, and I wasn't geeky enough to pursue it just for the fun of it.
The IT team used to dread November/December because of the number of calls we'd have from staff wanting to know what computer they should buy their kids for Christmas. They usually had this vague idea about what they wanted their kids to do with the things (usually 'homework') whereas we knew the kids just wanted to be able to play Pacman or whatever were that year's must-have games that were flooding the market. Apart from one guy who built games machines for himself and his friends, the rest of us weren't interested in that kind of machine and our experience was limited to the bog standard PCs we used at work, so we couldn't offer much advice, much to the annoyance of the staff, who assumed we were all 'computer experts' and knew everything there was to know about computers and computing.
I understand the concern that kids (and most of the population) 'can't use computers,' but neither can they diagnose their own ailments or select the appropriate herbs from the forest to treat themselves, as their ancient ancestors would have done. Our lives are much more complicated than they used to be, most of us don't live and work within an hour's walk of where we live and we don't have to wait six months for a bloke on a donkey passing through the village to tell us that there is/was a war in Syria...... wherever THAT is.
To be honest, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to say we no longer have control of our own destiny, as we did when we lived a relatively parochial lifestyle. Some tit in a bank fiddles some deals and the repercussions are felt around the globe, so that millions of people's investments will no longer provide the pension they were promised and there's bugger all they can do about it. I don't call that progress
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