Y'know, the more I think about this article, the more I think it's a complete load.<p>My dad hopped on a steamer ship and found his way to England from India with one bag and 14 pounds in his pocket. He found a job, made a living, bought a car -- all without instant communication to some helicopter parents. A few years later he found his way back to find a wife.<p>A few years later, they wound their way to Canada, with the only difference being that they got to fly.<p><i>That</i> is risk-taking, experimenting and hacking your way through a new culture. Screwing up at making kettle corn? Please.<p>ps. In case you think that this is one of those stories of a previous generation, in 1999 a cousin of mine arrived at the Toronto airport, in January, without even a coat to survive the drive home. He's employed and living in a nice place; no handouts, just damn hard work.
I can sympathize with the author's lack of understanding of people's fear of breaking things, especially of those that are tech-related. Take computers for instance. It seems that to the average Joe, they're magical black boxes; they put in passwords, discs, and mouse clicks, and out come YouTube videos and tax returns. To this person, if they don't click on the right series of "OK" buttons, they can put the computer in a permanent state of hopelessness from which it can never recover. It's like they're in some finite state machine with no idea what states the state transitions take them to. To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring. But to Average Joe, the next state could lead him off a cliff or set his pants on fire. This "fear" of exploring could simply be the manifestation of a deep-seated misunderstanding of the concept of software in general. It's really no different than the kettle corn, despite its apparent complexity; it just looks prettier and makes different noises.
Perceptions of computer maintenance.<p><pre><code> Your perception
|
V
Making toast[-----------------------------------------]Brain Surgery
^
Your fathers perception |
</code></pre>
Working with computers is more like making toast than doing brain surgery, but many people think the opposite and popular culture tends to reinforce this notion. Many people are understandably afraid. The key to helping people learn to use their own computers is to reverse this perception and give them the courage to try. Once they realize that its possible, they will quickly warm to the idea.<p>Edit: I chose brain surgery and toast because of their qualitative difference, not quantitative. Its easy to learn to make toast and the cost of error is cheap and easy to undo, its very hard to learn to operate on brains and the cost of mistakes are mortal. Most people can learn to make toast, most people can't learn to do brain surgery. Most people erroneously believe that they just can't learn to use their computers and so don't try.
The author gets frustratingly close to insight, but ultimately retreats to "blame the user". Only now, instead of the usual accusations of stupidity and/or laziness, they're irresponsible for being afraid to take what <i>they perceive</i> as risks.<p>Why not ask <i>why</i> they're afraid? Why do they see risks that you do not? To what degree are these fears rational? What can be done to assuage these fears so that they can actually <i>learn</i> something positive from the experience?[1] Oh no, too many questions! Quick, blame the user!<p>Most of the time it seems that the fear of breaking the computer expands into something like: "If I meddle with this thing I don't understand, I might break it.[2] If I break it, I won't know how to fix it. If I don't know how to fix it, I will have to ask or pay for help. If I have to ask or pay for help, I will feel stupid, lose money, and won't understand the thing any better." (Note that none of this is specific to computers.)<p>Implicit here is the perception both a high probability of failure <i>and</i> the perception that failure will be costly. This is the kind of risk that people respond to with fear instead of curiosity. When it appears cheap to make mistakes, people are much more willing to risk making them.<p>In light of this, comparing this sense of fear that a computer user may experience to the "risk" of trying to make your own kettle corn is absurd. There was no perception that failure was going to be costly. Even if there was a high probability of doing so, making a mess of your kitchen costs almost nothing, is easily reversible, and involves no hidden mechanisms. You just clean it up.<p>[1]: Emphasis on learn because much effort has been expended on interfaces that are usable without being learnable. That is, even if you successfully navigate them, you gain no new understanding. The low point historically was probably when Windows XP shipped with a <i>animated talking cartoon dog</i> to help find your files.<p>[2]: "Broken" can be something technically trivial, but if the user doesn't know how to fix it, it doesn't matter how trivial it is--it's still broken for them. The idea that you can't break software only holds true if you believe that reinitializing/reformatting/reinstalling is just part of normal operation and not a "nuke the site from orbit" solution to real problems.
Really? No one's broken hardware with bad software?<p>Kids these days.<p>Back in the early 80s there was a series of POKEs that would fry the old PETs. If I remember, it'd blow out the CRT flyback transformer.
Maybe I'm odd, but I <i>am</i> actually rather afraid of breaking software, at least at the system-level. I'm not at all afraid of <i>writing</i> software, or breaking <i>apps</i>, but I really don't like my entire OS being borked, and I try to avoid poking at it for fear that it will become so.<p>This is mostly from experience of things actually breaking in hard to fix ways if you poke them the wrong way. Back when I used Windows mainly, I probably reinstalled 4 or 5 times because of something somehow being screwed up and there being no apparent way to fix it that was easier than just reformatting.<p>Linux tends to give you more diagnostic information (you can google for error messages), and I've never had to outright reformat/reinstall, but it can still be a real hassle if you screw up your system. Early in my Linux-using days (circa 2002), my Debian installation somehow managed to get apt into an inconsistent state that required a lot of manual fixing to repair. And I'm still somewhat afraid of upgrading anything in the kernel/modules/X.org/videodrivers bundle, because I've more than once ended up with hours of debugging after an upgrade resulted in stuff not working together (this was worse before Debian improved its process for handling binary video drivers within the apt framework).
Add the ability to do research - most of my computer troubleshooting is just search engine use. His kettle corn could've been made right the first time if he'd googled around a bit before embarking on the project.<p>Edit, after thinking about it. I glass-bedded one of my rifles recently. This is a procedure involving epoxy and a disassembled rifle. If you do it very wrong, you will wind up with the barrel stuck permanently to the stock; I suppose you could mess up the inner workings, but that would take more than willful ignorance. But the internet provides all the information necessary to do it right the first time.
I've heard one argument that posits one of the causes for this rift is the prohibitive costs of legacy computer hardware/software. The old 286 in my father's office growing up probably ran him $4,000 - $5,000. If you can imagine paying a much larger chunk of your income for a home PC that was not designed with modularity or expandability in mind you can begin to see why the boomer generation is so careful around electronics.
I think this article is on the right track, but rather than it being a generation thing it is what a person is made of. I see two types of people - those that want to do things themselves vs those that would rather pay for someone to do it. The trend is more people of the later and it is scary if you think about it. As the quality of workmanship goes down, those skills don't get passed on (like framing a house, or working on a car) and then in the end you are stuff with inferior work. A good example would be changing the oil in your car - most of the time it is cheaper and of course faster to have it done, yet by losing that skill (maybe desire is the better word) you are now relying on some old kid who doesn't care one bit about your car. It isn't just the "handyman" though, it can apply to everything from cooking to writing software.
I'm like this, basically frustrating to someone who is standing next to me when I'm trying to fix a problem or just being the one at the keyboard at work or something. Have a tenancy to dive in and click through skimming dialogs, most of the time it works just fine.
Brilliantly put. This is exactly the mindset of an engineer/hacker.<p>(Incidentally; talking about the market - I'm very jealous. Im still on the look out for a traditional style, fresh produce market that I could feasibly live very near too)
Strangely I've started off computer usage by having a fear of breaking hardware and no fear of breaking software.<p>I assume this is because I've always though I can "undo" software changes, but hardware was expensive and you couldn't "undo" much there. This might also explain why I've never made my own PC from scratch.<p>Of course, now with OSX on the laptop and virtual servers in the cloud I've almost abstracted away hardware :-)
I think it comes from the 1960's depiction of computers, when if you hit the wrong key the keyboard would shoot sparks out and throw the operator across the room.