What my 4-year-old taught me about technology
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Very much so. Young children are still learning the basics of physical interaction with the world and how the world works. Its is incredibly short sited to give a child lots of exposure to touch-controlled devices and then delude yourself into thinking you've found some sort of insight when they assume that other things might have touch interfaces. They don't have enough knowledge about what things are to reason and infer about them like we can.
No, its not crazy, its perfectly logical. You're niece is learning how things in the world work out of necessity, touch interfaces being just one of many completely new-to-her things she is exposed to. Your mother has had many decades of a firm grip on how things in the world work and touchscreens are completely new to her extremely-entrenched mental model of the world.
The classic example of a child's mind being more flexible is the window of time wherein the human brain is more able to learn laugauge. After a certain age, the brain develops to a point where it puts up a wall that increases the difficulty to teach someone a second language, even though on the surface you may think that someone with lots of experience using language might have an easier time picking up a second.
The only time I see live TV now is at a friend's house, and sitting through advertisements is absolutely excruciating.
I think there needs to be some recognised international symbol that touchscreens could show to indicate they can and should be touched - pointer icon (index finder extended hand symbol) with emanating circles appears to be the de facto standard. They do rather lack affordance.
I've never yet tried to pinch zoom a magazine cover or whatever though.
Reminds me of the Star Trek movie scene when Scotty picks up the mouse and talks in to it.
A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything, and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks. Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a stylus to using a finger.
As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a long shot.
Ultimately, it is completing the task that matters. If I think about it, most tasks that require CLI interfaces are not necessary on an smartphone to begin with. And that might be a good thing.
We, the technocratic elite, will shape that world. We will be its masters, magicians amongst men. We will derive more power out of technology than regular users. But the price will be that in order to gain this deep knowledge we have to devote an awful lot of time to learn the arcane spells and invocations that are all but useless for most real world tasks.
We choose to master technology. Others choose to master science or stock markets or carpenting. To them, technology is a tool. In very much the same way we will be ignorant of the intricacies of their world.
Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have the option of a microsd card or removable battery.
But to 95% of the world, or even 99%, this is not the case. Technology is there to make their lives easier and help them accomplish certain tasks.
I don't complain when my car cannot transform into a speedboat on cue - because that's not what I bought it to do. Likewise, I really don't care that my pen is unable to change brush shape or stroke size while I'm using it, where an artist might find that to be the bee's knees.
Technology is a means to an end - I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity.
"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."
In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.
Now the point is, I am both a programmer and a pilot myself. So I can definitely see the appeal of both. But, I happily use an iPhone and commercial air travel. Other people have put in a lot of work to made these very safe and reliable for common purposes and they really work well for crossing the atlantic while listening to a podcast.
The iPhone is not denying anyone access to laptops any more than an Airbus is denying you access to a Cessna. They are not dumbing the population down. They get the job done with as little disturbance as possible. For the crazy ones though, There are real computers and real airplanes!
Why is this happening? Doesn't make sense to me.
Also, I would expect that being immersed in technology would at least stimulate curiosity in how it works, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
You can't peek the lid of a PC like you could with an Apple ][. There's no pre-installed BASIC to play with. No schematics. Even most cars are now "no user servicable parts inside" when you lift the hood.