Technology generation gap
Recently while helping older relatives and friends I had an epiphany about technology usage and age. Specifically older people approach technology with a completely different set of assumptions than younger people. Before you decide to file this under Well DUH! just hear me out.
The first occasion to get me thinking about this was when an older family friend was the victim of a fairly benign scam that essentially convinced her to forward some nasty political tripe to folks on her email list. Luckily no harm was done, other than embarrassing WTF responses from the message recipients. I was explaining to her that there are many unscrupulous people and other entities on the net that have no problem with misleading, lying and scamming anybody they can when she remarked that she thought it was “sad that you can’t trust people on the internet“. This remark kind of took me by surprise. I’ve always started from the assumption that internet content is not trustworthy. Not sad, that’s just the way the net works.
About the same time Bruce Schneier had this article wherein he reaches the following conclusion (emphasis mine).
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he’s operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society’s tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
I realized that this was exactly the disconnect my older friend and I were having. She was assuming that email was equivalent to handwritten correspondence from an entity that is known to you. While I was assuming that email is equivalent to bulk mail from an anonymous source. Now certainly there have been grifters and scam artists around since time immemorial, but it’s only been with the advent of the ubiquitously anonymous internet that the scams, schemes and spam have become pervasive. Back in the day, a grifter’s work was strictly up close and personal as opposed to nowadays when you can hit millions of marks with a single shot. Kind of like a knife fight versus carpet bombing. The point is that in my friend’s experience, a person who would lie, cheat or scam others was quickly discovered and was considered an anti-social aberration. And in general, you could trust most people. Not so on the internet, where there are no people to trust.
The next occasion that caused further rumination on this subject was when I was helping my mom with a computer problem. She noticed that several names in her address book application were appearing out of alphabetical order. I diagnosed the problem easily – the names had leading spaces. Apparently the OS/X address book doesn’t do a trim on entry fields. So once I removed the offending space characters the sorting worked as expected. Try as I might, I could not explain this to my mother. She could not get her mind around the idea that a space character is ultimately a binary value like any other alphanumeric character. As far as she was concerned, when you hit the space bar on the keyboard it just “moves over” and doesn’t print anything. In other words a space is nothing. The absence of a letter. Kind of like electrons and holes from my EE days. A hole is where an electron is not. Therefore holes have a positive charge. Yeah like that.
Again I realized that we were having a fundamental disconnect. I’ve always realized that everything I see on a computer screen is an abstraction. At the lowest level it’s all just zeros and ones. Actually high and low voltages or positive and negative charges. Even the zeros and ones are an abstraction. The desktop and windows are an abstract paradigm. Not so with my mom. She sees literal windows or cute little boxes called windows when she looks at her monitor. She clicks on buttons, types stuff into forms and moves sliders up and down. It’s not abstract at all. It’s literal for her.
So what can I do with this insight other than blog about it? Well immediately I realized as I was trying to make the argument to my QA lead that a bug where the back end process was working correctly but the GUI was displaying incorrect state should not be serious was a definite loser. On a larger scale I am able to articulate what is wrong with our industry’s release fast and patch often business model. It’s fundamentally based on our customers trusting us. Which they should not. And they probably won’t when the next generation starts making the buying decisions.
