July 22, 2004
Digital Literacy
Via Techdirt, here's an article on the growing digital literacy of average computer users:
If you'd asked a group of average consumers ten years ago whether they would like a telephone that had menus, a memory and a software system to organise their contacts, they would probably have laughed at you. Last week, I walked through a restaurant in the Midlands and saw, at the same time, six different groups of people at different tables doing something with a mobile phone - playing games, sharing content, laughing at a photo and so on. It all goes to show that the level of technical literacy required to be classified as a geek nowadays has increased dramatically. By the standards of ten years ago, we're all geeks.
Personally, it really bothers me to hear people in restaurants and other public places talking about RAM, hard drive size, viruses, and anything else related to computers, particularly those that do so in a less than fully informed fashion. That's just because I deal with the things all day though, so I don't want to hear about them outside of work, too. I'm slowly getting over it since I realize that it's only going to get worse. I might as well learn to tune them out. But, back to the article. It also mentions in passing what I think is the most important part of the whole phenomenon: digital illiteracy. Even though I think the decline in reading is a disturbing trend, it's equally important to be computer literate now. How many people are we leaving behind, condemned to a technological backwater? Does it even matter as much as we think?