My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
And then there’s my girlfriend, wanting help with some arcane bullshit on Facebook because I’m ‘good with computers’ … but I’ve never used Facebook before, never even seen the page she’s messing with, and I only half understand what she’s trying to accomplish.
To be fair, what being “good with computers” actually means is being adept at figuring out a new thing you haven’t seen before.
Computer literacy is about synthesis, not rote memorization. I like citing this interview, talking about software as “building blocks with which you can create things,” as a great example of what knowing how to use a computer properly is really like. (Note that the point isn’t the specific detail of the UNIX CLI, but the principle that he can imagine a novel workflow and make it happen.)
Speaking of which, that’s my “something about how people view or use technology that needs to die:” the notion that you can be “computer literate” without understanding how to program, at least a little bit. The entire difference between a computer and any of the technologies that came before it is that a computer doesn’t have a fixed function, and you can make it do whatever you want it to do as long as you have the imagination and skill to figure out how to describe it.