Archive for March, 2008
Technology’s outgroup
The media regularly assert that the “younger generation” will comprise technical savants, fluidly emailing while watching YouTube while chatting with friends (on the phone and through IM, which increasingly overlap) while designing flying cars and nanobots. The claim boils down to the simple conclusion that new technologies are by the young and for the young, and only the young can understand it - cue the clichéd joke parents make about needing their four-year-old to program the VCR (that is so 80’s). Sure technology is rarely self-explanatory (’PC LOAD LETTER‘…). But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.