Posted on Wednesday 6 August 2008
As someone who exudes technology, I am used to interesting technology focused moments that sometimes come up in public. The other day, though, had a very interesting mixture of interactions that made me stop and think about technology and the general public.
The first moment was while checking out from the doctor’s office. The receptionist, noticed me entering my next appointment into my iPod Touch and happily shared that she loved her Touch as well. Here was someone who at first glance did not seem like someone who would be packing one of the most powerful handheld computing devices on the market. And yet she was. Her desk included a speaker dock and the Touch met many needs throughout the day including music, calendaring, and more.
Then my wife and I stopped for breakfast (one of my favorite guilty pleasures on a day when I have to be late to the office). This was going to be a nice long breakfast, and my wife and I had our laptops to do some work with the provided WiFi. The waitress saw our Macs and asked about them. She was wanting a new laptop, she explained, but her boyfriend had told her that Macs were only for art people. My wife and I dissuaded her of that misconception, but were then horrified when she went on to tell us that her real problem with her current laptop was that writing papers for college for the past few years had been very difficult with only Notepad.
Notepad? You mean that bare bones text editor that does a better job of emulating a typewriter than anything remotely computerized? She was indeed using a program that lacks rudimentary tools like line breaks (not to mention spell checking). Here was someone - a younger person in college - who had no idea that there were other tools available besides the expensive Word that she hadn’t purchased. She did mention that spelling was an issue and she hated how the lines always messed up, but she hadn’t gone anywhere for help.
While we talk about online tools like Zoho Writer, Google Docs, or Acrobat.com, here was a member of the general public who was totally unaware of them. I urged her to check these out, or even to download Open Office as a free alternative to meet all her word processing needs. We suggested that the librarian at her college might be able to help her work through some of these options.
That morning just struck me as odd. In the first case, someone who looked to be in her 40s was rocking out to her iPod Touch. In the second case, someone in her 20s exhibited a very low level of technical fluency. What does this mean for school libraries (not to mention public and academic)?
