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Monday, November 08, 2004
Posted by tom
9:07 AM 0 comments

LETTING TECHNOLOGY IN

In 1989 I was in India working with the Tibetan Exile Government. I was tasked with teaching several of the young monks how to use newly arrived PCs for word processing and accounting. Within days my students became proficient users, not thanks to my brilliant teaching, but rather in spite of it.

While I concentrated on explaining the complex mechanisms that transformed keystrokes into images on the screen, they smiled politely and accepted what we call details as mystery. This acceptance of technology as magic is what technologists have been dreaming of for years, and it touches our deepest fire making instincts.

Fifteen years on and we are still fighting with the details of technology. Users still insist on knowing and understanding, on owning, the most elaborate details and features of technology, even those that are superfluous to their needs.

But there is hope. As the Economist recently points out in a special on simplifying IT, there are now technologies and gadgets that embed themselves into our lives seamlessly, and a generation of more casual, and less fearful users is accepting the mystery of technology without banging their heads against the details.

While simplification is helpful, anyone who has tried to hide technology will know that you can build a box around it but complexity doesn't go away. Westerners will feel better about technology that they don't see, only if they can trust that it is beneficial to them. The black box remains a menace to most of us.

A Luddite friend, who has difficulty using the electronic teller machine, is perfectly happy to connect his pacemaker via telephone to his doctor's computer. He accepts that the pacemaker is part of him, and is keeping him well. It is this acceptance or trust that will allow technology into our lives in a meaningful and less stressful way.

The next big leap will not be a simplification or dumbing down of technology, but rather an acceptance of the magic, a letting it get under our skin.