Behind the technology curve


NYT op-ed on being behind the technology curve

Interesting article, but badly misguided, I think.

For one thing, there are a few different problems here, which are all lumped together into one technology bugaboo. This guy is frustrated, and he thinks it's one thing, but it's really about five:

  1. Technology can be hard to use.
  2. Technology can be hard to maintain.
  3. There's new technology that many people don't know how to apply if they didn't grow up with it.
  4. Technology tends to interact with other technology with outcomes across a whole range of synergystic or anergistic effects.
  5. Some technology requires that you integrate it enough to see the effects across your other technologies, otherwise it looks worthless.
The first two are simple - technology is by nature very difficult to use and even more difficult to maintain. Douglas Adams had a great thing to say about this. I'd quote directly, but my copy of The Salmon of Doubt is out somewhere seeking new readers(***). He noted that the computer is not a thing in itself, it's a modeling device. So any given experience of using a computer is mostly dependent on the quality of the model. People who don't understand computers don't understand that anything that's difficult is that way because someone didn't put in enough or the right kind of effort to make it easy (which is not in the least to denigrate that effort - it can be the hardest part of software development). This is a longstanding disconnect between what developers need (and what they think is easy to deal with) and what consumers need, which has by any standards only gotten better in the past 20 years, but which still has a long way to go. Most of the recent attempts to solve this problem have been focused on restricting functionality, which results in an easy-to-use product that doesn't do anything useful for most people.

The last three are a bit more tricky. I think a lot of it is about a lack of obvious entry paths. I came to computer graphics primarily through a need to publish promotional posters for a campus literary society many years ago. Having done so, I was fairly ready to embrace digital photography (as a non-photographer). I understood graphics file formats, halftoning and how to get good prints, and I had a computer already with some decent graphics software. All that stood in the way was the price barrier, which eventually dropped. So then I picked up a digital camera, and found myself with a lot of excess disk space on a server which I'd purchased to store the growing number of GB my high res pictures were taking up. So I set aside some of that space for MP3s and starting ripping my CDs. Once I had a library of MP3s, it was an obvious step to look for a portable player, and I chose one that used the same storage cards as my camera.

All of this is only to say that getting into this technology has been for me (and everyone I know), a very incremental process, and from the outside, it looks daunting. Having a digital camera and using it a lot requires lots of disk storage and decent backups. Seeing the value in MP3 requires having a library of music (which requires lots of disk storage and decent backups), possibly a home network (if you want to play MP3s on your home A/V system, if you have a home A/V system and not just a plain old stereo - that's a whole other story), and maybe some portable devices. Maybe your portable MP3 player will be integrated with your camera, or your scheduler, or your phone. Except that the physical constraints of a device that makes a good camera aren't the same as those of a device that makes a good portable music player. But I digress...

I think the real point here is that it's a mistake to take the view that all of these technologies are "products". They are producers, consumers, and translators of various digital services, all of which are merely models of real or imagined concepts. They might be modeling music, or images, or a committment to be in a particular place at a particular time. As a general rule, the value of modeling lies in its openness to manipulate the model. While a photograph is just a photograph, a digital representation of a photograph can be used by other services, protected against loss, replicated, and made easily available to others. When you buy a digital camera, you're not buying a camera in the traditional sense, you're buying an entry point (a producer) into that network of services, which is largely useless until you also acquire other devices and other people with devices that can also access that network of services.

Consumer device companies have completely failed to make this argument. Not working for a consumer device company, I can't say if this is because they don't want to or because they can't. There would seem to be a market for someone to explain all of this, but part of the problem is that consumers don't want to pay extra for knowledge after paying for a thing - which is back to the problem of thinking of these devices as standalone products, with built-in uses, rather than as flexible service network accessors, with flexible uses.

(***) This brings to mind a gross simplification of a central issue in the ongoing copyright restrictions debate. I loaned out my copy of a book. Would it hurt anyone if I could still find the passage I was looking for?


By: Caviar

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