What’s a Necessity? - Floyd Norris Blog - NYTimes.com
There’s been no significant change in the number deeming a computer for home use to be a necessity (50 percent this year, 51 percent in 2006). But I am surprised it did not grow.
I live in a wired world, but many don’t. Older folks, especially, seem not to adapt to the implications as quickly as the young do - but this is true in almost all areas.
What we will see growing in the future is a digital divide different from that popularly discussed: This will be an upper class of bandwidth-based digerati who are able to take advantage of advances in information technology, interfaces, storage (the cloud), and bandwidth to live wider, fuller, smarter, longer lives…and those who can’t, or won’t, for whatever reasons.
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More important than age, half of all people have below-average intelligence. (Yah yah, normal distribution, median, mean, yah yah.) A good chunk of people aren’t bright enough to use a computer for more than games and porn. Another good chunk could use it but don’t see it as being worth the money and effort. (Not that I’m an elitist or anything.)
Also, who defines “necessity”? If it weren’t for being a freelance computer guy, I wouldn’t consider a home computer a necessity. More important than anything except cooking gear, yes, but not a necessity.
I’m in that interesting age group where I’m old enough to remember a time before PC’s, cell phones, and the internet, yet many of my peers and coworkers are not. The divide I’ve seen form the last few years is one between those who know how to use the tools, and those who do not.
Most troubling is the fact that these groups are not formed by age. Seniors may simply not adapt well to new things, but ignorant, stupid, or lazy is the same whether they are 18 or 80.
Lets’s look at Gooogle, for one; I’ve seen that a sizable portion of college students simply cannot run a boolean search to save their lives, nor are they interested in learning. They get frustrated when others expect them to be able to figure things out or find information on their own. The ability to quickly look up all manner of mundane things saves a lot of time, and can confer a sizable competitive advantage. Those who simply “aren’t computer people” will be left behind.
I’ve been hanging out for a few weeks at Yahoo! Answers, one of those ask-the-community sites with few holds barred, and it’s not exactly encouraging: all these people knew enough to go to the site to ask the questions, but so many of the answers are easily found elsewhere on the Web. So I have to believe Tim when he says that many college students can’t run a Boolean search to save their lives, though it seems clear to me that some of these folks, college-age and otherwise, are yakking just to hear themselves yak.
I think many are switching to smart phones, so no new computer purchase is necessary for a while, and an iphone probably isn’t considered a computer purchase.
What’s especially discouraging at these wiki-style “wisdom of crowds” sites is the quality of the crap being passed off as authoritative answers.
And then they ask the morons to vote on “the best answer.”
Duh.
Being as the country in now well into the fourth(?) generation of deliberately dumbed-down citizens(courtesy of the NEA/fed designed indoctination system), the amount of stupid in the country presently is not unexpected, but is rather the desired result.
And I’m not so certain that the lives of those who are completely connected will be all that wonderful. Based on how many people I presently see who appear to live on their cell-phones, I can say with pretty good authority that they will certainly be busy, heh, heh.
So, we’re dumber than people who desired a country full of idiots?
People do buy more portable computers than home computers at our webstore. That is also a trend in EU. More and more laptops is sold and less home computers.
I’ve been hanging out for a few weeks at Yahoo! Answers, one of those ask-the-community sites with few holds barred, and it’s not exactly encouraging: all these people knew enough to go to the site to ask the questions, but so many of the answers are easily found elsewhere on the Web.
I’ve become quite a fan of “Let me Google that for you” as a way of dealing with people like that.
They get their answer, and have to endure a bit of snark. Some might even learn something.
CG - present company always excepted of course.