When I lived in Ohio, my best friend at the time was a regular weekly commentator on a local public radio station. She was pretty sharp in a lot of ways, but computers still confused her. She wrote a lot and used Microsoft Word a lot, but she was never ever clear on what the Hard Drive was in her computer. And why should she be? Her life was busy enough with her job, her hobbies, and her family. So long as her writing was there for her when she sat down to write again, that's really all she wanted and needed.
Users shouldn't need to care what a Hard Drive is. Their lives are not necessarily enriched if they know about the structure of a URL. That's as much an arbitrary, throwaway bit of knowledge as knowing the exact sequence of menus/commands needed to turn on endnotes in Word 2003.
Those who enable users or unburden their minds will make money.
(In retrospect, I should've done things to make the thing visible. I should've taken the thing apart and showed her the hard drive, the RAM. Then my "File Cabinet/Desk" metaphor might've had something concrete for her to latch onto. As it was, she was smart enough to figure out all those Windows icons were just convenient fictions.)
>Their lives are not necessarily enriched if they know about the structure of a URL. That's as much an arbitrary, throwaway bit of knowledge as knowing the exact sequence of menus/commands needed to turn on endnotes in Word 2003.
That's absurd. Knowing URL structure (or enough about it to figure out what site you're on) is something that is necessary to use the internet. Phishing scams are the obvious reason, but also for things like this where that little bit of knowledge make the difference between success and failure.
But I think it's fine for the difficulty of telling a machine to do something complex to be proportionate with the complexity and specificity of that task.
So if I were making a photo album and I really wanted to tell the computer to put photos in a certain place on the page (instead of where it put them), I should have to articulate that fact in some way to the computer. Nothing is going to save me from having to clarify my thoughts to myself, and there's a certain limit to how easy we can make having to clarify that thought to the computer. I think dragging a mouse is pretty good, but maybe we'll have telepathic interfaces.
What about websites and URLs? You're sitting in front of a machine millions of times more powerful than the computers used to send men to the moon and asking it to send encrypted payment information across a vast network of other such nodes around the world to your financial institution. That's pretty crazy! I think it's a marvel that average people with no special education on the topic manage to do this every week. I wonder how nicely we could smooth it over further without making it unintentionally more confusing.
Not absurd at all. There are countless community colleges that have courses that cover both URL structure and such sequences of menus/commands in Word. But is it any kind of deep knowledge?
Since so many people use both web browsers and Microsoft Word, such knowledge could even help you to get a job. But is it any kind of deep or essential knowledge? Does anyone care about the structure of addresses for VideoTex? Does anyone care about the layout of menus and screens in the old AOL client? How about setting up privacy settings in Friendster? Yes, a few people still care, but almost everyone will recognize that this is all really just trivia now. But once upon a time, this was really useful information.
Yes, URL structure is currently necessary to use the internet as we know it today. But it's every bit as arbitrary as the width of the standard rail gauge.
Math is deep knowledge. Physics or chemistry is deep knowledge. URL structure is trivia. A lot of people who don't pay attention to it are actually smart enough to recognize it as such. They have other things to think about.
So because the technology may change at some point in the future, there's no reason to learn it now? Nobody should have bothered learning how to use a fountain pen, because they should have known ballpoints would be around eventually?
If you want to use the Internet, you should at least know a little bit about how information is addressed. Would you consider it acceptable to spend a couple hours in the library every day but still not know what the Dewey Decimal System is? This facebook login thing is like you went to the library every day for the same book, but instead of learning its location in the shelf, you ask the librarian and blindly grab the book he points at--in this case, he pointed to the book next to yours. Hey, this book used to be about Tom Sawyer--why did they change it to be about a jumping frog?
Nobody should have bothered learning how to use a fountain pen, because they should have known ballpoints would be around eventually?
Notice that nobody cares about nib maintenance anymore, and that ballpoints made fortunes before they became commoditized. Those fortunes were made by innovators who could tell the essentials from trivia and mechanics.
Would you consider it acceptable to spend a couple hours in the library every day but still not know what the Dewey Decimal System is?
Since we have computerized indexing, one could just go to serial numbers and not lose a bit of functionality. Physical browsing would lose out, but that's hardly a loss of essential function. Cover Flow shows how this could be replaced and enhanced. Lots of librarians are actually wrestling with such implications. Just one example:
This facebook login thing is like you went to the library every day for the same book, but instead of learning its location in the shelf, you ask the librarian and blindly grab the book he points at
Your analogy falls down. URLs are much farther from everyday reality than objects like books. The level of abstraction is different, which is the essential point.
URLs are much farther from everyday reality than objects like books
I should point out that the reverse is true for many people these days, and will be true for many more in the future. The digital revolution is creating a new reality, methinks, and it behooves a citizen of the times to learn how to get around in both. :)
The digital revolution is creating a new reality, methinks, and it behooves a citizen of the times to learn how to get around in both. :)
This is like touting the immense possibilities of a brave new, literate world, but then emphasizing one should brush up on their wet tablet cuneiform skills.
The first part hits the essence of the revolution. The second part is mired in implementation triviality.
By that token, law is also trivia. The thing is, how successful do you think the internet is going to be? It has, within a few decades, permeated almost every aspect of our lives, and it seems set to get even bigger. An analogy in human history would be, say, society itself. Before that, people lived in isolated subsistence-level, hunter-gatherer tribes. When bigger societies emerged, a member of such a tribe could have made the argument that knowing the rules of such a society was useless trivia because it wasn't really useful, as opposed to knowing how to hunt and recognize berries that aren't poisonous. These tribes either integrated into larger societies or became extinct.
Needless to say, I do not know the future of human civilization or whether the internet will continue to be important or even retain the same structure, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it will, because as more technology is built on top of it or that utilizes it (all our computers and mobile devices, web apps, etc), it becomes more indispensable, subject to the emergence of disruptive substitutes.
Forgive this rambling comment, but I have a point, which is this: I think that as more widely-used abstractions are built on top of a basic structure, this structure becomes an increasingly important reality unto itself and the mechanics of it become deep knowledge, at least where us humans are concerned. Also, I would point out that though I agree with you on math, physics and chemistry, to most people, those are useless trivia too.
I agree, I almost can't remember the last time I even bothered to look at a url...two weeks ago? a month? For the most part, the address bar is a meaningless mash of characters I can pretty safely ignore 95% of the time.
> Users shouldn't need to care what a Hard Drive is.
In theory, they ought not need to, but as currently constructed, they do need to because hard drives are terribly unreliable, and people expect to rely on them. If you explain to them that their thesis is being stored inside a little box that has a few discs of thin aluminium covered in rust and that they're being spun in space 5000 times a minute, then just sometimes they understand why they ought to have some sort of backup strategy. Some people will take your advice without understanding but most are skeptical of inconvenient claims and won't act without understanding.
It's like people shouldn't have to understand anything beyond that their car has a 'stop pedal'. But it's still really important for people to understand that they have brakes in their car, that the breaks wear out, don't work well in some kinds of conditions, and make certain sounds when they need fixing.
Sub-optimal conditions both, but a necessary artifact of current levels of technology. Now, ABS systems have reduced some of that wet-weather cognitive load with software. Online backup services are a start in that direction for hard drives. But until it comes as part of the built-in price of the computer (that is a sellable feature) and high-speed Internet is pervasive, people still need to worry about it. At least until dual SSD's are standard equipment.
