A friend from college started, “I’m not good with tech,” but as a real estate property appraiser she did things with Excel that I couldn’t even begin to understand. It’s true that she wasn’t an awkward out-of-style cat-eye glasses, baggy grandma sweater wearing nerd, but her ability to gather information, produce spreadsheets and long detailed reports was impressive. She didn’t look like a “techie,” but to say that she wasn’t good at tech? Nah.
Maybe it’s always been assumed to be a lifestyle versus just a skill set, but doesn’t that get in the way of how technology is adopted in the mainstream culture by perpetuating the nerd stereotype? Admittedly when I started tinkering with home computers in the 1980s you had to have a bit of a Radio Shack vibe because the things were expensive, arcane and prone to breaking down. That experience sounds exactly like what it was like when radio or high fidelity audio came into the American home, or maybe a better example is the evolution of our relationships with the automobile. In the beginning you had to have a level of expertise to use the thing but over time if you didn’t know how to operate the thing then you had some explaining to do. Using tech is just part of life. Right?
I met three baby-boomers last night who were all at different “levels” in their use of technology in their day to day lives. All of them have smartphones but one doesn’t have an email account and doesn’t text. He uses his phone to make calls and takes pictures and sends the pictures to his daughter, that’s it; No online banking, no social media, none of that stuff. The next person has an email account, and texts. Her thing is getting tickets online to see concerts. But she refuses to do FaceBook and I’m guessing any Social Media. And the third person does everything online, social media, concert tickets, email, etc. The third one is more of a “techie” than the others, but they all use technology in their lives to whatever extent that suits them and their needs. That’s fine. No judgement.
I think they’re all retired so there’s no “requirement” that they need additional skills using technology. No problems there. My only concern would be whether they are continuing to “grow” in other ways in their lives, in as much as I recognize that most of us as we age, if we don’t have a sense of moving forward in our day-to-day activities, it’s too easy for us to begin to decline. All of which is a different issue, but too often we feel like we’re being measured by our tech usage or comfort with technology as if that is the only measure of our relevance. That would be a mistake. The point is that our need to whatever level of proficiency with technology should be connected to whatever need we have in our professional or personal lives and that one level isn’t any better than another. It’s not a competition. It’s a matter of whether one has access to instruction or support so that they can do their job or pursue their personal activity. They’re tools, not levels of importance or relevance.
Parents at a K-5 school where I ran the computer lab wanted us to use Windows PCs versus Apple Macs because they wanted to make sure that their students had the technology skills that they would need in their future jobs when they got out of high school. I understood their concern, but I questioned if they realized that if their students, upon graduation seven to twelve years later, expected to find that the computers at their jobs were still using Windows XP or whatever version of Word we were working with, then something had gone horribly wrong in the world. That’s actually a different problem (the expectation to learn something once and then be “good” on the subject for the rest of your life…), but in my computer lab we learned how to use whatever app we needed, connected to whatever they were doing in their classroom. They might have been learning how to use Excel to create charts representing data for a science project, or HyperStudio (a kind of PowerPoint) to create presentations and projects. The point was that the app was connected to the project and not taught in isolation.
Not everyone had the same level of proficiency and that’s okay. As long as they got the basics, like driving a car, and used the tool to get to where they needed to be. More importantly, would be developing the life-long habit or ability to adjust ones tech skills to what one needs to do. Maybe that’s the difference between us and much older generation, there’s no “one and done” with technology because it’s always evolving and if our interest or job dictates, then we need to keep up. But not all of us needs to know every line of code to do the job. Technology is a tool, not a lifestyle label.
