The editors of the Washington Post point approvingly to an initiative by the Biden Administration:
The National Urban League’s Lewis Latimer Plan for Digital Equity and Inclusion wants to ensure that everyone can fully participate in the world the Web has created — from their education as children to their employment as adults to their health all along the way. The proposal, which emphasizes how historically marginalized groups have seen inequities compounded by a disproportionate lack of access to the Web, is chock full of recommendations for bringing broadband to those whose homes aren’t served or for whom service is too expensive. Yet the plan is most helpful in pointing out two additional gaps to bridge.
The first of these is what the report’s authors call digital readiness. There is little point in paying for an Internet plan if you don’t know how to use the Internet. The same goes for understanding how to operate a computer or tablet. But as many as half of Americans remain reluctant to explore online education because they are concerned they lack the technological skill; more than one-third of older adults have missed out of video visits with medical professionals this past year for similar reasons; workers unstudied in navigating the Web can’t fill plenty of good jobs.
This sounds like a first class boondoggle to me. There’s another reason that people are not digitally literate: they don’t want to be; they are technophobes.
My mother was a very intelligent woman. She had a masters degree; she read incessantly. But she never learned to operate her VCR and avoided technology as much as she could. She actively rejected my offers to help her. She gave away the answering machine I gave her. She simply didn’t want to have anything to do with technology. Don’t underestimate that as a factor, particularly in the elderly.
IMO they’d be better off ensuring that more people were functionally literate than trying to ensure digital readiness.
I was listening to a representative of a group that advocates in the area of technology and the aged on NPR several months ago. The way he put it was that older people have already invested in approaches to various tasks and the cost in time and money to try something new is not seen as worthwhile. OTOH, young people are immersed in a world of various aps, and trying new things out is rewarding in its own way. I think the example he gave was balancing a checkbook. People of a certain age have developed the habits and experience to balance their checkbooks in a handwritten register. There is not a lot of benefit of switching to software programs like Quicken with their additional financial cost, and concerns over stability and security. OTOH, I suspect a lot of the youngest people just check their account balances on-line, trusting fully in the banks.
Hmmm. So now everyone can waste their time on Facebook or Twitter. Great.
There are certainly honest and good reasons to have tech tools at your disposal. But, as an example, I really wonder if the lack of productivity associated with the tech boom, particularly in service industries, isn’t because there is much baggage as benefit.
I’m getting to the age (52) where learning new tech is annoying. I will probably, for example, stick to Windows PC’s and the Apple ecosystem for portable devices because I don’t want to have to learn a new system. It’s not that I can’t learn – it’s that I don’t want to spend the time and effort.
There is also something to be said for standardization, particularly for a UI. Books have a standard UI which is one thing that makes them so great. In tech, people are constantly trying changing UI’s and calling it innovation. Sometimes it results in real innovation, but mostly it’s just annoying.
CUA/SAA was the user interface standard for decades. Blame Microsoft for its diminished utilization. An example of why I don’t like big, dominant companies. They create their own standards rather than following established ones.