

What my 4-year-old taught me about technology - pitdesi
http://gigaom.com/2011/10/25/5-things-my-4-year-old-taught-me-about-technology/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29

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GertG
Sure, new generations interact with media differently. But isn't this article
reading way too much into a 4 year old liking to touch things and not having
patience? I'm sure I also threw a tantrum every time commercials interrupted
my favorite tv shows. (Still do, occasionally.)

~~~
cbs
_But isn't this article reading way too much into a 4 year old liking to touch
things and not having patience?_

Very much so. Young children are still learning the basics of physical
interaction with the world and how the world works. Its is incredibly short
sited to give a child lots of exposure to touch-controlled devices and then
delude yourself into thinking you've found some sort of insight when they
assume that other things might have touch interfaces. They don't have enough
knowledge about what things are to reason and infer about them like we can.

~~~
goatcurious
Yes - the article is making an obvious point but its a huge point. How about
this: my 2.5 year old niece is more adept at handling a touch phone than my
mother! Thats crazy! The perceptive power of today's kids is mind boggling
(maybe it always was but today's technology affords them a chance to express
it more powerfully)

~~~
cbs
_my 2.5 year old niece is more adept at handling a touch phone than my mother!
Thats crazy!_

No, its not crazy, its perfectly logical. You're niece is learning how things
in the world work out of necessity, touch interfaces being just one of many
completely new-to-her things she is exposed to. Your mother has had many
decades of a firm grip on how things in the world work and touchscreens are
completely new to her extremely-entrenched mental model of the world.

The classic example of a child's mind being more flexible is the window of
time wherein the human brain is more able to learn laugauge. After a certain
age, the brain develops to a point where it puts up a wall that increases the
difficulty to teach someone a second language, even though on the surface you
may think that someone with lots of experience using language might have an
easier time picking up a second.

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polymatter
I can definitely relate to the death of linear TV. I don't often watch TV. But
now I can't bare normal TV because of all the damn breaks that completely
destroy the atmosphere or the show I was watching to sell me stuff I don't
want.

~~~
w1ntermute
Same here. I haven't watched live TV in years (I watch scene releases, so
waiting for the on-demand video services to develop wasn't an issue).

The only time I see live TV now is at a friend's house, and sitting through
advertisements is absolutely excruciating.

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gbelote
It's very interesting hearing about young kids trying to interact with "old
media" like they would an iPhone or iPad. Swiping a billboard, tapping a
magazine cover. To me, these aren't obvious ways to interact with the things
I've gotten used to all my life.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I've been using computers since the days of tape drives. Personally, I've
tried to use a touch screen on occassions only to find it's a regular computer
screen.

I think there needs to be some recognised international symbol that
touchscreens could show to indicate they can and should be touched - pointer
icon (index finder extended hand symbol) with emanating circles appears to be
the de facto standard. They do rather lack affordance.

I've never yet tried to pinch zoom a magazine cover or whatever though.

Reminds me of the Star Trek movie scene when Scotty picks up the mouse and
talks in to it.

~~~
Causification
There's already an international symbol for touchscreens: fingerprints.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Lol, yeah, I'll look out for them next time.

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Causification
Touchscreens bring people closer to technology, but they also separate people
from understanding technology. It's great that we have a whole generation of
people with iphones, but we also have a whole generation of people who think
that if it isn't in the app store, it can't be done, who crack the glass on
their iphone and throw the whole thing into the garbage.

A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but
someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything,
and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks.
Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you
about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a
stylus to using a finger.

As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to
use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong
person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm
sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to
retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a
long shot.

~~~
Derbasti
And programming computers is yet harder yet gives the user even more power. I
think the dichotomy between power and usability is a false one. Technology
should help people with their tasks. If this can be accomplished with a touch
or speech UI I see nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately, it is completing the task that matters. If I think about it, most
tasks that require CLI interfaces are not necessary on an smartphone to begin
with. And that might be a good thing.

We, the technocratic elite, will shape that world. We will be its masters,
magicians amongst men. We will derive more power out of technology than
regular users. But the price will be that in order to gain this deep knowledge
we have to devote an awful lot of time to learn the arcane spells and
invocations that are all but useless for most real world tasks.

We choose to master technology. Others choose to master science or stock
markets or carpenting. To them, technology is a tool. In very much the same
way we will be ignorant of the intricacies of their world.

~~~
Causification
The lower the understanding of the average user, the less variety there is in
a given product category. Desktops came in all shapes and sizes, until
everybody bought one and suddenly they were all beige boxes. If you've
strolled through a brick n' mortar lately, you probably noticed that most
laptops look virtually identical nowadays. Tablets came in all shapes and
sizes, from the ten inch slate ala Stylistic, to the convertible laptop, to
the hybrid in the form of the TC1000 series, to the five inch chunkers like
the OQO and the Sony UX series. Now they're all minimalistic squares of shiny,
fingerprint-ridden black plastic. PDAs had a whole ecosystem of designs, so
many you could find one that exactly suited your needs. Folding, sliding, with
keyboard and without, slates, anything. The smartphone revolution destroyed
that. Now you can pick from a shiny square of black plastic with one button or
a shiny square of black plastic with four almost-buttons.

Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by
appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to
remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have
the option of a microsd card or removable battery.

~~~
potatolicious
You're still assuming that variety in a product category, or technology being
all-powerful, is the end goal.

But to 95% of the world, or even 99%, _this is not the case_. Technology is
there to make their lives easier and help them accomplish certain tasks.

I don't complain when my car cannot transform into a speedboat on cue -
because that's not what I bought it to do. Likewise, I really don't care that
my pen is unable to change brush shape or stroke size while I'm using it,
where an artist might find that to be the bee's knees.

Technology is a means to an end - I for one am sick of the technocratic elite
denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some
kind of technological purity.

~~~
Causification
The end goal is for the user to have something that best suits their needs.
For most people that might be an iphone. Many others are restricted to paying
for things they don't want in order to have the things they absolutely
require, while being denied the things they need. I hate to say it, but the
things I could buy seven years ago suited my needs then much better than the
things I can buy now suit my current needs. Computing began by requiring the
user to know exactly how the computer worked. Later it merely encouraged and
rewarded the user for knowing, like the person who can save a jpeg without
pasting it into a Word file. Now it doesn't encourage the user at all and is
making an effort at removing any difference between the person who knows and
the person who doesn't. A computer can be easy to use without stifling the
user; that's one reason Windows is so successful.

"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of
technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."

In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they
want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a
world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their
lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.

~~~
Derbasti
Lets compare this to airplanes. Air travel used to be limited to those who
were able and crazy enough to actually fly planes themselves. Now everyone can
use planes for transportation in a very mediated and controlled environment. A
pilot flying in an airliner is very much like a programmer using an iPhone:
Other engineers did all the hard work and the net result is something somewhat
boring and limiting (a commercial airliner will only fly to certain
destinations). On the other hand it is also very safe and comparatively cheap.
Now flying an aircraft on your own is amazingly fun and an exhilarating
experience. But it is also very expensive, quite complicated and somewhat
dangerous.

Now the point is, I am both a programmer and a pilot myself. So I can
definitely see the appeal of both. But, I happily use an iPhone and commercial
air travel. Other people have put in a lot of work to made these very safe and
reliable for common purposes and they really work well for crossing the
atlantic while listening to a podcast.

The iPhone is not denying anyone access to laptops any more than an Airbus is
denying you access to a Cessna. They are not dumbing the population down. They
get the job done with as little disturbance as possible. For the crazy ones
though, There are real computers and real airplanes!

