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I don't know about that. There seems to be something innate about one's ability to use computers. My father is 85 and is quite good with computers; he uses ema
by bambax 10y ago
I don't know about that. There seems to be something innate about one's ability to use computers.
My father is 85 and is quite good with computers; he uses email constantly, writes documents and books using word processors and understands the concept of files, reads on a Kindle, etc. But he had never touched a computer before he was maybe 70 (let alone own one), and before that he wasn't technical at all. He was trained as a Latin teacher (!) and spent his professional life in politics, never having to type anything by himself.
My father-in-law is very good at many manual tasks including woodworking, electricity, electronics, and was an officer in the French army for many years, where he was responsible for maintaining highly technical weapons. He too is 85 and he can't seem to understand computers, although I have known him for 15 years and have been trying to help him for that long. He seems to want to learn but isn't really interested in what one would call "the big picture", he just wants to know a list of actions that will get them to where he wants to go. Of course that approach fails miserably whenever something happens that's not on the list.
I have two friends who have been to top engineering schools who, I discovered recently, type whole urls not in the browsers' bar but in Google's search form. My eldest son is 11 and doesn't confuse the two. My younger son is 7 and doesn't seem much interested.
- roryisok 10y agoTyping URLs into the search bar of Google is very common. I see it all the time. If google is your default new tab page there's really nothing wrong with it. One extra click maybe.
- bambax 10y agoYou get a search result page instead of going directly to the site (that's how I noticed they were doing it).
- ericd 10y agoIt does have the nice feature of spell checking for you :-) It's a good bit safer to search for your bank site, for example, since there're large incentives for phishing sites to sit on common misspellings of bank domains.
- Retric 10y agoI actually do this just for financial sites I don't have bookmarked. It's faster if I miss type and vastly safer.
- dublinben 10y agoThere are conflicting incentives for search engines (Yahoo seems much worse than Google for this) to allow paid results for phishing sites above the real result. I can often tell exactly which phishing site a user is getting directed to instead of the real domain that they want.
- Freak_NL 10y agoIt does imply that the user is not (sufficiently) aware of the difference between a browser and a for-profit search engine. It's a type of behaviour that makes people dependent on a service where no dependency is needed. Also, how many of these users are both aware that they are sharing large parts of their browsing behaviour with Google and are okay with that?
- vilhelm_s 10y agoWell, most browsers are for-profit too. Typing an address into Chrome's address bar will still send it to Google so they can give suggestions back, I think. (E.g., if I type "http://www.abc" http://www.abc" into the bar, it suggests an autocomplete to "www.abcnews.com", which I have never visited. Doing the same in a 'Private Browsing' window turns off this autocomplete.) I'm not convinced that distinguishing between address bar and search field is either a necessary of a sufficient condition for understanding Internet privacy.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 10y agoInnate, yes: not being stupid helps tremendously. Not stupid + put in the time = "good" with tech.
- dest 10y agoI would say innate interest in the field rather than intelligence vs stupidity. I know intelligent people that spend time on it and fail because of lack of interest.
- jkmcf 10y agoInnate: inborn, natural I seem to have an innate talent for computers. Given a "clue" I can usually extrapolate most of what I need to know. I may be "smart", but my memory recall is horrible -- making connections is very difficult to me given too much time displacement. The extrapolation is mostly automatic w/o actually "thinking".
- chairmankaga 10y agoYou just described me, my memory recall is horrible and I'm very curious in finding an explanation. My memory is poor and seems to only get worse and I'm not even in my 30s yet.
- specialist 10y agoAptitude, yes. Some of it is what you learn first, and therefore what you must unlearn. Ditto terrible mental models. Ditto tools poorly designed for the work. Etc, etc. All this has been exhaustively hashed and rehashed by the UI/UX, cognitive psychologist, designers, SIGCHI, etc groups for decades. We just don't listen to them.
- VonGuard 10y agoI agree with this assessment. It has a lot to do with whether the person has the basic ability to understand computers and engineering-like things. If it's not taught at an early age it's tough to pick up this skill later. My parents are perfect examples of this. My mother is a graphic designer, old enough to have done page layout with a knife and glue. She learned Quark, then Freehand, then In-Design and still uses the stuff to this day. She was not raised with a computer, but her father was an engineer and she has that engineering mind, where she can follow something back to its root and figure it out. My father, on the other hand, is a Dale Carnegie teacher. He's a people person. He's had a computer since we got an Atari ST in 1985. He's been on Macs since 1987. He STILL cannot use the thing properly. Sending an email is hard for him. Using his iPad is tough. Facebook enrages him because "I don't know any of these people, how do I get rid of them, I didn't ask to see their pictures!" My dad was raised by a photographer and a nurse. He never learned how to troubleshoot. He cannot find a root cause. But he can hold a room full of people captivated and make them laugh, something my mother would NEVER want to do. So, it's those people skills versus those tech skills, as ever it was.