Adopting Technology vs. Understanding Technology

A while back I wrote about the gap in technology use that separates children from their parents. There are the usual jokes about how it defines who can program a VCR and who can send a txt message. When you grow up around technology you adopt it more easily. But there's a big difference between understanding how to use an interface that someone built for you (cell phones and video games) and understanding how the underlying technology works (DOS Prompts and TTL(Transistor-Transistor Logic)).

It's the same thing that happened to automobiles. There's less and less reason to look under the hood and there's less and less reason to troubleshoot your MP3 player or cell phone. This is not a bad thing. Your phone shouldn't crash. But as a result we have fewer opportunities to really understand the technology that we've become dependent on. So what happens when the technology fails and we've never looked under the hood before? Without understanding how something works, what chance do we have of fixing it?

Today, kids are exposed to branded, packaged technology and they are far better at using it than I am. This is a great thing. They get all the benefits of the technology but don't have to spend all the time I did to get things to work. No one wants to take a computer programming class just to record a TV show or dial a phone. There's too much life to live and too many other pursuits we need to follow. But there is a downside. When something is all packaged up, you rarely get a chance to see the "naked technology" behind it. As we become more isolated from the "naked technology" that does the work, we become more dependent on those that package the technology for us.

I'm certainly not advocating that we do away with modern conveniences or start programming our own cell phones. This is just a word of caution to be aware that as technology becomes more "prepared" we give up control over what we want the technology to do.