Living with specialization in User Land

We live in a world of special knowledge applied to special things. I realized this on a recent cross-country road trip.

I crossed the U.S./Canada border on Interstate 5 listening to NPR’s Car Talk, Ray and Tom invoking laughter in the most stoic of listeners. A woman asked for advice before she traded her beloved 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon for a Subaru Forester. She was understandably reluctant to give up the many years of stories, adventures and dreams her family had shared driving across the land.

She asked about the engine and whether or not her husband could do most of the maintenance on a new Subaru himself. Ray and Tom agreed that modern cars do not lend themselves to home mechanics as had prior years’ models. The stuff under the hood is unfamiliar now, designed to be maintained by trained specialists.

Two hours later I drove into Squamish, British Columbia, the rain washing my windshield clean of more than 1,500 miles since I left home. When I walked into the Adventure Center on Canadian Highway 99 at the edge of town, the young man behind the counter and his manager were discussing the power outage that had disabled all but one VoIP phone and computer terminal.

Neither of them wanted to try to fix it, fearing they might make it worse. They were waiting for the next day, Monday, when they could call support and talk to an expert.

Last week I stayed with a family friend, a professional photographer, writer and naturalist with more than 30 years in the field. He is seldom home for more than a few days at a time, and his life moves through his laptop and cell phone. But he has yet to realize the full capacity for electronic organization and collaboration.

I assisted him and his wife with switching from Yahoo! to Gmail, synchronizing Google Calendars to their Android phones, configuring email for their Internet domain, expanding their home wireless network with two Apple Airport Extreme adapters, establishing a central repository for sharing files, and connecting their home stereo system to streaming Internet radio. I transferred user data from an old laptop to one brand new, doubled the capacity of the old laptop, reinstalled Mac OSX, and transferred user data again.

They were thrilled. One of their daughters commented over the phone, “Welcome to the 21st century!”

Knowing where to start

From their point of view, I am a specialist with many years’ expertise in computer technology. Yet compared to code developers and engineers, I am just a layperson, an advanced user in User Land. To be honest, I just followed the directions presented to me on screen, doing little more than what I was told each step of the way.

It is not the doing that was the true barrier for my friends; they can point and click as easily as anyone. The challenge is knowing where to start.

Apple has not shipped with a printed manual for many years, believing their operating system is so simple anyone can just figure it out. I’ve watched too many people struggle to know this is far from true. Searching Apple’s website is nearly useless and Google yields overwhelming results. You must know what you are looking for before you even begin the search.

Later I stayed with friends a few blocks from the Puget Sound whose Wifi had gone down some time ago. Another friend had attempted to swap routers but they had lost the passwords and were stumped. I explained that somewhere on every router is a small button which, when pressed with the tip of a ballpoint pen, will reset the unit when you plug it in.

Certainly, there are individuals in each generation willing to explore, to push their boundaries and dive into the depths of what an operating system or application can do. But how many people have this confidence? I spent three full days upgrading my friends’ digital life, but how many working professionals have this kind of time? What’s more, if you do not know what you are missing, why would you ask for more?

Personally, I do not see technology as making things easier, for we are only introducing more complexity to our lives, always trying to do more. Placing a record on a turntable requires physical care, but not expertise. Connecting a digital audio archive to a wireless network and home theater requires a specialist.

Specialization is job security at one level, and yet part of the reason we have so many unemployed. What’s more, the ability for one generation to teach the next is lost, for anything learned is useless in just a few years.

We have no choice but to pick and choose what we will maintain as our expertise, and to have the courage to ask for assistance for everything else. Maybe this brings us together again, or maybe it keeps us apart. What are your thoughts?

Kai Staats is the principal of Over the Sun Innovations, based in Loveland. He can be contacted through www.overthesun.com
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