This morning, trying to get a Flash plugin for my shiny new Mozilla Firefox 3 open source browser to work, I was compelled to google search for solutions that work around my particular issue, read through an online forum until I landed on the right process, download a plugin archive in .XPI format, extract it using another open source program, 7zip, copy the contents into the appropriate plugins folder, and restart my browser.
This entire process took about 15 minutes, and I did it without giving much thought at all to the relative complexity involved. If my parents, who are quite young compared to most of my friends’ parents (Mom hasn’t hit fifty yet) were faced with a similar problem, they would probably not be aware of what step to take first. And we’ve had various personal computers in our home continuously since 1987.
My generation, and those that are coming after me, grew up in a world where technical complexity was part of every day life. We programmed VCRs for family members, set up cell phone plans before our parents did, remember MS-DOS and the novelty when Windows hit the scene, were early internet adopters, learned the ropes of online communication through low-baud dialup connections to local Bulletin Board Systems, sent e-mail before most people knew what e-mail was, might even remember Telnet and IRC and not have a problem navigating FTP, and if we’re old enough, we saw the web when it was a rowdy collection of text hyperlinks before it was prettied up with pictures and when Internet Explorer did not yet exist.
There is nothing special about any of this. It is simply a question of information and process adaptation. The 30-and-under crowd, in particular, have always lived in a digital world. We know it because it has been everywhere, as long as we remember. There are other things - older things - we don’t know, that we probably should. But the fact of the matter remains.
When I finished installing my plugin, I moused over to YouTube to make sure it was working (YouTube videos are encoded in Flash). I happened upon this video, which was really the inspiration for this post:
There’s a superficiality to the way this video was done, and it attempts to make a surprising point that isn’t really all that surprising. If it weren’t for the focus on the disconnect between the educational system and the way modern students learn as a “problem I didn’t make” (cry me a river) I think it would have been better overall. I get the frustration here, but we’re at a transitional point in the history of communication. We get to deal with the headaches but we also get to find the solutions and enjoy the opportunities.
This all ties into what I was writing about last week - the Internet (and other digital media) are changing the way we think and learn. We can make value judgements about it till we’re blue, but the reality is that the change is upon us and it isn’t going away. For those of us who have vocations that require us to be part of the world amidst all of the technology in play, we need to get used to the idea that things ain’t the same anymore and proficiency requires adoption of method.
I wish I read more books in the past. I’m reading more now, though the bulk of my reading still happens online. Truth be told, I would have been one of the kids in the video who held up signs revealing how many books they didn’t read for classes, only I was smart enough not to even bother spending the money on them. I knew I wouldn’t read them. I only wish I had now, because I would have been smarter, more knowledgeable, even if it didn’t effect my ability to breeze through my classes.
Books aside, the old structures and methods of learning probably won’t hold up much longer. The way we learn as students, the way we work as professionals, it’s all still lagging behind the information paradigm shift. I could do 95% of my work from anywhere, as long as I had an internet-connected computer and a phone. I am still, however, required to hoof it into my office, wasting (in terms of productivity-hours) about 20 hours a week commuting. In addition, because I (and many others like me) still work in an office, there are all the other old structures that can impede work efficiency - a certain amount of beurocracy, a work environment that features cubicles and fluorescent lights, lots of meetings around conference tables in windowless rooms, bad coffee, the personal dramas of co-workers within a confined space, set work hours, etc. There’s no way of knowing how much more efficient a worker could be if not bound to these structures, but some companies experimenting with a more non-linear work environment are finding that it pays real dividends.
At some point, the shift will be more total. Maybe the continued rising cost of fuel and increased environmental consciousness will convinve more employers to allow telecommuting, which would give them the additional benefit of reduced overhead for office space, utilities, etc. Maybe some intrepid educationally-minded soul from the young breed of info-warriors will help overhaul the school system. Maybe distance learning will become more commonplace, and students will participate in virtual classrooms via WebEx or something like it. (That would give homeschooling families a HUGE advantage, if they could sign up for classes they couldn’t adequately teach at home a la carte.)
I don’t know how things will take shape, I only know that they will. In an advanced technological age, nothing is as certain as the fact that things will change.
