Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

My parents-in-law are experiencing a computer for the first time. I found an unused 1998 Macintosh G3 and for the last two months they’ve been using dial-up email. Next week we upgrade to broadband.

The most interesting thing for me has been how everyone, and I mean everyone, takes certain things for granted now. The metaphors used when using a computer are so commonplace that nobody explains them. There are no manuals, or books, even for ‘dummies’, that start at the bottom of the learning curve. For some weeks they’ve been asking for a manual, and although I bought one on ebay, it doesn’t start at the very beginning.

This didn’t used to be the case, as Peter Merholz recently discovered when he bought an original 1984 Macintosh manual. This explanation is typical of what the new computer user needed then:

“If you save a new version, it replaces the ‘original’ on the disk. If you don’t, nothing on the disk is changed at all. You always have the option of saving the new version with the original name, saving it with a different name, or not saving it at all. It’s like having an original document and making photocopies of it to edit. When you’re satisfied with the changes, you change the original.”

The majority of human beings on the planet have not used a computer, however, the basic metaphors used when using a computer, I’d hazard a guess, are pretty well known. Mouse, dragging, scrolling, saving, windows, files, desktop are as ingrained in our expectations of knowledge as much as those associated with the motor car - ignition, gear, breaking, parking, indicating, bonnet, boot (trunk) etc. but that does not mean to say that you can drive a car, or a computer. It means that you learn quicker because you have the context in which that learning can take place. It’s an interesting observation that, just like the car, we don’t need manuals to explain these things anymore.

Image credit: Peter Merholz

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