Friday May 20, 2005 "I've got it, so everyone else must have it too" Syndrome
One of the things that I find interesting as a technology person has been to watch some of the problems that arise as technology, particularly Internet technology, has expanded in its availability and use. One of the big ones for me has been the fact that a lack of awareness and understanding of the technology, its uses, limitations and availability to be used by all often follows many newer users (and I don't think it is really their fault, but ours as the developers, deployers and evangelists of the technology).There are many manifestations of this. In a previous job, where my desktop system was an SGI workstation running Irix, I was e-mailed a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by a colleague. My response was to e-mail back requesting that the information be sent in plain text. His response was to send it back as a Word document!
The assumption that .doc is an industry standard is commonplace in my experience. So is the assumption that everyone runs Internet Explorer, even by websites that work perfectly well on other browsers (as evidenced by the fact that they display in Mozilla by using the PrefBar, a neat little tool that includes the ability for me to mislead web servers about the browser and OS I am running and gives me other useful stuff like a home page button and popup control).
Another is the assumption that everyone has equal access to e-mail and to the web. E-mail access is not yet universal, and not every organisation provides total or limited access to the web, often for good reason, such as by blocking webmail sites, yet I do come across people who assume that because they have a certain level of access, so will everyone else.
The network is not yet a universal tool, and while we continue to bring its benefits to more and more people, we also have a responsibility to educate people in how things work, or more importantly, why they may not.
( May 20 2005, 12:04:40 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]