When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't even understand the basics of evidence law.
When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold.
Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags.
Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...
This is likely true. However, using the Internet isn't a profession. It is a globally-scaled phenomenon that is essentially 'the future'. Anyone can learn how to use it and become an 'expert' for basically no cost and little time. People get made fun of not necessarily for being dunces, but for not choosing to embrace and learn about a technology that is already a huge part of their lives.
Using the human body isn't a profession either. But it's likely that you and I are significantly more ignorant than a doctor regarding its inner workings despite using our bodies every day.
Of course. But my point wasn't that 'things that aren't professions are easy to learn about', it was that 'using the Internet IS easy to learn, and requires few resources.' The fact that using the human body isn't a profession is completely irrelevant; doctors spend years studying how our bodies work, while all I do is some occasional research to learn more about it. Of course they know more than me, because they spent lots of time and money on it.
And each of those things is an important thing that the general populace should know in order to navigate life. Aren't sure what that latin tag you're getting permanently tattooed on your body means? Don't get it tattooed on your body.
Each of the original examples was important enough that you delegate to your professional. The whole reason you have a lawyer is so they can handle evidence rules, and correct your misconceptions.
But I'm never going to go to a professional to log into facebook. Or more realistically, understand what XSS attacks are and how to protect myself (or similar). It happens too often to be a consult-an-expert event.
I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't even close to understanding.
I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic.
The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with.
The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.
On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet.
One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different.
And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished.
I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.
He's saying that for a TON of people, they don't need to use it personally, and see no reason to put in the (sometimes) massive amount of effort to learn how to use the web. Their lives go on just fine without their direct involvement.
Also, it is useless to cry "How terrible that so many people don't understand! What a failure!" -- The only failure here is the failure to make software just as intuitive as older technology. For someone who never uses the web, Google is the only option because of it's incredible simplicity. It takes a non-web savvy person quite a while to parse something like Facebook or Amazon.
I'm amazed at the narrow view that so many people (seem to) have.
He said that the internet is not something that society absolutely cannot function without. He is wrong. Society very much depends on the internet. The fact that not everyone has a Faceboook profile is inconsequential to this, and I would point out that the one does not follow the other.
Further, saying that the failure lies in the fact that we need to "make software just as intuitive as older technology", is just hilarious. Since when is "older technology" intuitive? Simple, sure, but intuitive? It's not like the natural state of an old-fashioned phone call is fraught with complexity, and that phone companies have won a major victory by wrapping them in a simple user interface. You just call, then you're done. If that's intuitive, I assure you, it's accidental. And have you ever sent a letter before? What's intuitive about addressing an envelope, or styling your letter accordingly? What's intuitive about stamping it and sending off? We've been doing it forever, but that doesn't make it natural.
What you want to say is that we should be making software a simple and familiar as older technology. But at what cost? I love my smart phone, and as far as I'm concerned, it's about as close to being as simple as it can get, while still implementing all these features I like. I'm not switching to a Jitterbug any time soon. Sure, it's intuitive, but it's also simple. My phone is intuitive and functional. That's a win for me.
The fact is, at the end of the day, progress is made by breaking the norm. I don't want to go back to the simplicity of old phones; I don't want to look everything up at a library; I don't want to do everything the "old" way. But with these leaps in progress, a lot of people have been left behind.
This is, honestly, absurd. Society depends on the internet? Sure, some people depend on the internet. And some companies. And some verticals.
But "depends" sounds to me like... without it, society will crumble or go through some dramatic metamorphosis. I find that... questionable to say the least. I don't remember much about the 1980s, I was 8, but I'm faily certain it wasn't the dark ages as it seems you're suggesting. Eliminate the internet off tomorrow, and society will carry on.
Eliminate motor vehicles? Electricity? Complete chaos.
The idea that it's some big problem because people can't differentiate between Facebook and some blog?
This is more myopic thinking. You're acting like if you're not on the internet you must either be amish or impoverished. Please.
Individual people don't need to be on the internet but if the internet as a whole were to disappear society would crumble. No one is saying that the 80's were a dark age but things we could previously manage without the internet have now become totally dependent on the internet and more and more things are every day.
HA! You just don't get it. ALL the processes for which the internet provides a mission-critical service are going to freeze. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank? Who's tracking stocks? How are you going to get all your important emails, or your contacts, or your off-site financial records from company x? All these processes are not trivially related to the internet; they depend on it in a way that cannot just be "fixed". Make not mistake, our financial system is completely and 100% dependent on internet, and if you take it away, there will be a complete disaster. Sure, some of it will eventually get where it needs to go, but some of it won't. And some of that information you need NOW.
I'll say it again: without the internet, these processes FREEZE. And that's just the effects that don't involve the lack of ability to communicate. Here are some more:
Google is worth $154 billion. That's one company alone. There are lots of companies, lots of small business that are purely internet companies. I'd say, what, a couple trillion dollars worth just in the valley alone? What happens when the internet disappears? They are all suddenly useless. Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of money tied up in those companies. Not only would investors lose basically all money (and thus, losing their ability to leverage more bets, etc., depending on how deep they were in), the companies that were banking on those companies to buy things would lose money. And many, many more companies would lose time and energy due to vastly decreased productivity related to not being able to get those products in as fast a manner as the internet allows.
Then there's the fact that there is a lot of valuable information stored on the internet. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? Who's going to absorb that debt? You? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank?
It's no secret that e-commerce is big business in the US. Even a lot of businesses that are relatively small do e-commerce a lot of times, so you also have to count the fact that all their investments are sunk, too. Then there's the cost of the lost business that brought them, which they may have been banking on. Then there's the fact that, again, they can't get goods as fast as they used to because the efficient means of communication are gone.
Then there are the international implications, which means you can take all of what's said up there, and cross-apply the affects to them, as well as how those effects will affect us.
Oh, and I still haven't discussed the fact that you benefit more than you even know from information accessibility. For the last 10+ years, you've been slowly teaching yourself that you don't need to memorize everything because you have the internet. What happens when you need all those facts, but now they're gone? What happens when reporters don't have access to those facts? What happens when vital government organizations don't have access to those facts? And it's not just you: our entire society is built around this accessibility of information. Without it, we are blind.
So yes, the internet is integral to our way of living, and in fact, the way of living of the world as a whole. If you cannot see that, you need to exit the tech sector immediately.
You have no notion of the resiliency of our economy or our history as a civilization if you think that "pulling the plug" on the internet would be some crippling event.
Yes, business would be affected. But our civilization would collapse? I mean, you think people would just start hording guns and food because the INTERNET stopped working?
If Mastercard couldn't use the internet, you know what it would do? It would use banks of dedicated lines and dial-up modems to process cards, the same way it still does to this very day in most businesses.
I get that you live and breath this stuff, so do I. But you should seriously consider subjecting yourself to a liberal arts education. You need perspective. Our civilization has survived amazing adversity. Pandemics. World Wars. Revolutions. You think the internet would break us? Seriously?
Society can't function without ignition coils, but I'd wager that 90% of the world can't even vaguely articulate what role they serve.
There's a big difference between society depending on a handful of people understanding how something works, and society depending on most people understanding how something works. For some examples of the latter, you're operating at a serious disadvantage if you can't drive a car, address an envelope, or dial a long distance call.
I came here to say the same thing. I'm a 5th year at college and it astounds me how many CS/ECE/Engineering majors really don't understand that a vast majority of people don't know how anything works. It's a completely naive, misinformed, and narrow view of people in general.
Whenever I'm building software, I ask myself "Could my parents use this? Grandparents?" Most of the time, the answer is "probably not". But when it's "Yes", thats when I think I have a good implementation.
13 year old Americans (in families that can afford a computer with broadband) will have their whole social lives cataloged on Facebook or its successor. Indeed, even younger children will have their milestones shared by their eager parents, until they are old enough to take over. This is the divide: those who've had the ultimate social family tree preserved in a convenient database, and those who go on a road trip to search public records for traces of genealogy. Any effort an oldster takes today to preserve 'who they were' will pale next to a lifetime of crowdsourced social biography.
Overly optimistic. When Facebook dies -- and let us assume it will some day die -- who will import its data and carry on? Who will archive it? They save everything, today, but I doubt "long-term store of knowledge about individual humans" is one of their explicit design goals.
Well, Geocities used to be a behemoth only a company with mega resources like Yahoo could undertake. When it went down, a few individuals archived most of it [citation needed]. I'd imagine that if and when Facebook goes down, something along those lines might happen.
The problem here is Google's inline news feature.
It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix.
The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".
My take on this is that these are the reasons why things like the iPad will succeed, namely locked down single purpose devices that do one thing at a time well. Essentially Internet based appliances.
They will succeed primarily as some people (evidenced by this article) only use the Internet to do a few specific things and don't know of, or don't want to know of the specifics (address bar, search bar, certificates, etc) of using the internet in general. Therefore they will have their device with the icons of the things they use on the home screen, and not really venture into using a browser at all, just use the specific applications. Thus no more worrying about how to access Facebook or navigating a browser properly, they'll just click (tap) the Facebook icon and they are there.
The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint.
If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where:
- you are looking at page a
- page b is being loaded
- page c is displayed in the address bar
Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also looks identical to page c being loaded.
There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;"
In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
Our biggest site serves a nation of ~21 million, does ~3.5 million UBs (standard UB caveats apply) and derives 28.94% of it's traffic from Google organic.
I have to scroll down to keyword number 34 to find a phrase that is not some permutation of our domain name (which is also our hero brand name). The actual domain name accounts for 7.12% of these referrals, keywords 1-33 around 73%.
Out of interest, direct traffic is 38.66%
As amusing as the RRW debacle was, this is the way a significant segment of the population use the web.
Contrary to the title, what this article describes is obvious. The people yelling out "OMG WTF LOL" are just teenagers attempting to define their own identity by declaring the cluelessness of the older generation... nothing novel there.
Plus, the actual number of comments is unimpressive, given Facebook's size and demographics, a couple hundred confused comments does not seem especially significant considering the prominence and placement of the hit under Google.
The part of this post that stood out for me was the very bottom, where the author alludes to old politicians who are mostly ignorant of the Internet and modern technology. There is something pretty scary about the people 'in charge' being oblivious to something so significant.
Based on the fact that a large majority google "facebook login" to access the site, at least that I have seen, I'd say actually this suggests users are reasonably smart on average :-)
would be interesting to see the analytics for that post to get real figures.
I've spent probably way to much time thinking about this as well. I'll never forget the looks I got on the train when I was laughing hysterically at those article comments :)
It seemed that a lot of the confused were older judging from their profile pics. I know when I've shown my grandparents how to navigate the internet it's a lot easier to just set Google as their home page and tell them to type in what they want to see.
On the surface it seems to be a usability issue, but there's only so much you can do to help people who don't even really understand the internet and computers.
They're trying to INTEGRSTE search and address bar. They've succeeded. And it's far, far more usable than having them separate (for most people, people like my parents, my grandparents, etc).
I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
I have an 86-years-old grandmother that is valiantly trying to get used to the Internet.
It takes her a LOT of time to learn the most basic tasks, and I know it's an effort on her part (my grandfather doesn't even try).
She has now mastered the Google search, and so... she uses nothing else :) . That's probably what happened to these other old gentlemen (my grandmother doesn't have a facebook account because she's worried about privacy, but it could have happened to her).
The interesting thing I've noticed with my grandparents and great-aunts/uncles as test cases is that it's not really universal. Both of my grandfathers are over 80.
One of them carefully writes down how many times he has to click on something (he can't ever remember whether to single or double click), doesn't really understand that he's not on a typewriter and can use the backspace, so all of his mistakes are still inline, is comfortable with email and not much more. His little sister, in her 70s, however, has more Facebook friends than I do.
My other grandfather, the older of the two (83), plays backgammon against random people on Yahoo Games, uses instant messaging, regularly buys stuff online, reads my blog and even asked me what Twitter was, commenting that, "It seemed like another kind of blog." When we first set up a company newsletter, he was the first subscriber. He still works most days and complains that he can't get DSL at his house and so he prefers to surf at the office.
Years ago I ran a small computer class at a retirement community. Every week there would be four or five "students" who showed up (usually the same ones every time). They were all very bright and funny, and I enjoyed every minute of it, even when it was frustrating.
What I found, though, is that most of them weren't really interested in learning how to use their computers — at least, not to the point that they'd feel comfortable navigating to interesting new websites.
Instead, they'd usually tell me exactly what they wanted to do, be it access their webmail account or play Bejeweled, and asked me to write out a checklist detailing how to do it (click the Start button, click the blue IE button, etc.). This actually worked pretty well most of the time. But if something didn't go according to plan they were too scared of messing things up to trust their intuition (especially when I wasn't around).
I really wish the iPad was around in those days, it would have been perfect for them.
It is amazing to this that people need to go to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email?
And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for hours.
I recently watched a friend in his mid 20's try to install some poker software on a new laptop. He's been playing poker online for years.
Anyway, to get the software he clicked IE which brought up the default home page (AOL). In the AOL search box he typed 'google' and selected the first result. Then when google loaded he typed 'poker stars' in the search box to get to the correct site.
I always get confused by this attitude, I use the internet pretty much all day, most days.
When I visit a url, I type it in the "address bar", however I have never typed a tld, so my address bar is actually a google search, its generally always the first link, I click on it, on subsequent visits it auto completes.
Compared to the amount of times I have misspelt a domain, plain forgot it, or got the tld wrong, typing a keyword and clicking on the first result was always the easiest way for me.
Having done some work for a local credit union, I can tell you that yes people do actually do a google search for their bank to get to their online banking.
One item to consider is that a large portion of these people probably have google as their homepage, so they don't "go" to google, it's just he most conspicuous box when they fire up their browser.
Yeah, that's true. My inlaws though, they have Yahoo! set as their homepage, then go to google to get to a web address. I asked them why not just set it to google, and they said they liked having news and weather on the homepage to check out first. I tried to show them you can do that with google too, they just weren't going for it.
I thought it was pretty obvious that only the first few pages of comments were even remotely real. Then the internet lolmachine got a hold of it and went nuts.
Still, it saddens me that people are still just typing random shit in the address bar and expecting it to work.
When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold.
Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags.
Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...