Grandpa gave me a reality check…

For all you highly-skilled, technology-savvy librarians out there, please indulge me for a few paragraphs; I promise I’ll get to the point forthwith.
 
You are reading a “blog.” You found it on “the Internet,” or, more specifically, “the World Wide Web.” You probably quickly “booted up” your computer, typed in a “username” and “password,”and “launched a Web browser.” Maybe you “subscribe to our RSS feed,”and you found this “post” through your “RSS aggregator.” You can quickly grab the “URL” and share it with friends via your favorite “social network site,” like “Facebook” or “Twitter.” Even more basic, you used “a mouse” to “grab the URL,” by “cutting and pasting it.” Without even thinking about it, you might have swiped the URL by quickly moving the mouse and clicking at the same time, and that motion was so simple as to be subconscious.
 
“Yeah? So what? What the hell are you talking about? What’s with all the quotations marks?” you might be asking.

Imagine if you had no clue what all the words in quotation marks in the second paragraph meant, and that moving the mouse and clicking it at the same was a monumental feat. It’s hard to do; actually, it’s probably impossible for you to think outside of the quoted terms. 

Okay, that was a cheap rhetorical ploy to start this post, but I bring this up because I’ve been volunteering at a local branch of the Seattle Public Library by assisting in “Internet Basics” classes. The attendees are mostly older folks for whom these words are, quite literally, a foreign language.

Yesterday, I had to try to explain what Google Chrome is, and I continued to find myself explaining it in terms of other Web browsers.

I said, “Well, it’s basically the same thing as what you are using right now, Internet Explorer, except it was created by Google, instead of Microsoft. It’s just another thing that lets you surf the Web.”

I quickly realized that they didn’t know what Internet Explorer was, other than they double-clicked an icon on their desktop and “the Internet” appeared in the window, or “box.” Also, using the term “surf” probably threw them off as well.

The short of it is that I have come to realize how conditioned I am, how immersed in the terminology of “the Internet” I am, that it has been extremely difficult to think how to explain it without using the terms we all know.

Okay, you get it now.

You’re saying: “Old people have never used the Internet, and you [that is, me], a little whipper snapper, are blown away by the idea of not knowing what a Web browser is.” Yeah, that’s kind of it. But it goes beyond that.

Moving the mouse and clicking at the same time; typing; moving around windows on the screen; bringing one window to the fore in order to view it; these are bodily behaviors that are second nature for us, and yet so foreign to the attendees of these classes.

You’re saying: “Okay, so it’s terminology and bodily behaviors that they need to learn in order to “get the Net,” as Wayne Campbell once said.”

Well, Yes. And no. That’s not it completely. For me, this is the most interesting part of thinking about our interaction with computers, their software, and the Web.

There is a kind of structural grammar to computer software. Take the Web browser, for example. The URL or address bar is at the top of the screen. There is a “Forward” and “Back” button for navigation. I’m using Google Chrome right now, and it is rather different in its structure from other Web browsers. The address bar and the search “box” are the same thing. But, in Firefox and IE, you have a separate search box, usually right next to the address bar. There might be “bookmarks” or “favorites” that you can quickly click to get to your favorite sites. Even more basic, there are scroll bars, both vertical and horizontal. You can delete the screen by X-ing it out, minimize the screen or change its size from the buttons in the top right corner (or, for Apple software, upper left corner). You can click on one part of the page and nothing happens; click on another part of it and it changes the screen completely. Of course, you know these last things as “links.”


The point is: not only is there a whole dictionary of terminology and well-practiced bodily behaviors that allow us to use the Internet, but there is a visual and spatial structure of the on-screen representations, which we have learned over years of use. Designers have built in little clues, for example, underlining textual links. I’m no cognitive scientist, but I assume we have some sort of mental model or structure that conditions our interactions with these software objects.


The sheer depth and breadth of what we “know intuitively” about these software objects comes into full view when you find out that this knowledge is anything but intuitive. This calls into question the whole idea of “intuitiveness,” but that’s for another day I suppose.

For me, someone getting a master’s degree in “digital media communications,” these ideas and practices are so commonplace. So, while I’m assisting in these classes with people only beginning to learn these ideas and practices, I’m learning a lot too. As a soon-to-be librarian, I need to keep these experiences in mind and not assume a patron’s fluency with this stuff. Sure, in the academic library where I work, where there are plenty of young whipper snappers, I can usually assume a certain fluency. But the ball game changes in public libraries.

I guess I’m writing this because it was a wake-up call for me. Admittedly, in the last two years, I’ve lived mostly in the cloistered life-world of graduate school, so this whole blog post probably betrays my naivete. Nonetheless, it has been on my mind and, I thought, probably worth sharing.

- Ian