The other day I did a small favor for my sister. We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop. The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before. (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.) She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly. Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.
I told her she should switch to Firefox. She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it. I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead. Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE. She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I. I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster. Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.
None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it. But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person. Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way. She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.
Of course she’s not alone in that. Millions upon millions of people feel the same way. Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people. On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself. She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.
Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life. We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free. On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle. That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Note: Posted slightly late on account of all kinds of shit.
“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
“All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
The other day I did a small favor for my sister. We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop. The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before. (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.) She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly. Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.
I told her she should switch to Firefox. She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it. I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead. Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE. She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I. I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster. Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.
None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it. But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person. Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way. She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.
Of course she’s not alone in that. Millions upon millions of people feel the same way. Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people. On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself. She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.
Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life. We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free. On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle. That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.
