How technologically inept are you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Do you find electronic gear intuitive? Is it fun to figure out how to fully use all the features on a new appliance? Or are you frustrated that there is not more standardization, and do you use only a fraction of the capability of your various toys? If you are at the low-tech end of the continuum, do you feel this is a problem and do you have any intention of changing?

I do not find a lot of electronic gadgets intuitive, and when I do learn how to use something, I tend not to retain it. With respect to just about every electronic appliance I can think of, my usage is at the lowest level.

In college 25 years ago I used to be quite into stereo, and I could find my way around just about any stereo I encountered. But things have taken a drastic change in the past 2 decades far beyond “red is hot.”

For example, TVs. The idea of setting up and programming a new TV is to me a nightmare. And I have no idea what the majority of the buttons on the remotes are for. I don’t carry a cellphone, and on occasions when I borrow one I often have to ask how to make a call on it. We just got a new set of wireless phones for the house, and the other day my wife was calling when I was on the phone and I did not know how to use the call-waiting. Of course, getting call-waiting was not my decision in the first place. I’ve used computers at work for over 15 years now, and am pretty good at basic word-processing, but that’s about it.

I’m not proud of my incompetence. And I feel that as every day passes I will become more and more out of touch with how the majority of folk do even everyday things. But I’m simply not interested in so many things electronics do. I don’t care to talk on the phone. And other than watching TV, I can’t think of any other leisure, recreational activities I engage in that involve cutting edge electronics. I surf the net at work because the computer is in front of me and on, and I’m bored. When I’m anywhere else, I rarely have the desire to turn on a computer for entertainment.

Wondering exactly how out-of-the-loop I am.

2

I’m not quite the troglodyte you are. :wink:

But, yeah, I only get hand-me-down cell phones when my wife upgrades hers. Mine is currently pink and I use it about 3 minutes a month: when my wife calls me on it.

I recently started a thread about burning CDs where I had no idea that you couldn’t add songs to a disc after you had burned one song.

I like HDTV, but am currently happy with my 18 year old CRT. I don’t own an iPod or MP3 player. My car doesn’t even have a CD player in it. In fact I mostly listen to AM radio.

I like to surf though, and do frequently when I can find the time. I like the internet much better than TV. I get to choose what to read and watch: without commercials.

I have a diploma in electronics technology and do in fact find most electronics very intuitive; I just don’t give a damn.

3

I’m a software developer by profession, but my wife is amused by what a luddite I can be at times. I don’t pay bills on-line, I still write checks. I file my tax forms on paper. My cell phone is a very basic few-frills model that is probably close to five years old. And along the same lines with the OP’s comments about stereos and TVs, when we got a home theater system last Christmas my jaw just dropped when I saw the number of functions available and the sheer number of plugs for various devices on the back. My old stereo receiver had a pair of jacks for phono, tape (in and out), CD, and aux. The back of the surround sound receiver was literally covered in jacks. It took me an entire weekend to get it up and running.

On the other hand, even though it’s been about ten years since the last time I did it, I bet I could still build my own computer.

4

I’m pretty good with electronics and stuff (I think I get it from my dad–I sure as hell didn’t get it from Mom!). I’m not the type to delve into every little detail of what a program can do. I look for what I need, and muddle through. It works pretty well for me, and since I learn more gradually, I retain it better. I’m also the type of person who learns better from doing than by reading a manual, but that’s probably because at least half of all manuals for electronics and software are crap.

My mother, on the other hand…she could probably get confused with a calculator. Fortunately, Dad’s an electronics technician by trade, so even before I started learning this stuff, we always had someone around the house who was good at it. And we certainly never had to pay for satellite TV installation.

5

Oh hell yes; a thousand times yes. I have absolutely no idea what technology does, or how to make it work. I would be horrified with embarrassment if any of you knew for a fact how long it took me just to learn how to post messages like this on a computer. It hurts me daily.

I would change it if I could; I’ve tried. But it costs money, and I don’t know where to start, and I strongly suspect that I may just be naturally stupid in this regard. It didn’t used to be this way. When I was a kid, I spent the summer in California with my uncle, who was working in the computer industry at the time. He had computers in practically every room of his house. This was back when hardly anybody had a computer in their house. There was a little graphics program that he taught me to use. It was incredibly crude and blocky and just about the neatest thing I had ever played with. I spent the whole summer goofing around on that thing. It did just what I wanted it to. It was great. Then I had to go home and never owned another computer for about 15 years.

Now I look at the machine, and it’s all just a series of rectangles. Rectangles and icons and file formats that I don’t know what they do or what the difference between any of them is. I try to teach myself, and there’s always a tiny terminology gap between the book and what’s going on onscreen that throws me off completely. That is, if there even is a book. Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes there’s just online instructions, and I am forced to look at rectangles to learn how to work other rectangles. I don’t trust rectangles anymore. I try to do things, and something goes wrong, and sometimes I can go backward and fix it and sometimes I can’t, and I don’t know what I did wrong or why. Sometimes it turns out that the thing I was trying to do isn’t even possible to begin with.

What I need is a person; someone like my uncle, to watch over my shoulder and patiently explain it all to me: “This is what you need to do; here is how it’s done.” They would show me these things, and answer my questions, and if I tried to do something impossible, they would tell me so right away. They would show me what is necessary and what is not; what is useful and what is a waste of money. Then I could learn, and everything would be okay. But there are no such people for me anymore. There are only store clerks who stare at me with increasing frustration as I try to explain what I want without knowing any of the jargon. There are classes where instructors explain such matters briskly to large groups who already seem to know the material, while I sit alone, lost within the first 30 seconds. Things continue to slide away.

6

I’m a physicist in industry and have had one technical job or another for the last 35 years, 7 patents, teach several courses occasionally, and often do design work with electronics, optics, heat transfer, and more. I use about a dozen programming languages fairly proficiently and maybe a dozen more in a halting and uncertain fashion. The last few months I’ve been programming an automation system for a room-sized machine.

I have a world of trouble with the goddam cell phone, and antivirus software. I remember way back when what I wanted more than anything else was a huge and powerful stereo. Now I don’t know how to use the one we have, and I’m not even sure which door of the entertainment system it’s behind. These things have too many poorly conceived features that cost the manufacturer almost nothing because they’re just code running on a microprocessor, so each key on the front panel has twenty different functions and contexts.

7

I didn’t pay any attention to technology until late college, but since then I’ve found most things to be pretty intuitive. I definitely have a “knack” for this stuff. It’s part of why/how I wound up becoming a technical writer 5 years after graduation: I learn new hardware and software very quickly, and am able to explain it to folks like Terrifel in a way they understand. I remember one summer during college I was working as a temp, and I took an MS Word proficiency test: I scored at the “expert” level even though I’d never used it before (only WordStar)!

There does seem to be a kind of cumulative experience effect, though: during my 10+ years in the IT industry it has become increasingly easier to “guess” how a new system/application/electronic gadget will work. (I think I actually read an article or study or something about this effect once, many years ago.) So if I hadn’t become a tech writer all those years ago and started being exposed to various operating systems and the like, who knows if I’d be able to figure out how to program my universal remote today. :wink:

8

I, on the other hand, am ept.

9

Let me put it this way- it just took me 30 minutes to figure out what a widget was and how to download and install one. Then I realized that I already had some but I just didn’t know they were called widgets.

10

I learn through experimenting. Technologically advance people suck at explaining things to a beginner because they skip a lot of small steps. I find that I learn better if I just see for myself how something works.

I just use every feature I can without damaging the gadget. I got to know what everything does. That way I pick up the language of technology, and that helps with learning other technologies. When I got my cell phone I looked up all the options whose function I didn’t understand.

It’s all about knowing what the words mean.

I figure out how to use anything that sounds like it could be useful.

11

I’m a gamer and a programmer, and I’m one of those kids that could get around pretty much any security on the school network without blinking, in 8th grade I was the only one who could figure out how to work the freaking real-time chroma-key (blue/green screen replacement with a background image or video) on our video recording/broadcasting equipment. You’d think I’d be able to bend anything technological to my whim…

No, I cannot work out Cell Phones, half the little gadgets on my car, and those giant stereo systems make my eyes glaze over instantly and I have no idea what half the buttons and settings on my DVR remote do. I mean, sure a lot of it is just logic and intuition “the green plug goes in the green socket, the Bass knob controls the bass,” but the number of features and random nuanced settings just makes my head spin. but I would say I’m above average, I’m certain I could easily figure this all out if I felt a need to, I’m not debilitated for what I need/want to do with all the stuff I don’t understand.

Not all of us do, I taught my totally tech inept journalism teacher a ton of things about networking, websites, hardware, etc and i was never asked to slow down. But you’re right, as a body, most techno-nerds are TERRIBLE teachers, practically 90% of everything I know was figured out by logic and intuition, the rest was from books and a little bit of "did you know"s from friends. In fact, I made a point when I learned this stuff that I wouldn’t turn into a bad teacher so I could make the world a tad more tech-aware place.

12

I like most technology, and consider myself a fairly good tech-user; I can figure out how to use new stuff in a short period of time, often because I just enjoy navigating menus and seeing what kinds of features are available. One example: I often hijack widescreen TVs and DVD players wherever I am, simply to set the damn things’ aspect ratios CORRECTLY. And, usually, the owner of the TV/DVD will sit there dumbfounded, unaware until that moment that they could do that, and that an unnaturally squished or stretched picture is not what the brave new world of HD is supposed to look like.

However, I was embarrassed yesterday when a friend handed me his cell phone to call another friend up. It was only the third time I have ever held a cell phone in my life, and while I could figure out how to use it if given a bit of time, everyone sat there just expecting me to whip it open and go to town. They took it back out of my hands as I was trying to figure out how to unlatch it, asked the number, dialed it, then handed the phone back.

13

I think this suggests a fundamental difference between you and me. For example, let’s say your computer comes out with a new operating system, or when you go to renew your phone contract they tell you your old phone is obsolete. I can imagine you have a pleasant sensation, anticipating looking through the new product and finding out what it can do for you. I, on the other hand, experience mild dread. I most likely was perfectly happy with my old OS/phone, knew how to use it to do the things I needed/wanted it to do, and do not find the idea of learning a new system enjoyable.

Digital TV is all fine and good, but for my TV watching needs I’m perfectly happy with my old set.

I feel I’m pretty good at identifying my needs/wants. I do not need to explore what a new device is capable of in order to find out what I want it to do. Consider the telephone. I want it to make telephone calls. That’s it. I’ll readily acknowledge that push buttons were an improvement on rotary dial, and cordless is an improvement on hardwire. I can also imagine portability is an advantage for many folk over landlines. But I still want my phone for the simple purpose of making phone calls. I’m perfectly willing to jot down messages on pieces of paper, keep phone numbers in a phone book, and forego surfing the web until I get near a computer.

It seems to me that in many cases, people are willing to accept that they need something, simply because a new technological advance makes that something possible/available. Like the old saw about marketing, making people think they can’t live without something they previously didn’t know existed.

I’m also a HUGE fan of standardization. When I want to use a telephone, I should not need to think for more than a millisecond how to turn the damned thing on and how to dial a number and make a call. And I wish a TV to turn on when I hit the power button, without having to figure out if it is in the correct mode or whatever.

Far too often it seems as tho devices are designed backwards. They come out of the box configured to do as many tings imaginable. Which I believe is confusing for the least sophisticated user. The lowest level user often needs to learn how to disable functions they do not wish to use and that distract/confuse them. Instead, I suggest it would be preferable for a system to initially be set up to satisfy the barebones needs of the lowest level user, with the ability of having additional functions unlocked by anyone depending on their needs/interests/ability.

I don’t wish to sound as tho I have no interest in finding out how things work. I do considerable reading and spend a lot of time learning more about my region’s and the earth’s natural history, ecosystems, genetics, improving my golf game, my gardens, my aquaria, training my dog, educating and inspiring my kids, etc… :stuck_out_tongue:

14

I think people who grow up being encouraged to fiddle around with electronics have more of a tendency to adapt to and quickly use new technologies. I got to grow up surrounded by video games and home computers (during an era where this was still pretty odd), so exploratory pokings-around of said devices was how I satisfied the kind of curiosity that I imagine caused kids in earlier eras to take apart machines or learn about cars (or to phreak the phone system).

About the only time I dread using some kind of new technology is if I’m taking my first baby steps with it in front of people, like the above-mentioned cell phone thing. I loved tinkering around with MS Excel in my own time, for another example, but my first exposure to it was in a physics lab class, where it was assumed that we knew how to use it wth no instruction. That sucked.

15

I can get by. I usually enjoy messing with electronics until they do what I want them to do. I do find that as I get older, I find myself having to look at how tos and instructions more than I used to. When I was younger, it was a point of pride that I never read the manual but could figure it out.

That said home phones are a huge blind spot for me. I don’t like them and I never use them. Our landline is a corded phone with absolutely no options.

That said I don’t have an entertainment system and will probably not have one.

16

I have the same problem. People get nervous when you start messing around with a program.

People will quickly try to show me what to do before I figure it out myself. I don’t know why this upsets me, but it hurts my pride a little. It is impossible for me to know how to use all the programs out there, but I can learn just about all of them if you give me a few minutes.

17

Like the rest of my family I’m not crazy about high tech.

For my job I need to know how to use a computer (very basically) and a cell phone and that’s about it and that’s about all. The higher tech research stuff is left to my coworkers. That’s what they’re paid for.

If I need to know anything else it will be because I need it for work and then I’ll have to learn it. Dude, I still use an SLR camera! :stuck_out_tongue:

18

I’ve made it a goal in my life to live in the past as much as I can. I’m strictly analog and never really believed digital as the tech god some people purport it to be. I have 8-track players, a reel-to-reel, cassette players, turntables, vcrs and as little as I know about electronics I can clean and change belts in all of those.

The other day, my wife was having problems downloading stuff on to her ipod and changing the volume and I told her “you know what hon, I’ve never had that problem with my cassette player”.

19

All this reminds me of a joke that I heard…

They promised us that some day, our computers will be as easy to use as our phones… and now its true! Phones are incredibly complex little gadjets that take expertise to operate…

FML

20

>I, on the other hand, am ept.

Well, now, just hold on a sec. There’s ept, and then there’s ept. How ept are you? Are you just ept enough to escape notice, or is your eptitude the stuff of envious conversations?