On the Issue of Troubleshooting

As someone who works for tech support, and someone who has recently been doing a lot of trouble shooting regarding technological problems I don't necessarily understand, this small quote from a Chicago Tribune interview with Cory Doctorow really resonated with me:

"Do you know who Don Norman is? Norman and Jakob Nielsen are co-owners of this big user-interface firm. An important Norman book was called "The Design of Everyday Things," essentially a jeremiad against designers and in favor of engineers. He repudiated it 20 years later in a book called "Emotional Design." He starts from a premise that all technology is inherently broken, that at a certain level of complexity everything is nearly not working. Our capacity to make it work is entirely dependent on our ability to be calm, take a deep breath, feel good about ourselves and work out what the answer is. And that has a lot to do with our relationship with our technology, and it s a kind of feng shui arrangement with our technology, and he says that’s why beautiful things are more functional. So I’ve become a Normanist."

This really does make a fair and excellent point. It is not what you know or what you don't know, it's not what you supposedly can or cannot do, it is patience, calmness and resilience that allow people to solve computer related problems. I am of the school of belief that if you simply take a deep breath and see the issue at hand no as a sinister technomological doohicky problem and rather as an actually problem solving issue you will go a long way to making these issues solvable.

Because I constantly am talking to people with computer issues at work, I've really begun to understand the 2/3 of the problem is overcoming your own innate fear of the unknown. People so often will, even subliminally, say to themselves "Oh, it's technology, I'll never get it," whereas if they simply rallied the information they knew and used common sense they would be able to fix many daunting problems themselves. I know this, because I am constantly dealing with problems and issues I have never seen before, know nothing about, and do not understand. When this happens, I close my eyes and remind myself that I am capable, that people made this technology, and that there is no reason I shouldn't be able to figure out what is going wrong. 9 times out of 10 I am able to fix my problems, and the skills I learned go into helping me with new problems when they arise in the future.

Recently I've found that young people (and by young I mean 18 and below) are having more and more computer related problems, similar to the sort that "old people" might have. These problems are generally related to connecting to the internet, getting email configured, browser troubleshooting etc. After a conversation with a good friend of mine, we arrived at the conclusion that perhaps younger internet users grew up in a time when they weren't constantly HAVING to troubleshoot. If all you can remember is broadband, then why on earth would you generally have to configure things? If your parents knew how to do it and have always done it for you, why should you yourself know or care?

To me, as someone who has been dealing with computers on one level or another for over 15 years, this was sort of stunning. Like I said, I'm no wiz at all, almost all of my friends are more skilled than me. But like our grandfathers knew how to fix a leaky faucet and our great-grandfathers knew how to dig a cellar, I take it for granted that there are troubleshooting things that I know as inherent truths. And I also know that with common sense, deep breaths and concentration, anyone can know what I know. It just never occurred to me that the next generation might know less than I.

I can't know for sure if this is a coincidence or the beginning of a trend, but I DO know that the advice offered above is sound and it should be heeded by anyone, no matter how experienced or inexperienced with computers they may be.