http://www.365tomorrows.com/01/27/adult-education/

Relevant.

Also if you don’t already know of 365 Tomorrows, it is quite a good site.

I love this post, I have actually worried about this too. It’s all good to joke about a university course ECE 736 Advanced VCR Programming, but there does seem to be a point when people no longer adapt to technology. Personally I think this is also the point when people no longer care to learn new things.

The technophobes I have seen are those that get home from work and sit in front of the television until bed time. They have no interest in learning anything new. So it would be my bet that as long as you keep in pursuit of new skills and knowledge you will probably be able to keep up with technology.

@ ZeWrestler:

56K? I used to access the inter webs with 26k modem. When I finally upgraded my modem to 56k I was like “OMG, this is soooooo fast”. Now if a page does not load in seconds I immediately I assume that it is either down, or that my internet is out.

@ Hector:

Same here. I don’t really do all that much on facebook either. I don’t use it the way some of the younger people I know use it. But I don’t discard it as something useless as some people do. It is all about keeping an open mind. :)

@ Zeke:

See, I think part of the issue here is that these kids grow up without a guidance in this area. Their parents may be able to give them sage advice on relationships, school, work related stuff – but when it comes to communication networks, social media and data privacy they are clueless. No one tells these kids what is appropriate and not appropriate facebook material. No one warns them about privacy issues and possible implications. No one tells them how easy is to get your account taken over by some pisher or script kiddie if you are not paying attention.

These kids are given very, very powerful tools, high bandwidth uplinks and and are let loose to roam the wilderness of the internet without fully understanding how it works, and what dangers it may pose to them. No one to warn them, no one to guide them. No wander some of them get little carried away.

It is a different kind of future shock – one where you get lost in the new without fully understanding it. But with some guidance and some forceful knowledge insertion they can be steered the right way.

@ Eric:

Actually, our civilization has never really “crashed” since like the fall of Rome. And even then, vast amounts of knowledge were preserved. The smaller crashes are usually local – nations fall, empires crumble, but it is all local damage. They are replaced by other nations and empires. Civilization and technology is usually preserved. If things go to hell here one day, these kids can just move to a more civilized part of the planet and continue their connected lives there.

I mean, ever since we got the internet there was no global crash that would shut it down. And it would be quite difficult to arrange for something like that anyway.

My question is what are these kids going to do when our civilization crashes and we have to learn how to survive without modern technology. If you look at our past civilization crashes fairly regularly.

I have noticed to be honest i have some friends who are so obsessed with facebook that it makes me sick. Im 20 and, and use facebook once a month to check up on my birth dad every now and then, and thats it. The fact that EVERY second of ones life is needed to be on facebook is pathetic, and people need to put their energy into productive things. when i say this i am referring to less self centered activities, ones that help other people. yeah, helping people. I am no sociologist, but the thing is, it seems people who are always on facebook tend to be introverted, self centered people who’s concern over others is shoved away by their need to communicate. its an addiction. theres plenty of other things. Now im not bashing it totally, but its pretty sad to watch people like that, makes me almost feel Superior, perhaps they feel the same.

A parent myself, I could’ve signed Mart’s comment :-)
My kids are 3 and 5, and both play with my PSP, and the smartphone, And they have an old Dell machine with Ubuntu to play with too. And I try to play with them!
I just want them to understand, to learn the things they can do, and how it really works.

On the future scare, I agree with Jambarama. Time is a finite resource, and I have to choose where do I spend it. I have nothing against facebook (not a generational gap here, I have several friends my same age who spend hours at a time in facebook), I just get my kicks from different activities. i.e. Learning new programming languages.
I just try to keep an open mind.
Oh, and kids are really time consuming!

In my day, we used a 56k modem to access the internet via-dialup on our phone lines. None of this cable modem crap. =P

@ Dileep:

Actually, I believe most people practice running mostly in order to stay fit. Our bodies were not really designed for sedentary life style combined with high calorie diet. So in order to stay healthy we need to watch what we eat, and exercise. I do not think anyone out there jogs every morning because of a fear his car will one day break down, and they will be forced to leg it to work.

Yes, our vehicles are faulty but we do have support systems for that. If your car breaks down in the middle road, you just call a towing company and they will come and get you.

As for your memorization point: yes, I agree but I think we are talking about slightly different things. I do believe that for now it is crucial to keep most of your knowledge in your biological memory. We don’t have high bandwidth electronic memory to rely on.

That said, our biological memory is faulty as well. We forget things. It is sometimes incredibly difficult to retrieve memories. Our memory can be altered via simple process of auto suggestion. Having another layer of electronic memory would be nice – you could then reconcile and verify from both sources. But alas, we don’t have that yet.

So yes, you should memorize certain things. The problem with that is: how much are you going to remember 5 years from now. I think every knowledge student knows how to cram for an exam, but few retain that knowledge for a long time.

A doctor can usually diagnose stuff of the top of his head, because this is what he does every day. Same with someone working as syadmin – 90% of server issues will be something that you have dealt before and remembered. Every once in a while though, you run into something exotic that you will need to look up. This goes for doctors, sysadmins and whoever.

We are lucky enough we can look it up on the fly using broadband network uplink instead of hiking to a library and hitting the books for an entire evening.

@ jambarama:

Honestly, I’m a casual Facebook user. Most of the time I don’t really see the need to friend-stalk and follow the minute details of my friends’ lives via their status updates. But I do see the utility of it – that’s how the younger generations are communicating nowadays. That’s how most people share pictures (with the horrible, horrible compression and all).

If kids are doing it, there has to be something to it. For me, this is a good enough reason to force myself to investigate the technology and give it a whirl. That’s sort of my point – you don’t have to love it, or even be excited about it. Just use it, understand it, don’t get left behind. That’s sort of my goal – try to keep up, even if I don’t particularly like where the new trends are taking us.

@ Victoria:

Yeah, this is a problem. Actually it is several problems but chief of them is this:

– How do I access my stuff offline?

We already solved this issue long time ago though. It is called caching. Our browsers already do this all the time. But we currently treat our browser cache as trash and privacy concern that ought to be deleted. Most browsers don’t support offline browsing of your cache very well. I believe this is something we ought to work on.

We ought to be able to have a permanent cache, that is indexed and easily searchable and easy to browse. Our offline memory so to speak. Something we looked up once, should be easy to fetch back even if network is not online.

The other issue you speak off is the power thing. That is a huge issue but… That can be solved too. I think I touched upon this in the Zombie Survival Kit post – you can always get a personal solar panel kit, that would potentially allow you to recharge your electronics.

Eventually we will get to a point where we will be able to charge our hardware via body heat, or have it installed as wetware and have it be supplied with energy just like any other organ in our body.

@ Mart:

I can already tell your kid will turn out to be an upstanding netizen. It is actually kinda scary to think most of kids today grow up without any parental guidance. They have full access to the net, but no one to guide them through it. This is why Youtube comments are essentially the embodiment of eternal September. This is why kids get in deep trouble assuming internet anonymity when it is merely an illusion.

The fact that parents today are simply incapable of guiding and protecting their children because of their technological ineptitude worries me. I mean, how can even hope to rise a child the right way if you can only comprehend about 30% of what is going on in his/her life.

@ Axel Rauschmayer:

I absolutely agree. I do believe that the breaking down of authority will become a major global trend. Especially since the authority these days seems to have a lot of trouble coping with change. Governments are struggling to even begin understanding what is going on on the internet these days, and they are under a lot of pressure from special-interest groups to put a lid on all the new emergent trends that threaten to make their business models completely obsolete in less than a decade.

I have a reservation with the memorising bit. I don’t have the time to compose proper prose for this, so I’ll use examples and analogies instead.
I prefer to make the distinction between robust biological components that have evolved for millions of years, and tech-addons. I see value in relying more on the former. That is why people still practice running, even when they own cars and jetpacks and portals. These systems are buggy and can fail. Then, it helps to fall back on the old, and faithful legs and muscle.
I come from India, and one curious quirk about Indian traditional knowledge is that it was written in verse, designed to be passed on through memorisation. The literary artistry involved in weaving together concepts to prevent decay/modification through successive iterations was akin to error-control coding. Most of our records only survived periodic empire-collapses because entire schools could be revived by a handful of survivors.
But archival advantages aside, even today, we write closed-book exams at our universities, even at the graduate level. I think intimate buffering of detail within grey matter allows for multiple neural pathways to excite eachother in new ways, allowing for insight. I for one, would not visit a doctor who googles his diagnosis.