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Net Culture > Articles
Pondering Techno Phobia
Cindy Grant03/00
The other day, I did something for the first time. I ordered groceries from Groceryworks.com, an online grocery store serving the Dallas area. The potential that this service has on simplifying my life so overwhelmed me, I overlooked the mirage of problems their server had with my order. The next day I looked at my dozen or so grocery bags, thinking what this could mean to my life. I was truly elated.
I shared my virtual grocery experience with 3 or 4 of my friends and anyone else that happened to call our house that afternoon. What an incredible breakthrough, I said! Imagine whom this would benefit! Mothers of tiny infants; singles suffering from the flu; people who are too busy to stand in line at the unfriendly, mega-aisled grocery store; the elderly – oh, well, maybe not them.
Then it struck me. Not everyone’s up for a drive down the Information Superhighway. Of course, I’ve been aware of this fact for some time now. But I realized in new ways the significance techno phobia has on certain subcultures in America.
Computer technology isn’t available to everyone in every socioeconomic group. It also isn’t wholeheartedly welcome among those 65 and older. To them, IT is a foreign way of thinking.
Far from ridiculing a technophobe, I feel for them. We IT-oriented folks can easily overlook the years of priming we’ve had in acclimating to the logic of our PC’s. To us, MS Office and AOL are a breeze – but we are comparing these technologies to our own experiences with the technology available to us ten or 15 years ago. Not everyone ran out and bought a $2,500 PC and monochrome monitor when WordPerfect was still version 1 and dot matrix printers were all the rage.
I remember fondly the first time I laid my fingers on a computer keyboard. It was the late ‘70’s, and I was in 7th grade taking a BASIC programming class in a gifted school. We spent a couple of classes writing a program to tell time. That TRS-80 with its single-sided, 45-record-looking floppy seemed like such a technological miracle to me. I could almost imagine the possibilities of 2001: A Space Odyssey when I looked at it, and this thrilled me. At the same time, my techno-father was busy in his spare time assembling a computer with a do-It-yourself kit from Radio Shack. Once it was operational, we could do little more than Word Processing and Pong. But we were the life of the neighborhood. All the kids came over to get a shot at it.
My life experiences primed me for a life with computers. In fact, I missed being part of the Geek subculture because I simply chose not to immerse myself in programming language and expensive novelties such as early modems. But, in 1983, I did watch, with rapt attention, my dream date Matthew Broderick in War Games play at being a hacker before hacking was a household name. I grew up in the first wave of publicly available IT. My children, of course, have much more available to them. Their comfort level with computers will soon be above mine.
American subcultures that are largely techno phobic – the elderly and the poor, as well as those with learning difficulties such as dyslexia -- are not experiencing the mindset that comes with the Internet. This disparity will become more, not less, obvious, as more of our lifestyle options are Internet oriented. Businesses across all industries are shifting gears to go online and make their niche known to the web-literate.
Gee, I wonder what to order for this week’s groceries.