Ian M Rountree

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How Will Our Children Learn to Internet?

January 6, 2016 by Ian Leave a Comment

Internet Skills, like Keyboarding before them, are not part of our educational culture. Why?

When you boot up a video game for the first time – whether it’s a first person shooter, a single player RPG, or an MMORPG involving multiple players across the internet – there’s almost always a newb island. For the first little while, the game’s distressingly easy, you’re handed all kinds of information in easy to digest chunks, and the broad rules of the game are laid out in the form of demonstrations.

Move here. Get the thing. Press the button. Talk to her. Fight him. Complete the quest.

These places – it’s usually either a literal island, or a small encounter camp off to the side of the rest of the world – teach the newest of the new players, with no previous exposure to the genre or the game, the fundamentals of the world they’re about to inhabit. Experienced players, who have an inherited understanding of many elements of general game design and delivery, will pass through this experience very quickly. The less your exposure to the game, games in general, and the system being used, the longer it’ll take to get through it. But everyone can get through newb island with relative ease. It’s a literal boot camp for the experience; the place where your expectations get reset, you’re informed about the new world, and given your place in it.

Unlike designed experiences such as video games, there’s no “newb island” on the internet. Without it, how will we teach future users what good behavior is?

The User’s Side: Child-proofing the world vs World-proofing the child

We like to think of the early web was very different from what we see now. Small, insular groups controlled their bulletin boards and chat systems with a friendly face and clear no-nonsense rules.

There are a few examples of this. One of the earliest chats I joined in the 90s, Alamak, had a large (at the time) community – numbering a few hundred users concurrently connecting, almost any hour of the day. The admins, and particularly the owner, were very active. They had to be; sales of “Ops” permissions (the ability to make rooms, a stake in the policing of the site, and other perks) for a few dollars a month were how they made their living. They had a clear interest in growing a community, and making sure that community supported them.

Some of these Ops took it on themselves to do a New User Speech, when they identified someone very clearly logging in for the first time. Doing that identification was hard, but the speech was integral to how a number of people saw the chat; over the course of about fifteen minutes, in a locked room, the Op would go over the usual expectations, dump some really simple “Don’t be a jerk” style guidelines on the new user, and answer some questions.

Lots of people have a clear nostalgia for that kind of activity – the small groups, the new user speeches, and so on – but it’s difficult to remember that the environment didn’t stay that way for long. By the time you were a “new user” on two or three different chats, you get tired of learning new rules, and you start assuming that every community is basically the same. It’s hard to learn that “Don’t be a jerk” actually means very different things in different environments.

So things changed. New users stopped accepting help as offered. Problems got more common, and toxicity (a big deal today) began to make its way toward being the norm. System admins had to adjust; instead of educating the users, they had to secure their systems. Unfortunately, in the way of many things, the business side of system security is always more effective than the community side, and we can see where that goes today.

The bigger the net got, and the more people logged in daily, the more obvious it became that there was just no value – no way to scale tasks – in the realm of user education. So we abandoned it. There were simply too many new things, and too many people.

The Internet’s Side: Eternal September

There are way too many newbs. Like – mind-boggling numbers of people, entering the web for the first time, every day. It’s so hard to foster new people partly because there are so many – and partly because they come in with this sort of magical-thinking “I Am Om(net)scient” attitude that’s impossible to break down.

The term “Eternal September” isn’t used very often any more (because it’s over 20 years now that we’ve been within this never-ending month). But it’s an important idea to recognize.

The truth is that your experience with the web begins long before you actually put hands to keyboard, especially for younger people. Anyone under 18 now has never lived in a world without pervasive cellular phone use. Anyone under 10 won’t remember a time when tablets were a novelty, and not a de rigueur part of living in a connected economy. There are no effective barriers to entry, by design, to the world of connected commerce, communications, and digital business.

The outcome here is that, while there’s a lot of ambient knowledge about the internet and how to work it, it’s become largely instinct – unstudied, mysterious, and sourceless. Anyone who’s never gone out of their way to read an EULA, T&C document, or the ToS for their favorite app is an amateur. They’re appreciating something, even to a high level of potential use, without conscious education about the thing they’re appreciating.

They’re newbs. All of us are, still, after close to 25 years. This is especially true of social media, which has only been a big deal less than a decade, despite being the literal core of the internet’s popular foundation.

It’s clear we don’t yet know how to use social media in a positive light.

Resentment is a serious consequence of social networks, and one that they’re all bad at dealing with. On any social network there are far fewer people who are successful (usually in quasi-tiers) and then there’s everybody else looking in through the window at the party. For many this means they get to contact their heroes, but for some it’s a cause for jealousy. She’s so lucky. He’s such a shill. She knows the right people. He’s in their pocket. She sleeps around. He’s corrupt.

The above is from an article decompressing about GamerGate. This isn’t an article about GamerGate, but it’s impossible not to look at big internet phenomena without considering where it’s come from, what could have prevented it, and spending some time thinking about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Of course there will always be instances where good comes from the internet’s basic transparency and free communication. Child predators being found out, joyful revolutions, shared moments of accomplishment. But those aren’t what I want to talk about. What worries me is how, in the future, will people know how to act in social circumstances, both online and offline? How will the differences between the tools at hand for those circumstances begin to cue us in and create opportunities to use reason and accurately develop opinions and emotions?

There’s no “decline of internet education” – it’s never existed properly in the first place.

I wish I had answers to offer, I really do – so if you came here for them, my apologies for disappointing you. Instead of trying to fix this problem (which I hope you’ll at least agree it is), I’d like to ask some questions that I really hope you’ll think about, whether you respond here in the comments or not.

  • Education or Training: How can we begin to build an education framework for the web, for the users to come after us? Should that framework have a face in the school system, or should parents keep that role?
  • Respecting the “Internet Permanent Record”: What kinds of social structures do we need to change, so that we stop punishing people decades later for their initial lack of informed action, such as just generally being young and stupid, or – more recently – a Canadian Liberal candidate being pushed out of her election race because of a poor taste tweet being dug up?
  • Mandates of Limitations: Should parents allow or encourage their kids to set up masks, or disposable avatar accounts, that they’ll use until their age of majority and then permanently abandon, for the sake of both of the above aims?
  • Should Business Step In: Fewer people every year actually learn non-social skills, such as keyboarding, despite average typing speed likely rising simply by way of self-training. Is there a business case for creating apps or systems intended to obsolete themselves by way of educating a user out of the need for them?

You can see where this is going, I hope. We must a lot more considerate not only of the structures we’re building (socially and personally) using the internet itself – and conscious, intentional education is a good way to start. But how does that work?

If you’ve got any questions about this – and I hope you do – I really hope you ask them, and keep asking them, until someone begins to work on answers in a meaningful and visible way.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: community, education, internet

Mind The Gap

August 20, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

We lay a lot of trust in our news sites, just as we do/did with newspapers before them expecting that when something appears in their space, it’s worth viewing and provides meaningful,concise information.

Then you get articles like the one @modernsusan dropped me today, “Time to drop the Netbook label.”

It blew me away, so much I’m having trouble expressing how frustrated I am trying to figure out their point in writing this. In the space of 949 words, the article meanders from being pro-notebook to anti-netbook, and somehow in between tries to explain the idea of the netbook class of computers by explaining where certain models fit inside the very gap that defines the difference between fully-featured laptops and stripped-down netbooks.

Netbooks DO NOT replace fully-featured computers!

They’re add-on devices. Pure and simple. Thankfully, CNN explains their original purpose:

The big PC makers, understandably, wanted a piece of the action too, but not at the expense of cannibalizing their budget-conscious traditional notebook lines.

So Netbooks were sold as a “companion device.” As in, if you keep some of your data “in the cloud” as with e-mail on Yahoo or Gmail or pictures on Facebook or Picasa, and you stream music on a service like Pandora or Last.fm, you can use your regular notebook at home and use something smaller on the road that still affords access to a lot of your stuff.

A good point. Totally ruined, later in the article:

Color, screen resolution, battery, Wi-Fi, Webcam? The same. And they both lack an internal optical drive. The differences, though relatively small, can be summed up in the 11z notebook’s 1.5 inches of extra screen real estate, a more powerful Celeron processor, 1GB of extra memory, and a larger hard drive.

Plus, by getting the notebook with Vista, you have an automatic free upgrade to Windows 7. With any computer with XP, it costs around $100 to get Windows 7 Home Premium Edition.

The specs are so similar that the average shopper would likely be confused as to why one is better than the other. And the way Dell introduced the 11z doesn’t clear matters up. Dell’s official blog notes that “the Inspiron 11z blends Netbook-like portability with laptop-like capability.”

Can you see where it is, this total blow-your-mind article-ruining realization that hit me after reading this passage? I did a count on the page, and CNN mentions the Dell 11z seven (count them, 7) times in less than six hundred words.

They’re promoting a bridge product! That’s why they’re writing this! Whether or not Dell asked, or paid, or they’re just using it as an example, the focus stands out, and it blows my mind because it ruins the whole thing. I feel like they’re trying to sell me one of these things, and I can’t help but be angry about it.

Netbooks fit nicely into the space between a laptop and a smartphone. By definition, they ARE a filler product! I’ve spoken before about why the market needs gaps, and I stand by it. So having CNN declaring the gap a non-issue really gets my goat.

A high saturation of what reads like product placement really doesn’t help either.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: hardware, shopping

A Little Rant About Vista

June 29, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

Seriously, people, it’s not that bad!

Ok. I’ve heard it. You’ve heard it. Justin Long, Mr “Hello, I’m A Mac” has all but said it a few dozen ways. But really, is it that big of a deal? I was one of the early adopters who got a Vista-based computer right out of the gate in 2006, and the day I bought it, I would have agreed, it sucked. It blew worse than going back to Windows 3.1 and being stuck with a 13inch big-box CRT monitor.

But you know what happened? The updates started rolling out about April, and because I’d had the POS four months, I didn’t see a difference, but it made one. By May many of the issues that plagued the release-date Windows Vista were gone. But the damaging ads were not. Now, two plus years later, Windows 7 is coming out (October 22nd has been set as the release date, but you can get it early, sort of.) and people still refuse to believe Vista isn’t as bad as people think it is!

Grow up a bit, if you can. It’s fine. Trust me.

Yes. Vista has its problems. When has any piece of technology ever not? And yes, Windows 7 is an improvement on Vista. If it weren’t, why would Microsoft have bothered with a public beta, much less an extended review term, much less still releasing it? They even fixed the problem of people buying new PCs with Vista by wrangling the manufacturers into offering “Free Upgrade” coupons between now and January of 2010! Which means there’s no point saying you’re waiting for Windows 7, because the computer you buy NOW is Windows 7! Just, it will be in October.

So it’s time to give up the ghost. Vista is (mostly) fixed. The new version is coming, with many concessions like free upgrades and pro-rated early ordering to boot!

Cut it out, dudes and dudettes.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: software

What The Bleep is a Netbook, Anyway?

June 24, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

I recently went on a bit of a rant at Engadget. A rather smart man named Michael Gartenberg, one of the VPs of a company called Interpret, LLC, wrote an article about the definitions and changes the class of small, portable computers most recently called the Netbook has undergone recently.

In short, a Netbook is most often viewed as any computer with a screen-measurement of under 14 inches with a common retail price of under $400. This used to mean computers with very light-weight capabilities typically used by hipsters in coffee shops writing their first novel (or, to be fair, maybe their tenth – it’s hard to kn0w) and business people who needed a small, portable filing cabinet they could write documentation or presentations on during red-eye flights to and from meetings and conferences. This all changed about two years ago when Asus introduced the Eee, one of the first big-recognition Netbooks out there, and every major manufacturer jumped on the wagon.

We’ve now got dozens of models from dozens of makers with hundreds of spec variants – it becomes very hard to tell what the difference between the individual units is, and why we should be craving one over the other. Worse, it’s nearly impossible to tell when we’re going to use these things if we haven’t got an idea already, or whether we can even afford to be carting them around with us everywhere we go. Space is, after all, at a premium whether you’ve got a back pocket or a backpack.

Thus, my comment on Engadget:

It really is about what you’re willing to carry. I used to have a PDA and a cell phone – my PDA played music, my phone had a couple simple games. Then I got a smartphone which didn’t play music and got rid of the PDA because, even with no music player, PDA and Smartphone combo was rediculous. Then I got an iPod. And got rid of the smartphone, because my new iPod Touch had a calendar – smart move, right? Wrong, four months later, I’m carrying a BlackBerry and an iPod Touch.

Who carries a laptop and a netbook? Well, as other posters have said, I admit I have a gaming laptop and a productivity laptop – not a netbook, however, but the point stands. They NEVER leave the house at the same time.

The point is not what we call them, the point is people expect certain experiences out of certain products. I sell electronics – daily, I see people coming in wanting to replace laptops with netbooks as their primary computer, and returning them the next day because netbooks (Or subnotebooks, either one) lack an optical drive and a few other basic inclusions that notebooks carry. With no desktop in the house, the laptop-per-person ratio has risen drastically.

Eventually, netbooks will approach low-end laptops in form and fuction. We may drop the name then. The trick is whether or not the market for “netbooks” will survive the fad phase and make it into the more permanent “utility” phase, as more people come to understand the distinction and difference between all of these manufactured terms we keep hurling their way.

Until then it’s two markets divided by a common terminology.

The massive flood of netbooks into the market, as well as the laptop replacing the desktop in many households, seems like a natural change of pace, if you look at it on the surface. After all, everything gets smaller, so the desktop becomes a laptop, and what the laptop used to do, the netbook now does better, smaller, in more places.

Or so people think! Trust me, if you expect to be using one of these tiny machines for any length of time, I’d suggest at least asking a clerk in some store to let you type on one, nonstop, for five minutes just to see if you can bear it. The keyboards are tiny, the screens are bitsy, and the trackpads they include are very touchy and inaccurate by and large. Sure, it’s cheap, but don’t treat the buying of a netbook like a liesure purchase, even if you’re planning on running nothing but old Windows XP games on the road.

Netbooks are very useful tools. That’s an important word; tool. They’re not really beefy enough to be toys, but thanks to their real keyboards and larger screens, full-blown operating systems and larger amounts of memory (nothing said of internet connectivity) students and office workers have the opportunity to be much more organized, more compact, and more productive on the road, and in the classroom.

Imagine, instead of carrying hundreds of pounds of textbooks, having your entire courseload on PDF file in a thin, snappy little computer? Or, for you corporates out there, when was the last time you realized you had an inspiration for something to improve a PowerPoint from cool to awesome five minutes before the presentation and had no access to a computer?

In this way, Netbooks are incredible. Access to everything you want (assuming you synced it or carry a USB drive) and the programs you need to do stuff with those things! Awesome!

Still, as with everything, dropping four hundred dollars – for some people, that’s a full two-weeks’ pay – on something like this requires a bit more thought than “Ooh, shiny!” and some attention to store return policies. If it doesn’t work for you, you don’t need it. End of story. But there are easier ways to figure that out than taking it home for a month and maybe missing your return date. Who wants an exquisite paperweight?

Hopefully, as the market adjusts itself away from the Shiny New Toy idea behind the Netbook and people start considering with more care their personal need for such a device, the differences between a small laptop and a large netbook will widen, instead of shrinking as they are now. Technology has a habit of making things smaller; this isn’t always a good thing.

UPDATE – July 4th, 2009: Mitch Joel of Twist Image just went on a rant about Netbooks too, and was a bit more concise about why he likes them. Paging Mitch, I agree!

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: hardware

And on the 7th Windows, Gates rested

May 7, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

So I, like so many other tech enthusiasts, downloaded my free evaluation copy of Windows 7 when it became available on May 5th, and I installed it today. And I have to say, I’m rather impressed. Not just by the fact that my laptop now idles at less than 1300mb of ram, when Vista Ultimate used nearly 1700mb, and Vista Premium used about 1500mb. It’s not just how pretty it is either – Aero works better, Aero Peek is funky, and the automatically-rotating desktop backgrounds are also a bit of a cool plus – but it feels like a more cohesive version of the experience I had when I first went from Windows 98 to Windows XP; I have the sense that there is real improvement here, not just cosmetic improvement.

But I’m concerned that Microsoft may have miscalculated. I suddenly, inexplicably, have become convinced that my next computer will be an Apple.

I wish I knew what it was about this that did it. Perhaps it’s the process of pruning down the progrms I use versus the ones I don’t use. Maybe it’s the way the Start Bar can be programmed to behave very similarly to OSX’s Dock. Perhaps it’s the fact that I can, with the flip of a button, pop the Start bar onto the top of the screen instead of the bottom, which is very very Mac-feeling. I’m not sure. But I feel as though I’ve been hybridized.

Clearly MS did the right thing allowing people to get the RC of Win7 very early, and having it free and unlimited for ten months – if I still have my current laptop when Win7 comes out, I’ll be purchasing a copy, no doubt about it. There’s no way I’ll want to go back to Vista by then, not with all the new toys 7 has to offer, and how practical the toys actually are (for once). But at the same time…

New software costs a lot. I know, I sell the stuff. Macs cost a lot, too, and the benefits of a Mac as I concieve of them is actually shrinking with the new version of Windows. It’ll take some more time to really determine the full extent of differences between Vista as I’ve been using for the past two years, and Windows 7. It’ll also bear some testing and research to see what Apple has up their sleeves, and whether all the programs I commonly use and the tasks I commonly run through can be completed on a Mac – and whether these things are portable back to the Windows environment I use at work (where it’s a mix of XP for the workstations and Vista for the servers). The bottom line is that Macs have always been intrinsically sexy, and I grew up on them. But with 7 being as slick as it is on the surface, Macs just became a much harder sell.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: archive, microsoft

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