Go on! Tell your boss to install Open Office and that you're not going to help.
If you read this blog, you must know a few influential people? Maybe they’ve been elected, or have some official role that is, in reality, more powerful than someone who has been elected?
Would they be the sort of person who would get someone else to do anything vaguely complicated with a PC? Do they regard their desktop computer as a necessary tool - but not something that they really should understand?
The BBC’s ever-perceptive Bill Thompson thinks that they need to find their inner geek:
It’s almost 50 years since the writer CP Snow gave his famous lecture about the ‘two cultures’ at Cambridge University, where he outlined the dangers that come from the lack of understanding between literary intellectuals and the scientific community.
Today things don’t seem as bad, and there is clearly a much greater awareness of and interest in popular science. Unfortunately a new divide has opened up, that between those of us who know enough about our computers to look under the bonnet from time to time and those who use them without any real curiosity or awareness.
The results could be far worse than being ripped off by unscrupulous engineers who offer them unnecessary upgrades, because these digital tools will increasingly shape society.
Earlier in the same post, he has this observation:
Last Friday the actor and self-confessed ‘technophile’ Stephen Fry was one of the more interesting contributors to a rather self-serving debate about Digital Britain held at the British Library.
He offered an analogy between the early days of the motor car and the current development of a network society, noting that there were no agonised debates or high-level task forces convened to discuss the rollout of the car, so perhaps we should be more relaxed in our attitude to going digital.
We might not have seen our cities damaged beyond repair in the interests of improving traffic flow if we’d stopped to think, of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized
