Comment by cshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this was a hugely entertaining read. I can hardly believe it was written in 1980. Really lost it, laughing out loud at this part (and several other parts):

> There is nothing like going home to the parents house and sitting there at the dinner table trying to explain what an amazing set of conversations you had today on the computer. They’re like, what? It can take an entire dinner conversation to try to explain what pnotes and TERM-talk are, and then you realize by the end of dinner, you have gotten nowhere, and they still simply Do. Not. Get. It. It’s frustrating. Some day, everyone will use these kinds of tools and we won’t be having these pointless hour-long conversations at the dinner table or anywhere else, trying to explain The Future, which for some weird reason you, lucky bastard, are already IN, while they’re still stuck in the past. I look forward to when this stuff is all mainstream and people can just talk about the online mail and chats they had today and nobody bats an eye. It will come. Question is, how long?

It wasn't written in 1980, it's a tongue-in-cheek response to an article written by a 2015 teenager that went viral yesterday: https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social-me...

Ah, thank you. I was starting to get a bit of vertigo on how prescient this was, I felt like I was reading The Machine. Now that I know it's satire it makes a lot more sense.

I know they're talking of WordPress.com, but hearing "WordPress" and "sophisticated" amuses me.

We're not there yet, because technology keeps advancing and some people (stereotypically older) don't keep up, but the baseline of assumed knowledge does keep rising.

At this point, the ideas of what a computer does and what the Internet does (not so much what they are, but the basic role they play) are assumed knowledge for everyone still active in the economy. The stereotypical image now is less "Old man picks up a computer mouse like a TV remote control and tries to change the channel on the monitor" and more "Old man has one inch of usable browser window due to the vast encrustation of spyware toolbars", which implies enough basic technical knowledge to even get those toolbars.

It really wasn't too long ago when the comic stereotype of "really out-of-it old man" involved a horse and a plow and a Franklin stove, and I think that's pretty amazing.

On the other hand:

> I look forward to when this stuff is all mainstream and people can just talk about the online mail and chats they had today and nobody bats an eye.

I think this time still haven't come yet. Of course almost everyone talks on-line a lot now, but adults can't admit openly they do, lest they get stigmatized as computer-addicted nerds who need to "log off to real life". Society at large still doesn't accept IMs and e-mails as a legitimate communication form. Maybe we need to wait until current teens grow up.

But people do understand that computers are a legitimate tool for everyday use (I remember when that wasn't so- even though personal computers were somewhat available, it was a little suspicious if you used one to do something that could be done otherwise).

So if somebody says they found a new way- using a computer- to solve an old problem, it's not so out of the ordinary, even if nobody else in the conversation had solved that problem in that way yet. Instead of scorn you are as likely to be met with "what a good idea."

It's on the boundary now, with Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook being mentioned casually by celebrities on TV chat shows. The BBC routinely go to Twitter for "vox pops" where previously they'd have gone into the street to ask random people.

On the contrary, actually. Celebrities giving free advertising for corporate products and luring people there is not really the same as educating people about what online mail and chat are, or rather a very specific biased kind of.

I mean I have family member who have been using computers online for years and still struggle to grasp basic online concept such a web browser, a search engine or email though they use it daily.

Replacing random people on the street who actually are somewhat random actual people going around their day by twitter accounts who represent a small subset of online personas registered to a corporate web service which can be people or not is a frightening trend.

If you knock on people's doors, those are people registered with some corporate mail service. Why does a corporation make a communication tool bad?

It's not the corporation that makes a communication tool bad, it's the selection bias introduced by some of those tools that make them bad for purpose of sampling opinions of general population.

You can assume that almost every citizen has a permanent address, and thus a mailbox. Nowdays in many countries you can also assume that almost everyone has a phone. But the demographics of Twitter are much different. Your average farmer, or liberal arts major, or most of the people over 50 probably haven't even heard about it. Using tweets to approximate vox populi will make your result heavily biased towards a particular group of people.

The interaction of the BBC's "no brand names on air" policy with this is often hilarious, as they have to either refer to "social media" or say "other <X> are available" if they do mention a brand name.

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