Features

net.wars: The me-ness of being

Wendy appears to be suffering from a surfeit of screaming toddlers and child-like computers and me! me! me! - but not ME.

It's four years since Ellen Ullman pointed out how like demented three-year-olds Windows makes users sound these days. My documents. MY computer. MY NETWORK!

I'd sort of forgotten about this - I long ago renamed all those icons on my computer things like "Go away" and "Beast" - until not long ago I started using IRC and found myself typing things like "/me is happy. /me won a tennis set off a guy I'd never beaten before 6-3." Of course, online it comes out, "wendyg is happy ... " But while you're typing it, boy do you feel like you just managed to grab the best toy out of the pram from your baby brother.

Then this week I'm spending three days being eddicated on the innards of Windows 2000 networking (chorus of fed-up geek friends: "And about time, too, dammit."). And of course the training company's computers all have the bad, dumb names. After a couple of hours, I surreptitiously changed them on "my" machine. But the instructor keeps using them. At least it's not Windows ME, which was clearly the ultimate manifestation of this particular world problem.

It is easy to become truly self-absorbed when you spend a lot of time online. Email filters, killfiles, site blocking ... it's not impossible to configure the online world so that you don't have to deal with anything or anyone that you don't want to. This may explain why we react with such outrage when we get junk email: MY INBOX! MINE! AND YOU CAN'T HAVE IT! Still, the fun part about self-absorption is that it leads to so much fantasy and role-playing. One of my friends was, this week, briefly enchanted with the notion of My Brooklyn Bridge . Well, it could be.

But I digress. The curious thing about taking a course about software you already use and concepts you've been writing about for years is that you discover two things: 1) the gaps in your knowledge aren't as dramatic as you'd feared; 2) your software still has features you managed to miss.

The first of these has to do with the way journalists learn. In general, we don't. We research. We pick up whatever we need for the specific article we're writing, and then do our best to forget most of it as soon as possible. It is, in fact, very like being in school, where much of what you're taught is stored in medium-term memory only as long as needed until the exam. If you're a specialist, simple repetition eventually forces you to learn some things (basically because it would take too long to research it every time), and so I can say confidently that I don't have to relearn the basics of cryptography every time I write about it. Forgetting things is a defence, definitely, especially if you believe Sherlock Holmes's comment that a mind is like an empty attic: the space is not infinite, and you need to be careful what furniture you choose to stock it with.

But normally you don't learn about the software we use every day by writing articles; you do that by exploring the software itself.

Now, I'd thought I was pretty good at this. I've always been amazed at the folks whose copies of Netscape still load the Netscape home page every time they start the software. Sure, they find it annoying, but it never occurred to them to look to see if they could change it. These days, when I install anything I go methodically through all the menus, looking for things I can change. I'd been through the Administrative Tools section of Windows 2000 umpteen times, and yet quite what some of those tools did never really registered, basically, I suppose, because what the online help said about them wasn't really understandable either. The presumption seems to be that either you already know or you don't need/want to know.

In the early days of Windows, there was a common strand of thought that graphical interfaces encouraged users to explore, where commnad line interfaces encouraged them to learn exactly the commands they needed and no more. It seems apparent now that this isn't quite true - there still is a limit to how far people will explore, it's just that it's located further up the knowledge scale with graphical interfaces.

As a musician I used to talk about the "technical barrier" inherent in a given instrument, which I defined as the amount of skill you had to acquire in order to play a single note on a particular instrument and have it sound pretty good. On a violin, the technical barrier is extremely high; on a piano it's non-existent. The same with basic chords. But to become a virtuoso on either instrument, takes roughly the same (huge) amount of time, effort, learning, dedication, and innate talent. So graphical interrfaces have maybe moved the technical barrier to the basic chords point, but not beyond. Ultimately, most people have about as much control over their Windows computers as a three-year-old does over most of his environment. Perhaps the parallel is depressingly apt.

Oh, well, you know what they say. A little learning is a dangerous thing. I now know enough to write a book, completely trash my own network, and maybe even get a temporary job in tech support. "/me suggests you reinstall Windows. Have a nice day!"