Everyone has problems with technology even the most tech-savvy person has had a few problems which has driven him to the point of, either step on it until you can’t even recognize it anymore, or just buy a new one to replace it. The democratization of technology has given the everyday-man the ability to do something, such as creating a website, that a even a few years ago would have been out of reach for a plethora of individuals. But I see more and more everyday, people are taking this technology and never using it to its fullest extent, it just goes to waste. A few months back, I returned from my half year “finding myself” journey in Vietnam, to come to the realization that I need a cellphone again, since my plan was up (or so I thought, which is a story for another day) I began my search for the close to perfect, bestest cellphone with the cheapest price. I settled on dropping my current carrier Sprint in favor of selling my digital soul for two years to AT&T for the AT&T Tilt aka HTC Kaiser aka HTC TyTN II aka a whole bunch of other names. A month or so later, my roommate decided that he was in need of a phone upgrade, whilst trying to stick to his carrier of Sprint he decided that paying $400 for a brand spankin’ new phone, also from HTC (he opted to get the HTC Touch) was a good way to be on par with myself and my phone.
Months later I have hacked, read dozens of forums and reflashed my phone to slightly near-perfection and am loving it. But my roommate’s main uses for his device are as follows, texting (on a non-qwerty only touch screen device), phone calls and watching the broken web on Pocket IE. Calling it a waste in a great piece of technology is an understatement. For what he uses his phone for he should have stuck with his previous device the Moto Q, which has an awesome full-qwerty keyboard for texting and can make calls. As disappointed as I am right now, it was expected that he was never going to ever “use” the device.
I “work” in a computer lab, where students and faculty come in with work and occasionally (read: all the freaking time), have problems accomplishing tasks, you know things like printing color copies or copying and pasting a formula from one cell to another, so I usually get asked for assistance in these items. While helping I get the expected thank you’s and such, but I also get the “Why isn’t this working?” or “This should just work”
I guess my main point in this matter is that people are just becoming lazy and complacent and either think that technology should “just work” or just buy something to be chic and stylish. I think one way to solve this is to go back to doing things the hard way, then one can fully appreciate technology and its usefulness. Although there is a growing number of modders out there, their still a very niche population. By simply taking something apart, say a radio, one can learn so much about it. This is my call to bring back the past, bring back the times when things were “hard”, where messy html ruled the universe instead of discombobulated facebook and myspace pages. Go back to your computers and instead of asking your tech-savvy friend to figure it out for you, do it for yourself. Take out that screwdriver, open it up and just mess around with it until you have a mess of screws and wires laying around and just try to put it back together. If it doesn’t work, then take it apart again and redo what you did.
--written by Peter To--
