From: ken@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Ken Johnson)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: What is... Computeracy?
Date: 22 Jul 92 10:14:09 GMT
Followup-To: talk.bizarre
Organization: Bugs-R-Us



I wrote this article (unsolicited) for The Oldie magazine.  I enjoyed
writing it, and I even I thought it might amuse them.  Yesterday I
received another addition to my rejection slip collection.  I thought I
would give talk.bizarre readers a chance to see it anyway. 

-- Ken "The next Jeffery Archer" Johnson


#  What is...  Computeracy?
#  
#  Ken Johnson
#  
#  Like many people, I have a computer terminal on my desk at
#  work.  When I thought of writing an article about computer
#  literacy, one of my first acts was to reach for the keyboard
#  and start typing a first draft into the word processor.  If,
#  later, I want to show my work to a colleague for comment, I
#  could send it to him by electronic mail. If I want to find
#  out whether there are any books on the subject, I can
#  consult the University Library catalogue, without leaving my
#  desk, across a local area network.
#  
#  Already you can see in this article the distinguishing marks
#  of the techie who uses computers every working day: I am
#  using the computer to do things which I could have done
#  without it if I had wanted to, and secondly, I find it
#  impossible to talk about even simple tasks like reading a
#  catalogue or writing a story without dragging in technical
#  terminology which may mean nothing to the uninitiated.  So,
#  if you had come across the term, you might describe me as
#  computer literate - or, in Chris Cunningham's neologism,
#  computerate.
#  
#  Computers put the fear of God into people who are unfamiliar
#  with them. Indeed, computers are portrayed in folklore as a
#  sort of invading force: sooner or later, goes the myth, they
#  will confront you, cannons blazing, and you will face a
#  stark choice: learn to operate a computer, or get out and be
#  called a `technophobe' to boot, as if there were something
#  wrong with you.  People apologise for knowing nothing about
#  computers.
#  
#  Schools have swallowed this line wholesale: one primary
#  school I visited would regularly sit small children in front
#  of a computer-generated picture of a kitchen scale and tell
#  them to weigh out required quantities of flour on the scale
#  by pressing keys to add and remove flour from the pile shown
#  in the picture on the screen.  Presumably the childrens'
#  increased familiarity with the computer was supposed to
#  compensate them for not having real flour and a real scale
#  and baking real biscuits at a tiny fraction of the cost.
#  The same logic is to be seen in the television commercial
#  which suggests that using the computer all the time is
#  better than hardly touching it even after taking a training
#  course.
#  
#  More and more organisations are appearing with the purpose
#  of imparting basic computer skills to more and more
#  audiences: significantly, these audiences are often groups
#  who find it difficult to get work.  I think there are half a
#  dozen in Edinburgh alone.  After the naming of parts, the
#  novice is taught some of the jargon words and given a chance
#  to type a letter on a word processor, play a computer game,
#  draw a picture with a mouse or perhaps a turtle (jargon
#  again) and perhaps write a short computer program.  If you
#  can do all these things with help, you may count yourself as
#  `computer literate'.  The course probably supplements these
#  basics with lectures on Decision Support Systems or perhaps
#  Electronic Bulletin Boards.
#  
#  Certainly, the information put across on these courses may
#  be interesting.  A word processor does help me to write
#  English; I happen to enjoy a game of Hack or Tetris if I
#  have ten minutes to waste, and decision support systems are
#  useful in organisations where a very few experts have the
#  knowledge to guide the decisions taken by dozens of junior
#  staff.  Turtles are enormous fun; bulletin boards are a
#  cult. But none of these functions is so important that
#  anybody who is not interested needs to struggle with them.
#  Bare `literacy' is, in any case, useless.  You have to be
#  good at using a word processor before it becomes an asset in
#  the job of writing prose.  How valuable is it if it takes
#  you a day to do on the computer what you could have done
#  without it in twenty minutes? And some computer software is
#  hopelessly oversold: out of one comprehensive school class
#  of twenty children, fifteen were advised by a Decision
#  Support System on career choice to consider seeking
#  employment as a Leather Technologist.  I put this to the
#  author of the book about the program, who was most piqued
#  and replied that it had given each child other suggestions
#  too, and it had performed better than a tired careers
#  teacher on a Friday afternoon.  Be that as it may, I rather
#  feel that finding work for schoolchildren is far too
#  important to be delegated to computers.
#  
#  Why does computeracy purport to be important? In the 1960's
#  and 1970's, as computers were installed in accounts offices
#  and university departments, it seemed as though there was
#  likely to be a shortage of computer programmers.  Certainly
#  in the early days the programming of computers was a
#  difficult and fiddly job; these days, it is a lot easier.
#  There were job opportunities for programmers, partly because
#  many organisations wrote their own programs; nowadays they
#  would probably buy a program off the shelf and put up with
#  the fact that it could do most of what they wanted but not
#  all.
#  
#  But as personal computers became widespread in the 1980's,
#  someone moved the goalposts: computer programming,
#  certainly, was a skill that very few people would ever
#  require, except perhaps for recreation; but we were told
#  that it was crucial that everyone should know something
#  about computers.  Otherwise a future Government might set up
#  a National Database and your personal freedom would be taken
#  away without your understanding what was going on.  Or a
#  robot could be trained to do your job and you might not even
#  know what it was.  Suddenly, a false analogy between knowing
#  a bit about computers and the (genuinely essential) ability
#  to read and write took hold.  If you thought hardware was
#  flowerpots and ironmongery or a string was something you
#  tied a parcel up with or a field was green or a record was
#  made of vinyl and had music on it, you were ignorant and
#  vulnerable and `computer illiterate' - which sounds every
#  bit as dreadful as `illiterate' while being in fact much
#  less important.
#  
#  One friend of mine, an expert chef skilled enough to run a
#  small restaurant single handed, was almost persuaded to
#  spend a year at college learning to use a personal computer
#  - an item of equipment almost wholly worthless in her
#  vocation except for propping doors open. She knew she would
#  find the course dull, boring and irrelevant, but she was
#  afraid that without such knowledge she would never find work
#  again after her children had grown up.  I talked her out of
#  it.  I wish I had taken her to see the fish and chip shop I
#  came across in Fort William where two women served expertly
#  cooked food, ignoring the elaborate computer-style cash
#  register thoughtfully provided by their manager and instead
#  giving change out a desk drawer, which was perfectly
#  adequate for their purpose.
#  
#          Ken Johnson is Senior Computer Scientist at the
#          Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at
#          the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  He is
#          writing in a wholly personal capacity and the
#          Institute in no way endorses the views expressed
#          in this article. 
-- 
                          ////  Ken Johnson, A I Applications Institute
We won't be meeting again ////       80 South Bridge, EDINBURGH EH1 1HN
On the slow train,        ////                 E-mail ken@aiai.ed.ac.uk
On the slow train.        ////     phone 031-650 2756  fax 031-650 6513