There’s a famous scene in Robert Flaherty’s silent documentary “Nanook of the North” in which Nanook, an Inuit hunter whose daily life the film depicts, visits a distant trading post. There, he watches in wonderment as a trader plays a record on a phonograph and explains (as the intertitle tells us) “how the white man ‘cans’ his voice.” The trader lifts the record off the turntable and hands it to Nanook, who examines it closely and then bites into it, perhaps to find out how the voice is stored inside.
The scene, as we now know, was staged. By 1922, the year the film was made, the Inuit were well acquainted with technology, and actually hunted with rifles rather than the old-fashioned harpoons they’re shown to use in the film. The real-life Nanook knew perfectly well what a phonograph record was. Presumably, he and Flaherty thought that American audiences would find the record-biting scene amusing. In spirit, it’s really no different from the scene in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” in which the crew of the Enterprise time-travels back to 1986, and chief engineer Scotty, encountering an early Macintosh computer, speaks into the mouse to give the computer instructions.
We instinctively find it funny when someone is mystified by technology that we take for granted. Debra and I laugh when our 20-something goddaughters don’t know where to put the stamp on an envelope, or have trouble reading an analog clock. The thing is, for our goddaughters, it’s not funny at all. These are actual things that they don’t know, and they’re encountering situations in which they’re expected to know them. Our laughter really isn’t helpful. I know this because I’ve often been in the same situation that these young women are in.
There was the time when an outdoor event was going on at Chabot College, where I was a faculty member. A colleague of mine who had been charged with photographing the event needed to step away for a few minutes, so she handed me her camera. “Would you mind taking pictures for a while?” she said.
The camera she handed me was a fancy SLR, with a long lens and numerous buttons and knobs. “I don’t know how to work this,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” She thought I was putting her on. “You teach Photoshop, don’t you?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I know how to take photos,” I said. I’m actually quite camera-phobic. If I had to take pictures, I always made do with an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera, and polished the photos in Photoshop. If I needed really high-quality photos for a client job, I hired a photographer.
“Never mind,” she said, shaking her head, and took the camera back. I don’t think she ever believed that I didn’t know how to use it; she thought I was just being an asshole.
There was also the time when, as an underemployed freelancer, I swallowed my pride and called a temp agency to see whether they could get me some work. The man I spoke to asked me the standard questions (what my availability was, how fast I could type, etc.), and then asked whether I had any special skills that might be of use in an office.
“I can do page layout,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “What do you use? Quark? Pagemaker?”
“WordPerfect,” I said.
“WordPerfect?” he said. “That’s a word processor. I thought you said you did page layout.”
“I do,” I said. “I do page layout in WordPerfect.”
I was an early adopter of WordPerfect, became one of their beta testers, and eventually handled WordPerfect support on CompuServe. I was a WordPerfect expert — I could make it do anything, including page layout. I had no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on professional page-layout software when, as a beta tester, I got WordPerfect for free.
“If my pages look the same, and my clients can’t tell the difference by looking at them,” I asked the man, “why does it matter what software I use?”
“It matters,” he said, “because nobody is going to hire you to do page layout in WordPerfect!”
Like Nanook and Scotty, I’m not stupid. Given the opportunity (and the money to buy the expensive hardware or software), I could figure out how to use a camera or a page-layout program. It’s just that the need had never arisen before.
That’s why I tend to be sympathetic when people don’t know things that I expect them to know. Like the time when, on the first day of class, I was teaching my PC-using students to use the Macs that were in our classroom. I showed them how to use the buttonless mouse, where the Dock is, and what the Apple and application menus are for. I showed them the proper way to eject a drive and how to translate PC helper keys (control, alt) to Mac helper keys (command, option). About half an hour in, one shy student raised her hand.
“Hi!” I said, “You have a question?”
“Yes,” she said. “How do you turn it on?”
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