What's Happening?

For this blogpost we had to grab a recent article from an ACM or IEEE magazine and talk about it. I chose to write about "The Great and Terrible Oz" by Grady Booch from the January/February 2013 edition of IEEE Software.

The article expresses the importance of education of the public when it comes to computers. As technology use increases and gains momentum the public seem to be getting further and further from how software actually works. Everyone from your parents to politicians are losing touch with how technology works, and this is a problem. The further the curtain puts people out of the knowledge the less they understand about technology and the prevalence of "magic" in the system will increase. I have seen this gone awry many a time. People think that they "just get viruses" because lack of knowledge. People pay a prince in Nigeria to be part of the rich. People steal software because "it is already made". Without the proper knowledge people are going to get more and more lost.

The problem with this day and age is that technology is growing faster than the population can adapt. Sure the tech savvy know what is going on, but the rest of the world will blindly go out and buy iPad's because of targeted advertisements. My parents in particular still ask me for computer help from time to time, but I have trained them to a level where they only ask if they really need help. Another thing that I have done to help them be more educated is to send them videos of scams and tutorials of different technologies. They won't be falling for a 419 scam anytime soon because they know a little bit about electronic banking.

I have also noticed that with education the amount of viruses on a given machine approaches zero. Switching my parents from IE to Chrome (admittedly by tricking them into thinking Chrome was IE) drastically reduced the number of phone calls asking for help. Now, I'm not saying that everyone has to do what I did to my parents (that was for my own personal gain), but a little bit of education goes a long way. With acts going through congress like SOPA and PIPA an education of the public would go a long way of protecting the internet and my job security in the future.