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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1996 The empirical strikes back Even as a technologist, I sometimes come to grief with multi-function buttons and other interface twists. It took me a while to discover that ejecting an audio cassette from my car radio meant depressing the play button for four seconds. Not obvious to me, but it was for my young son. In this case the divide was not technophile and technophobe, it was just a mindset difference. As a general rule such fractures between generations are age-related through experience and expectation - a bit like acquiring a bad golf swing. For the very young, the process of learning to work with technology is done by raw experimentation, trial and error. You get on a machine and you fly until you crash, and then you reset and start again. This is repeated until you become proficient. As a process it is incremental and handbook-free, like learning to walk and run. While older generations might view computer games as a waste of time, they are a sure way of overcoming technophobia and acquiring essential skills. There is no doubt that IT has a great potential to a create couch potatoes and unthinking people, but on the other hand it also is a great enabler and means of educating faster than ever before. Children are like sponges for information, experience and understanding. With IT they can go at their own pace and feel unabashed at experimenting. They are never intimidated by mere technology, only by people. In some studies it has been found that that youngsters can absorb information 50 percent faster and retain 80 percent more in the pictographic and interactive world of multimedia. In some cases it is even greater, in others, far less. The advantage is strongly linked to the topic - unfortunately we do not seem to have discovered a means of burning the multiplication tables or spelling and grammar into the human brain other than by rote. Talking to a young virtual pilot recently, I discovered an encyclopaedic mind able to recount the performance and specification of many aircraft from the Second World War to the present day. His knowledge came from the direct experience of flying them on both sides in the many theatres of war since 1939. At the same time it turned out that his spatial awareness was also unusual. He saw the screen as window on the inside of a sphere, just a portal to a world of virtual war. Interestingly, with the aid of radar, his memory and spatial awareness, he was able to visualise the location of tens of aircraft in a simulated dog fight. Most impressive of all was his developed sense of combat strategy: he played to win against impossible odds. This youngster was also able to visualise complex interactions in three dimensions. When confronted with the Pythagorean triangle, the sum of the squares appeared obvious. This was followed by the conceptual leap to 3D, and then to N dimensional space - obvious. Well, 25 years ago it was not obvious to me - nor I suspect to many others. Powerful stuff these games. So powerful, he was prompted to ask the question: why do we have real wars and kill real people when it can be done on the screen and no one gets hurt? Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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