by I saw a bit recently on TMZ about Hillary Clinton complaining about her TiVo deleting shows she wanted to watch while saving things she’s not interested in. I don’t know if it’s a true story or apocryphal, but it illustrates something I’ve been thinking about for awhile: what makes someone a “techie”? It seems to me there’s a very big divide between technical and non-technical people, but teasing out what those differences are isn’t as easy as recognizing that the divide exists.
I think this story illustrates one of the more obvious differences between techies and non-techies. The difference is this: techies implicitly understand the difference between content and metacontent. Techies understand it so implicitly, that you can be forgiven if you’re a techie for scratching your head and saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. Because this understanding is so deep and so automatic that we don’t even think about it, and we don’t even realize we understand it. But we do.
Let’s take a simple Unix filesystem as an example. “Content” is what’s inside the file. “Metacontent” is things like the file’s name, its size, its permissions, dates, and so on. Metacontent is, to some degree or another, understood by the computer—at least, the computer pays attention to the metacontent for different purposes. The content, on the other hand, is completely opaque. We get that the computer can do stuff automatically based on the metacontent, but it can only do stuff with the content with difficulty, if at all.
Techies understand this dividing line between content and metacontent, its importance, and how bright it is—even as they understand how fungible it is. Add a system-wide searching function like OS X or Vista has, and what was content before can become metacontent, so long as the file is text or contains parseable text (like an HTML or PDF file). But we’d never expect a picture of a bird we just uploaded to come up when we type “bird” into the search box—the bird is in the content, and so is unattainable to the computers of today. A non-techie just might expect that bird to appear—and if he does expect it, he’ll be completely mystified when it doesn’t.
The Hillary/TiVo example got me thinking about this because I actually tried to help a non-techie with his TiVo in a similar situation. I asked him to show me how he uses his TiVo. He went in and, with a little difficulty, programmed in several new shows to record. “But now, look!” he exclaimed, jabbing the remote to display the “Now Playing” screen. “All of these Project Runway reruns, and it deleted the new episodes of The Shield I was saving to watch all at once!”
Now, TiVo’s do have a “save” feature. But he wasn’t using it. He just had the shows sitting in his queue. He trusted that the TiVo would somehow understand that first-run episodes of a scripted serial are more important to save than reruns of a reality show. Of course, we techies slap our foreheads and say “duh”, as we implicitly get that the algorithm the machine is using for deletion is a simple FIFO queue along with a check of the “how long to save” attribute. But non-techies don’t see that; FIFO queues don’t often exist in the natural world, and objects have a gestalt that encompasses every characteristic of them. A gestalt TiVo would take into account everything about a show—not just how long it’s been sitting in the queue and its “how long to save” metacontent, but its content, and clearly see that some shows are more important than others.
I’ve banished from my vocabulary in dealing with users the question: “what did you expect to happen?” (intoned inquisitively with stress on the word happen, not sarcastically with stress on the last syllable of expect). Because what the user hears when you ask that question is, “you disagree with the computer. The computer’s right, you’re wrong. So ‘fess up on your idiocy, and I’ll have a nice laugh with my techie friends later at your expense.” Instead, I said to my friend, “oh, no! Still… I bet there are some people out there who really love their Project Runway reruns, and don’t care for The Shield that much. How do you wish the TiVo had worked differently?”
At this point, he stopped, thought about it, laughed, and agreed that the TiVo hadn’t done anything wrong, and that he needed to start using the “save” feature. See, non-techies do sort of get that there’s information that technology can grasp, and other information out of its scope. They just don’t do it as automatically as we do. (If you’ll forgive another tangent into linguistics, I think it’s similar to how some languages have grammatical gender and others don’t. People who speak those languages track the grammatical gender of chairs and trees and buildings and honesty and don’t even think about it, and can’t comprehend any difficulty to the matter. People who speak languages without grammatical gender like English have a lot of difficulty remembering gender when they have to use a language that has it, and they have to do it consciously and carefully.)
I think the ubiquity of search engines has made the problem worse, because most non-techies interact with that technology, and get a sense that the technology is “understanding” the content, when actually it’s just munging content into a particular type of metacontent it can index on.
I’ll post other ways I think techies and non-techies are different in the future. I think considering these differences help in working with our users, managers, and other non-technical people in everyday life.