Generations and technology

A number of years ago I was teaching online and had a student in Denmark. She was a woman old enough to be frightened of computers but she gamely wanted to try my online class anyway. But from the beginning, she had troubles. She couldn't make the syllabus "go anywhere," and I was blind to the most simple explanation for this and instead concocted any number of hardware and software problems that would make her web page "dead." Well, it ends up, she didn't know what a link was and didn't know you were supposed to click one to "get somewhere." It took five of the ten weeks for me to figure this out in our flurry of email exchanges. It simply didn't occur to me to look for such a "simple" explanation.

Well, today the same thing happened. A widely published and respected poet was trying to access Oregon Literary Review. He could get to the title page but not beyond it. He had emailed one of my editors, who apparently didn't understand the question or problem because she kept telling him to "refresh the page," and he kept doing so, and nothing happened -- he was still at the title page. So the editor passed him over to me. I immediately saw the Denmark problem returning, so I told him to click the section headings, which were live links (and told him how to watch for the arrow turning into a finger at a live link), and this should solve his problem. It did.

I still try imagining someone staring at a web page, trying to will it to go somewhere else.

The technological generation gap takes other forms. The responses to Moments thus far go strictly by age, from wow!!! to zzzzzzzzzzzz, from A to D or maybe even F. Old farts dig it! Younger folks don't seem to. Interesting. I don't think it's the subject matter. I think it's the technology. I think old farts are amazed that I made something that "looks like a movie" and the younger generation, which knew more about video at age five than I'll ever know, finds nothing much to suggest video proficiency.

I'm exhausted, mentally and physically, but dear old Gerry Mulligan is providing much relaxation.