Things About Getting Older: Learning and Technology

There's a very good Alux post about the changes that happen as we grow older. A fair amount of the time it's spot-on. I'm going to riff on some of the points in a couple of posts.

First up is the technology thing in items 9 and 13. We oldies are less inclined to want to learn new things and to keep up with the new technology. The commentary makes it clear that included in 'new technology' is social media.

Social media is two things. First, it's an online version of old stuff in the analogue realm. Blogs can be personal diaries (like this one), or op-ed journalism, or scrapbooks. Instagram can be a scrapbook, a photo album, a portfolio, or a shop window. Twitter is where some people say things that in the past stayed in the room, the pub, the restaurant or the quiet corner of some club or meeting room. Amazon is mail-order done right (until it was swamped by Chinese junk). Facebook is playground gossip time, or else it's a billboard for bands and businesses. WhatsApp is a group messaging service, and extends the older idea of newsletters sent to small numbers of like-minded people or fans of something obscure. Linked-In is a big CV repository and those didn't used to exist. All the others are variations of the Big Seven.

Second, it's a bunch of opportunities to a) screw up our lives, careers and reputations, b) to create a career- or ego-enhancing but ultimately fake public image of ourselves, c) make money by sponsoring goods and services, d) publicise our work, e) err... that's it.

Now, we oldies are a) too darn cautious to screw up in public, b) our careers are pretty much topped out, and our egos take a beating every time we look in the mirror (unless we have severe delusions about what attractive looks like), c) only young or famous people can sell stuff and we're neither, and d) most of us have jobs or are retired or have an established customer base. We just don't need social media. There are exceptions, and you will be surprised at how well we use it when we know what we're using it for.

Now let's talk about technology. I can remember the first computer technology I decided I would let pass. It was Flash (ask your grandfather). Flash was for graphics, and I am a writer. Writers, remember, would be quite happy with a 286 running WordPerfect 4.2 (ask your grandfather). Writing is a pretty darn low-tech occupation.

And I'm really an engineer who turned to the philosophy of science and mathematics, and then had to get a day job so I didn't have to sleep in homeless shelters. To engineers, technology is a tool. Not an end in itself. It's nerds who treat it as an end in itself.

I don't dig ditches, because I don't have a farm I need to dig ditches on. So I don't need to know about back-hoes and diggers.

A lot of retail computer technology is for graphics and video production. There is a LOT to learn in those programs. I don't do that stuff, so it's no fault that I don't know shortcuts for plug-ins in Lightroom. I am not spending time and money on photography-related stuff while my eye is AWOL.

I get that by remaining a text-typer, I am not taking advantage of the new things I could do. Sticking to one's last when a music editing programme cost thousands of pounds and needed a specialist to edit tape is sensible. But when it's so cheap, don't I want to dabble? Maybe it's not about the technology but the new channels of communication. Should I be exploring those possibilities?

That's a fair question. My first thought is, that a few years ago, I might have given it a whirl. But now, a lot of YT channels are basically small TV production companies. The production standards are going up by the year. And the people posting recordings from their iPhones look like... people posting recordings from their iPhones.

However, I could be excusifying to support a bad case of denial.

I did keep up with PC technology, but the last Windows version I could handle to the roots was Windows 2000. After that it just got too complicated. I used to cut code, but code-cutting now is mostly about finding the appropriate library for what you want to do (optionally cussing because it hasn't be ported to your Python version) and making sense of the parameters of the functions in the library. This applies to Microsoft C++ / C# / VBA, and even to a hefty chunk of Python these days. To think there was a time when people sniffed at VBA as a 'glue' language. They're all glue languages now. As for writing Power Shell scripts? No. I just... No.

It's not because I can't. Of course I can. It's that it's not my day job, I won't re-use the knowledge, and it's quicker to hack it manually. If it was my day job, I would put in the effort of learning Power Shell. I've had the pleasure of learning computer languages. Several times over.

That's the real issue. Other than writing, I don't do anything else frequently or well enough to justify the investment of time to learn whatever the technologies are.

I have been learning a lot about hi-fi and acoustics over the last year. I think that counts. It's new to me.

After years at the keyboard and commuting, I do need to be learning / polishing up some things. Cooking. Home DIY. Painting and decorating. New to me.

So yes, to the Millennials at Alux, we oldies do learn new stuff, just not the new stuff you're learning.