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July 25, 2003

Techies by Necessity, Not by Choice

 


By KATIE HAFNER

Knowledge Tools Click Here for Vocabulary
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Matt Collins

Ben Garvin for The New York Times
Joshua Marcuse, a student, schooled himself in laptop settings.
Jeffrey Brown for The New York Times
Emile Barrios, a marketing consultant in San Diego, calls tech-support lines only as a last resort.

JOSHUA MARCUSE didn't plan things this way. Mr. Marcuse, a 21-year-old who is about to start his senior year at Dartmouth College, had no desire to follow the example of his many peers who pursued technical fields. His academic studies are in international relations and moral philosophy.

"I would not describe myself as technically inclined," he said. "I almost have a neo-Luddite attitude to technology."

Yet Mr. Marcuse devotes several hours a week to the care and feeding of his computer, printers and other electronic devices. With no formal training, he has grown proficient at rummaging through his laptop's settings and changing them to suit any number of connection options. For several months he has been tinkering with the computer's balky DVD drive. He is so proficient that members of his family rely on him for all their technical needs.

As consumer electronics proliferate and consumers grow increasingly disenchanted with technical support operations (which routinely charge for calls), many people are discovering that whether they want to or not, they are developing more than a little technical proficiency. Some, like Mr. Marcuse, become virtual experts. But many of these accidental techies learn only as much as they absolutely must.

"People are getting more proficient because they have to, not because they want to," said Steve Cousins, manager of the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC, a subsidiary of Xerox .

PARC noted the trend toward self-sufficiency two years ago in a report on home computing. "As computers enter the home in greater numbers, individuals find themselves becoming systems administrators," it concluded.

Indeed, wrote the paper's authors, W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter, the average consumer performs chores that two decades ago would have been familiar only to a mainframe systems operator: installation and removal of hardware and software, and general troubleshooting and maintenance.

In the last two years, many devices have become more demanding. Home CD players are not simply turned on; they must be programmed before they can be used. Digital cameras seem relatively straightforward until the time comes to hook them up to the computer and download photos. Even cable TV boxes need to be rebooted from time to time. With the spread of constant broadband connections and in-house networks, people have had to become their own network administrators.

And if the future really does include Internet-ready coffee pots and refrigerators, the situation is only going to get worse.

"I've definitely become more courageous over the years," said Ann Kilhoffer-Reichert, 41, a marketing consultant in San Diego who has never read a computer manual. Ms. Kilhoffer-Reichert said she used to take her computer in for repair whenever it malfunctioned. But now she tackles repairs herself, stopping just short of the operating system level.

Her first troubleshooting measure is usually to make sure everything is connected properly, with no loose wires. "I learned this lesson the day I unloaded and reloaded printer drivers and couldn't figure out why I still couldn't print," she said. "Then much to my embarrassment I found that the printer cable had come unplugged from the back of the computer."

Ms. Kilhoffer-Reichert credited the Windows XP System Restore feature with much of her new-found "repair'' ability. Recently, for example, the sound mysteriously disappeared from her computer. The speakers were working and all the wires were connected properly. So she went to the XP restore feature and selected the previous day. "Magically I had sound again," she said.

Instead of calling tech-support lines, she also navigates her way through Web site lists of frequently asked questions, or FAQ's, which are growing more detailed and widespread to accommodate the technically proficient.

For Ms. Kilhoffer-Reichert and others, such expertise derives from economic necessity, as their livelihoods depend on the technical tools they use. "If my computer isn't working, I equate it directly to lost income," she said.

Yet Mr. Marcuse says he has learned just the amount he must, perhaps slightly less. "I can get my computer to operate most of the time, and frequently there are things wrong with it that I just tolerate," he said. "I don't want to deal with some company's tech support bureaucracy. I'd rather just suffer with the imperfection."

Often what results from learning only as much as you have to is a house of cards. If one thing goes wrong, it can bring everything else down with it. Many users know this but would rather risk the consequences than seek professional help.

"I call tech support only as a last resort," said Emile Barrios, 48, a self-employed marketing consultant in San Diego who fixes his own equipment. He said that most of his experiences with technical support lines have been disappointing.

"It seems they're less and less interested in finding a human being who can help you out with your problems," Mr. Barrios said. "You're on hold for 30 or 40 minutes before you get someone to help you."

Phyllis LaBaw, 45, associate athletic director at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is seldom away from her computer. As a result, she has grown self-reliant over the years without having attended a single computer-related class, she said. "You start spending time, and you're going to get to the point that eventually you're going to learn how to fix what you've botched up."

Still, for all the time they invest, most self-taught technicians would rather be doing something else.

Mr. Barrios would prefer a good game of golf to the many hours he spends tweaking and troubleshooting the computers and devices that populate his house. "And given the way I play golf, that's saying something," he said. "It's a testament to how little I want to do this."

Yet as the Southern California sun beckoned outside his window one day recently, Mr. Barrios remained inside, noodling with the Microsoft Word utility for printing addresses on envelopes. "It's like this unending thing, a part of my job now," he said. And they have no other option, thanks in part to interdependencies that have developed. Mr. Marcuse, for instance, said his parents planned their yearly schedule around his plans to be home. "They don't want to undertake a computer project when I'm not nearby," he said.

The technically proficient consumer is nothing new. "When electric wiring was first introduced in homes, people had to learn how to handle that and perhaps string wires themselves," said Donald Norman, a professor of computer science and psychology at Northwestern University.

Throughout much of the 19th century, the owner of a parlor clock had to install and regulate the pendulum, which required a certain amount of technical knowledge, said Joe Corn, a senior lecturer in history at Stanford University who is researching the history of consumers' encounters with technological complexity. Some 150 years ago, Dr. Corn said, sewing machines were sold with a wrench, a screwdriver and, often, an oiling can.

The automobile is another example, Dr. Norman said. "Years ago, if you were rich enough, you had to take your mechanic with you on trips because cars broke down so frequently," he said. Thereafter, car owners learned to tinker under the hood themselves, making use of rather elaborate tool kits that were sold with the cars.

Dr. Corn said that drivers of some early automobiles had to pump lubricating oil into the cylinders periodically, acting as a machine tender. By 1910, he said, virtually all automakers had automated that process.

Similarly, the rise of electronics has furthered automation. But, Dr. Corn noted, the constant addition of features introduces new sources of complexity. "The computer will never become simply an appliance as long as some users want software that does so many things," he said.

Electronic devices are growing more reliable, Dr. Norman said, but they still require maintenance. "The navigation system in my car works just fine, but every year they send me a new DVD and I lose all the addresses that I carefully typed in the previous year," he said. "Digital cameras, cellphones, P.D.A.'s, MP3 players all need maintenance."

What's more, the variety of devices that must be fixed and maintained is expanding. "You purchase and learn how to use one gadget and you want the next gizmo that comes out," Ms. LaBaw said.

That is borne out by the book "PCs for Dummies," which used to cover just PC technology - the hard drive, the monitor and the disk drive. The ninth edition of the book, expected in October, will include a section covering peripherals like digital cameras, scanners and printers.

"And that list continues to expand," said Andy Cummings, vice president and publisher of Wiley Technology Publishing in Indianapolis, which publishes the "For Dummies" series.

As a result, the sheer number of hours spent tinkering has grown. "There are times when I feel that I've worked the whole day and done no work," Dr. Norman said. "All I have done is maintained or fixed my computer equipment."

The shift toward self-sufficiency is being noticed by those who run technical support operations. "Five years ago, more calls than not were about problems, about things not working,'' said Matt Fingerhut, director of consumer technical support at Microsoft. "Today they are overwhelmingly from customers trying to take advantage of new features of software."

Joe L. Pastorelli, who is in charge of customer service and information technology at Linksys, which makes networking equipment for the home, agreed. "We used to see a lot of techno-geek people that would come in, and it's completely gone to the other side of the coin," Mr. Pastorelli said. "Now we've got the housewife who calls in and wants to hook up a wireless network in her home."

"It's like a big home improvement project," Mr. Barrios said. "No matter what you do, there's always something else. I know more about this than I ever thought I would know. And I don't see that changing anytime soon."



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