I've been reading these tales of tech support gone wrong for entertainment lately. I know, bad me -- shouldn't laugh at the troubles of others.
Yeah, right -- who am I kidding?
Anyway, after thinking about what was really required for these things to be possible, it occurred to me that these people are describing absolutely fantastic machines. What they describe is not necessarily intuitive, and most of the time has to do with telepathy (which is coming, but it's taking it's sweet time), but every now and then something truly interesting pops out.
One gentleman apparently got the idea that to send email, you wrote a letter on paper, balled it up, and inserted it into an orifice on the system. And the system, being the magnificent piece of technology it is, would just figure out how to turn that into data, locate the recipient, and produce email on their end.
Now, if that were possible, it'd be a hell of a thing. It's not, though, so it becomes a joke.
I'm going to keep reading, though. I keep getting good ideas for new gadgets in my stories. :)
What they describe is not necessarily intuitive
Not to you, but how else do you think people would come up with these ideas? To send a fax, you write your letter on a piece of paper and stick it into a fax machine. To send a letter, you write your letter on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and stick it into a mailbox. Why should a computer be any different?
That is why I think "intuitive" is an absolutely terrible word to use to describe computers.
Re:There's That Word Again
phillup on 2003-08-04T23:59:42
To send a fax, you write your letter on a piece of paper and stick it into a fax machine. To send a letter, you write your letter on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and stick it into a mailbox. Why should a computer be any different?
Um... keyboard?
Re:There's That Word Again
chromatic on 2003-08-05T01:12:40
My typewriter doesn't send e-mail.
Re:There's That Word Again
phillup on 2003-08-05T17:34:29
Have you heard of people writing their letters and then inserting them into the typewriter?
I haven't. ( but I haven't been around that many typewriter users either... ) Why? Well... to an extent, form follows function.
You had asked "Why should a computer be any different?" and I was trying to offer up the keyboard as the reason.
With a typewriter most people know the keyboard is for input (and, I don't believe that they know this because of intuition. It is learned.)... and I would bet that the person that tried stuffing the paper into the computer actually used the keyboard on the computer to generate the email... probably printed the darn thing out... all using the computer.
It was the "sending an email" that he had the problem with.
Now, your question was why the computer should be different... because it *is* different.
The fax doesn't have a keyboard, the computer does. This should be the first clue that it is used in a different manner than the fax machine.
And... in no way am I trying to say that how to use it is intuitive. I actually agree with everything you said... except the very last part.
I do believe that the computer is different enough in apperance that one should not be suprised that you would use it differently. (than a fax machine)
Re:There's That Word Again
chaoticset on 2003-08-05T00:35:29
Well, I'm really the only one I was thinking it has to seem intuitive to.Not to youI'm writing this with a very light sense of audience, mostly people from this hyah site. Were it non-technically minded folk and writing with a more serious purpose, I might refer to the paper insertion data transfer as "intuitive".
The audience here is really just me anyway, I'm only guessing that a few others here might read it, and possibly a few stragglers from other areas of the web. I take the point, I do -- I read what you've said about it before, and I think I understood it, and felt that I agreed -- it's not necessarily intuitive. But here, in this case, referring to it as unintuitive fits the people that will probably read it.
I'm not saying that the concept is unintuitive to the human race, or even unintuitive to every American in the United States, I'm just saying that you and about twenty other people, maybe, will find it unintuitive.
On top of all this, even with the limited scope of what I'm saying -- I understand that I might well be wrong. I'm okay with being wrong.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, part because it seems to allow for remarkably interesting creative results (now I've got a notion that what you'd have are nanomachines that can scan paper, and OCR algorithms that result from their instruction sets, and transmittal -- this is now a concept for bizarre espionage tools as opposed to a way to get data from a human mind to a computer) and part because there's some sort of short-circuit in there. When I read about a 'breakthrough' discovery, typically there's some sort of odd parallel (like the story of the bubble chamber and the beer) where the short-circuit, the (forgive my use of the word again where it may or may not be applicable) uninformed intuition can, when an implementation is produced by the informed person, actually be a wonderful step in the right direction.
I believe this is why free association is useful, why the Oblique Strategies are useful -- precisely because they tend to produce less informed ways to view something. When you take the less informed notion and apply the information you have to fill in the gaps, sometimes you get something interesting. Sometimes, something very interesting, it seems.
