We're All Geeks Now

from the such-is-life dept

We've complained before about how the tech industry is way too focused on "jargon," but it appears that now that tech is going so mainstream, lots of people are picking up the jargon, even if they don't realize it. New Media Zero has an amusing anecdote about a focus group on a new digital video recorder advertising effort where there was a woman in the "over 70" age group who admitted she wasn't technically literate at all. However, when the ad system was being described to her, she apparently stated: "So it's a bit like the difference between streaming and downloading content over a broadband connection." Apparently, the woman who claimed she wasn't technically literate at all had picked up more than she realized -- she just assumed that everyone else knew more about tech than she did, because they always seemed to before. In other words, perhaps technology is making us all into geeks these days. The writer also points to the number of people (in the UK, where this is more common than the US) who use more advanced features on their mobile phones (and know all the terminology associated with it), saying that ten years ago, most of those people would insist they would never use such features. This doesn't mean that tech lingo is still good for marketing purposes, but it does suggest learning the lingo isn't as big a hurdle as some make it out to be.

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