I think just giving them a tablet and a couple of minutes’ instruction on navigating Wikipedia would work very nicely for that particular job. It’d also get them started with the online world, which is arguably the biggest shift in Westerners’ daily lives since 1967.
Errh. I’m not sure it would be that easy. Some members of my family not particularly comfortable with computers took much more than that before they got to the point where they could conduct a google search on a tablet and read news articles, and they were familiar and trained in the use of systems much more modern and similar to tablets than the Hypertext Editing System (which was being developed in 1967).
I think the weirdness of a solid flat piece of material glasslike on one side and rubber-weird on the other with icky pressure plates on the sides where the glassy side somehow partially changes color into arbitrary and unfamiliar images with uncanny precision unlike any other type of light-emitting device ever encountered before and where the lights and images somehow move as if controlled by some intelligence by magically detecting the mere touch of fingers...
...is being slightly underestimated here.
And we haven’t reached the browser or Wikipedia yet. I think they might ask for a (physical, paper, bound) book instead.
a solid flat piece of material glasslike on one side and rubber-weird on the other with icky pressure plates on the sides where the glassy side somehow partially changes color into arbitrary and unfamiliar images with uncanny precision unlike any other type of light-emitting device ever encountered before and where the lights and images somehow move as if controlled by some intelligence by magically detecting the mere touch of fingers...
“Oh, it’s a small TV that I can touch to move the pictures around. Neat.”
People learn all sorts of arcana given the right incentive. My aged parents got broadband for one purpose: to Skype to their children and grandchildren.In the late ’90s, a friend’s technophobe father got an iMac and a dialup account for the single purpose of using eBay.
Errh. I’m not sure it would be that easy. Some members of my family not particularly comfortable with computers took much more than that before they got to the point where they could conduct a google search on a tablet and read news articles, and they were familiar and trained in the use of systems much more modern and similar to tablets than the Hypertext Editing System (which was being developed in 1967).
I think the weirdness of a solid flat piece of material glasslike on one side and rubber-weird on the other with icky pressure plates on the sides where the glassy side somehow partially changes color into arbitrary and unfamiliar images with uncanny precision unlike any other type of light-emitting device ever encountered before and where the lights and images somehow move as if controlled by some intelligence by magically detecting the mere touch of fingers...
...is being slightly underestimated here.
And we haven’t reached the browser or Wikipedia yet. I think they might ask for a (physical, paper, bound) book instead.
People are very adaptable.
“Oh, it’s a small TV that I can touch to move the pictures around. Neat.”
People learn all sorts of arcana given the right incentive. My aged parents got broadband for one purpose: to Skype to their children and grandchildren.In the late ’90s, a friend’s technophobe father got an iMac and a dialup account for the single purpose of using eBay.