COMPUTER LANGUAGE, Part 1
For generations in the Western world, and maybe in other parts of the developed world, teenagers have found that their parents “don’t get it!” What that really means is that their parents are not living in the young people’s world, where the language and the customs are changing. To many young people, their parents are ‘behind the times’, by maintaining the traditional language and customs of the family or their ethnic group. Well, something’s gotta give. Who blinks first?
If parents aren’t aware of the changes, it can be painful to have their children criticize them. In the good ol’ days, children were seen and not heard; they did what their parents told them to do; they lived with and respected their parents until they got married or moved out of home. I’m not saying that that doesn’t happen these days, but the changes in young people’s language and customs are SO DRAMATIC, since the Internet and social media, that parents haven’t got a hope of keeping up with them!
Try asking your son or daughter to explain something about the Internet or social media, and they might sigh heavily, out of despair, at the thought of teaching their parents anything. (…or admitting that they really aren’t sure how to do it!) If you’re lucky to have two or more children, you might be able to choose which one to ask—which one is more likely to listen to you. If you can figure out what your question is, you’re already half way to the answer. Right? But if you don’t speak the language, good luck!
As the youngest sibling, and the only teacher, I was lucky to learn some things about the Internet at school, from my colleagues. But my real education came when I bought my first personal computer. An Apple. And a laptop, at that. I can’t say that I can teach my siblings how to navigate online, because I’m still trying to figure it all out. But during COVID, I’ve spent so much time online—watching webinars, attending virtual meetings, and connecting with my children—that I think I can teach my siblings a thing or two about the language and customs of Zoom.
Right. So, I speak the ‘first language’ of my siblings and I speak ‘Beginner Zoom’. Ah, but there’s a bigger challenge: understanding how they’re interpreting the instructions in Zoom, based on typical instructions in their ‘first language’. For example, the menu at the top of a website: ‘Home’, ‘About’, ‘Join’, ‘Log in’, three horizontal lines or three vertical dots. Another example is the series of ‘pop-up windows’ that you have to navigate past, in order to join an online event. Icons really help with the language. But a problem arises with the interpretation of those icons. It’s hard to know what you are expected to do, and the adventure or misadventure of finding out can be so frustrating!
I have so much sympathy for people who are learning another language, that they’ve never heard before. Tune in, next week.
Fiona