OCTOBER 2 — Switching phones has both become easier and harder.
Upgrading from one iPhone to another is a simple affair — set them next to each other and go off to have a cup of coffee and maybe a bagel.
Yet everything else about the process has become cumbersome.
I do not enjoy the multiple screens, the various hoops I must jump through to make everything usable again.
My bank insists I go to an ATM to prove that yes, it is me, using this brand new phone and not some nefarious scammer.
Such tedium.
Tech has unfortunately become tedious where once it was exciting and fun.
I think security is important but at the same time there has to be a better way of implementing it than giving the average middle-aged person a migraine.
One of the subjects I took for my IT degree was User Interfaces.
I thought by now we’d have made things more accessible and easier to use.
Instead, I look at apps and just want to scream.
It feels as though computers, phones and websites have increasingly become user-hostile.
Perhaps I was just lucky that I grew up with computers; that I had the kind of brain that saw the internet and new apps as fun new puzzles to unlock.
I still think Snapchat is an abomination, though.
While I can figure out even the trickiest of interfaces (Snapchat aside) it does not leave me satisfied but furious.
At the same time, literacy of basic software is quickly eroding.
My lecturer friend tells me her students don’t even know where to find where files are saved on the computer.
Some even have to search online or look up demonstrations on YouTube just to do things a lot of us take for granted such as creating a new Word document.
I don’t want even the basic functions of things we are increasingly reliant on to be made so hard to understand for both the young or old.
People being overly dependent on the one-click AI programmes is also a problem.
Students don’t read books; they ask for AI summaries.
People don’t reply to emails; they ask the bot to do it for them.
It feels as though instead of moving forward we are hurtling towards the deskillifying of humanity.
That would explain why a rando on social media can confidently tell me Covid vaccines are evil because his internet echo chamber told him so.
Tech was supposed to be the great equaliser — instead it has become one more hurdle for the poor or old to jump through.
My mother started using mobile phones only 10 years after everyone else had and honestly, I think she had the right idea.
She leaves things like internet banking and monitoring her bank accounts online to my sister.
As do many parents or older people because technology moves too fast and has gotten too complex for them to keep up.
I want the hard work to be on the side of whoever is making an app or maintaining it.
For the user it should be as simple as teaching a baby to smile.
Until that happens I’m going to spend at least one day a week keeping away from computers and digging into the soil because hilariously, ChatGPT can’t mow my lawn or fertilise my gardenias, when that truly would have improved my quality of life.
When did we start living in The Matrix?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
