Heavens! A reel I posted last week took off unexpectedly—over half a million views on Instagram at last count. I wanted to puke from both excitement and the sheer white-hot terror of being perceived. The whole point in sharing content about tech and computers was to connect to an audience who wanted to learn. And boy, did y’all let me know!
The comments on both Instagram and TikTok were full of people saying the same thing: they want to get better with technology but have no idea where to begin.
To me, I intuitively knew that because I work with clients as a web developer so I see their frustration often. Tech feels incredibly complex because there’s just so much of it. It is always changing. That’s exactly why I want to create content that makes technology accessible to folks.
Why exactly do people struggle with digital literacy? After all, modern tech has genuinely never been more approachable. The whole push in software and app design right now is to sand down every rough edge, so users have little to zero barriers to using said tech.
The problem is that as we abstract away the work underneath the hood, the less people understand what the tech is actually doing. The notion of cars came up in the comment section of this video and that comparison holds up. Most people don’t know enough about their car to know if a mechanic is being straight with them about what’s wrong. But tech is even more embedded in daily life than cars are, woven into nearly everything we own and use, including cars themselves!
Almost everything you touch runs on tech now
Your paycheck, your medical records, your city’s government services. All of it sits on top of software and systems users never see. That’s true whether you consider yourself a tech person or not. Opting out isn’t really on the menu anymore. I suppose if someone was truly successful at that, I’d hardly hear from them through email anyways.
Tech may also determine your livelihood. Most of us have to work and will for our lifetimes. Being able to find information, judge whether it’s real, and communicate through digital tools is now a baseline skill for work. People who have it tend to land jobs and stay financially stable more easily. The National Skills Coalition and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that 92 percent of jobs now require digital skills, and workers who qualify for jobs that need even one of those skills earn about 23 percent more, around $8,000 a year, than workers in jobs that require none.
Technical knowledge stacks. Each thing you learn makes the next thing easier to grasp, which means that when the basics stay hidden, every new tool feels like starting from zero. This is compounded by the fact that software has no true universal blueprint. Yes, best practices exist, but no two apps work exactly alike, even when they look similar. So when something goes wrong, you have no mental map for where to even begin. And on any given day, you might be moving between a handful of different programs, each with its own interface, its own logic, its own quirks. (I myself think of every time I’ve been trained on software at a new job: “It’s supposed to work like this but it actually only works if you do this weird way.”)
When something breaks, people without a basic mental model of how the system works have less context for figuring out what went wrong. That usually leads to a miserable tech support conversation where the user can’t describe the problem and the support agent can’t see it. Increasingly, that initial support agent is an AI chatbot repeating the same three suggestions in a loop. Don’t get me started.
The basics go a long way
A commenter lamented that I was basically implying everyone should be an engineer. First, engineers cover a wide variety of sub-disciplines so just saying engineer isn’t really useful. (First-and-a-half, as someone who has known many engineers, they aren’t all the same across the board. Someone brilliant in bridges may be awful at cybersecurity.)
Second, everybody can grasp digital literacy. You don’t need to be an advanced professional in any industry but you do need to think about how systems work. That latter point may be why it might be easier for engineers to grasp technical concepts but by no means are engineers the only folks who can excel at digital literacy.
Remember: You deserve the right to make informed decisions about your life. Right now, most of our lives involve technology.
Take a simple example. When you visit a website, it can see more about you than most people realize. It may show a rough location, the device plus browser you’re on, where you came from, and may even show a trail that follows you across other sites through trackers and cookies. That data gets bought, sold, and used to shape the world around you.
Once you know the basic way that the internet and tech works, you unlock a fun life experience called ~informed choices~. You can adjust privacy settings! The odds of you spotting a phishing scam before it empties your account go way, way up.
The more tech is designed to make itself invisible, the more people lose the knowledge about that tech unless they are intentionally educated about it. There are a million more things I can say but I’ll let those things live in future blogs so I can go stare into the distance.
You will never regret knowing more. That’s especially true when it comes to something that affects you each and every day.
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Sources and further reading:
- University of San Diego, What Is Digital Literacy
- Common Sense Education, Digital Literacy and Well-Being Curriculum
- Wikipedia, Digital Literacy
- National Skills Coalition and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Closing the Digital Skill Divide
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