“…even the most money-hungry, wannabe apolitical technologist needs to understand the role that social power plays in technology adoption.”
– Alexis Madrigal writing about Why the First Laptop Had Such a Hard Time Catching On (Hint: Sexism). Secretaries (women) knew how to use a keyboard, not executives (men), so the adoption of laptops was very slow at first. Men wouldn’t touch them.
When I was a kid I loved office supplies. I lingered in the aisles of our local stationery store and admired the orderly stacks of index cards, file folders, and pens of all colors. I loved to organize my desk, the kitchen cabinets, the linen closet — anything I could label, I did. I announced to my parents that I had figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up: someone who organizes things. A secretary. My dad thought about it a minute and suggested that I aim to have a secretary, not be a secretary.
A few years later, when I was in 9th grade, I took a required typing class. My dad, an executive at IBM, decided to learn to type, too. During the day at school I’d type on a Selectric and at night we’d share the family PC.
I confess that I tricked my teacher into giving me extra credit for pages and pages of “homework” (I’d really just cut and paste the same lines over and over, then print the pages out on our dot-matrix). She had no idea that was possible and I got an A in typing. Dad did well, too. It was 1984, he was in his 40s, and he recognized that his industry was shifting. He saw what many people didn’t see back then, that keyboards were the future and there was no shame in knowing how to type.
In reading the Atlantic story about why laptops failed to catch on, I realized that I learned a lot about recognizing tech adoption patterns from my dad. I now scan the landscape, looking for promising patterns in mobile health or social media, hoping I can help people to avoid missing the next ripe opportunity. What’s the 2012 equivalent for learning how to type? Which lines of work are shifting — and which side of the shift do you want to be on?
Image: IBM Model M Keyboard, by bujcich on Flickr.
Fascinating. Your Dad was a trailblazer! I attended a convent boarding school throughout my high school years, where subjects like Typing were compulsory (along with Latin, Home Economics and Tennis (all representing knowledge that well-rounded young ladies should possess, I suppose!)
And I’m amazed now to see my two grown children two-finger their way with lightening speed on their own laptops. “Keyboarding” wasn’t a option at their high schools. Two fingers (and of course two thumbs for texting!) are all they apparently need….
Ha! I went to a public high school where I also had the opportunity to take metal shop, wood shop, and auto repair (I wish I’d taken that one).
Dad was (and is) a trailblazer. He was on CompuServe in the 1980s, which we used to research my first car.
I love this post! I was on a long road trip to OK from New Mexico when I really did decide to become a gas jockey, which seemed – at the very intense age of 8- a very cool, if not exceedingly unlikely job for a girl barely able to reach the windshield wipers… but it was the girl part most had trouble with. Girls didn’t work in Gas stations. Yet it was frankly less the social stigma attached to the gas jockey job than the fact my Grandmother thought it might be a bad idea for me to keep inhaling the gas fumes that really swayed me to think again. And while my love of cars and the attending smell of gasoline never abated completely, the need for old school gas jockeys died with the advent of self-serve stations. I didn’t return to my Vet School plans, much to my family’s dismay… I chose instead to become a volunteer EMT in my little town. A choice which eventually has informed every job I’ve done since.
Kait, you’re the coolest. I love that story.
I’m now remembering a friend who announced, at around age 4, that he was going to grow up to be a motorcycle.
What I read in / project onto this story is the importance of indulging one’s innate curiosity. One of the most common threads I’ve found across different innovators is the willingness to follow paths and learn new concepts and skills that were intrinsically interesting to them.
One of the strongest, albeit controversial and perhaps iconoclastic, expressions of this trajectory I’ve read recently is by Roger Schank, writing a message to high school students who hate high school: Here is why you hate it, in which he advises “Learn what matters to you”.
As for the relevance of this to technology [adoption], I’m paying attention to the massive open online courses (MOOCs); tying this back to health information, I can imagine a Khan Academy for health information as being a useful dimension to this trend.
Fantastic insights — thanks so much, Joe!
My dad gave me a laminated quote that I keep on my desk:
“For the gods perceive things in the future,
And ordinary people things in the present,
But the wise perceive things about to happen.”
– Philostratus
A Khan Academy for health information… very intriguing!
Love this piece, Susannah. I’ve often reflected on my typing classes in high school … and the stenography class that I took that I still use, and then think about how when I was in college I typed all my friends’ papers because I was the best typist – and the one who had a typewriter (alas, no laptops then).
And as for me, I’m on the side of change. I love learning and love change, so I think w live in exciting times. And to my way of thinking, the people and the businesses who realize that however fast they thought times moved and were changing in the past, technology and innovation has and do change everything. And learning to adapt and adopt are the surest ways to not only success, but also maybe happiness. If we spend less time fighting change and more time realizing how change can, quite possibly, make life better, easier, less complex, etc., we might actually be happier.
I dunno …. but I do know what side I’m on. Great post!!!
Thanks!
I happened to catch this clip from the Today show — Hanna Rosin talking about her book, The End of Men:
http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/49017150#49017150
She describes how women have been more flexible, more able than men to adapt to the changing opportunities in education and the workplace. It resonated with me as I thought about this microcosm — me and my dad learning how to type together, me at 14, him at 45. He was someone who did adapt.
Also, as a note to anyone who notices — I edited the title of the post. It was “Learning to type (and typecast)” but I realized it’s more accurate to say that my dad actually taught me not to typecast myself — that’s the lesson I want to bring forward.
I loved your story! And especially what your father sad to you. I wish my parents had too. In high school I saw such limited roles for women (nurse, secretary, teacher) that I didn’t want to even know how to type (bad decision, obviously, and one that I have never rectified although I hold out hope for speech recognition’s improved accuracy).