The lockdown journal: A technophobe's guide to a digital world
A few days ago, my mother asked me for the credentials to her gmail account, which I'd been maintaining for her for the last decade. I sent her the details and promptly forgot about it till evening, when I asked her if she was able to login.
She replied in frustration: No, I've been trying for hours! This just doesn't work.
I wondered if I'd given her the wrong details, and quickly checked. It worked. Tell me more about what you're doing.
She explained to me, unable to use the right jargon, mixing up things, and ten minutes and ten questions later, I came to understand that she was trying to use her gmail credentials to login to another website. Sigh! I could have saved her so much time had I known this. That won't work, I told her.
Why? She asks me in puzzlement. Isn't that my login and password?
It's like locks and keys. Different locks need different keys.
My mother has been a technophobe in a digital world for the last two decades. Smartphones and laptops have always left her feeling like an alien. Being a doctor, her work did not demand that she learn and use technology. Neither did her interest. So, while the world moved on to emails, online banking and a digital wallet, she stayed with letters, passbooks and a quaint ancient purse. Of course, she learnt the bare minimum that was required of her: Making a phone call, sending a Whatsapp message. When I tried to convince her to go digital, she protested: This is too hard for me. There is no true necessity! Your generation needs to learn all this, this is the technology of the future. We are the oldies, we come from a different world. There are still remnants of our world here, and that is enough for us to live.
She was right, life went on. She used the old mechanisms to live life as she knew it. Till covid came along, that is.
Now, all of a sudden, the government is asking all doctors to upload patient details everyday. Seminars the medical community used to conduct are now transformed into webinars.
And that is how I find my mom, in distress, feeling like a dinosaur in the digital world.
What is excel? What does it mean to upload? How do I join a webinar? Where do I get my login details?
I try to explain on the phone, but it is too much jargon for her. I walk her through installing an app, and it is a frustrating journey for both of us. She doesn't understand anything I say--"play store", "home screen" are phrases she has never heard of. She finds a terms and conditions screen, and I ask her to click on "accept". She tells me that she's clicking it, but that it doesn't work. After 30 seconds of listening, I figure it out. There's a checkbox right above those buttons, you need to click that before hitting accept, I tell her. How do you know all this? She asks in despair.
At one point, I tire of this and ask her to open an app and give me remote access to her phone. When she struggles to do even that, I lose it and yell at her. Teaching you is harder than teaching a chimpanzee! You don't understand anything, just listen to what I'm saying.
She agrees and says sadly: Yes, I guess I'm too stupid to grasp all this. I feel terrible, that I lead her to think her ignorance stemmed from a lack of intelligence. That had not been my intention.
Eventually, she gives me remote access, and I quickly finish up whatever she wanted to do.
But the incident continues to rankle me. There should be a better way of teaching her, I muse.
I, like so many other millennials, never found it hard to use a smartphone or a laptop. It was quite intuitive, and the jargon was never heavy. Academia and industry further honed these skills, and I've never felt scared of technology. But how do I explain tiny nuances such as a grayed out button to my Mom? How do I tell her to pay attention to the circle indicating progress in green? These are rules from a language she doesn't speak. The more I formalize these things, the more she has to remember, the more she struggles, mixing up the rules and terminology. Formalizing technology makes it a big bulky book full of rules, a book my Mom shudders to read and learn from. I want to give her a one page cheat sheet, and ask her to have fun exploring.
Is it easy on me because I grew up with it? How can I make this a fun experience for her? I want her to learn intuitively, building up from the basics.
It is not that she is stupid, or that the jargon is too much for her. She is a doctor, and the medical field is one that is chock-full of jargon. My mother is just one of many such people in a country like India.
One of the interesting things about the lockdown is how it has propelled people towards a digital lifestyle, whether they like it or not. Earlier, if you were a technophobe, you could happily shrug off several things, and simply say: I don't need to know how to do that! Now, it is not so. You must learn, you must adapt. Teachers are asked to teach online, students are asked to learn online. Doctors are asked to collect and report data. Paying bills is online, banking transactions are online, ordering groceries is online.
In most cases however, there is no pipeline in place to ease this transition. There is no community to provide support. People who have previously trained themselves in the digital world are flourishing. The others are floundering, caught in this wave, forced to confront the demon of all their nightmares, technology. This is a problem for all of us to think about. Several of us have a parent or a relative who is scared of technology, who fears that the digital world is full of fraudsters and invisible traps. How do we help such people transition? How do we teach them the language of this digital world? How do we help them get over their fears and prepare them for the future? How would you go about this, Reader?
She replied in frustration: No, I've been trying for hours! This just doesn't work.
I wondered if I'd given her the wrong details, and quickly checked. It worked. Tell me more about what you're doing.
She explained to me, unable to use the right jargon, mixing up things, and ten minutes and ten questions later, I came to understand that she was trying to use her gmail credentials to login to another website. Sigh! I could have saved her so much time had I known this. That won't work, I told her.
Why? She asks me in puzzlement. Isn't that my login and password?
It's like locks and keys. Different locks need different keys.
My mother has been a technophobe in a digital world for the last two decades. Smartphones and laptops have always left her feeling like an alien. Being a doctor, her work did not demand that she learn and use technology. Neither did her interest. So, while the world moved on to emails, online banking and a digital wallet, she stayed with letters, passbooks and a quaint ancient purse. Of course, she learnt the bare minimum that was required of her: Making a phone call, sending a Whatsapp message. When I tried to convince her to go digital, she protested: This is too hard for me. There is no true necessity! Your generation needs to learn all this, this is the technology of the future. We are the oldies, we come from a different world. There are still remnants of our world here, and that is enough for us to live.
She was right, life went on. She used the old mechanisms to live life as she knew it. Till covid came along, that is.
Now, all of a sudden, the government is asking all doctors to upload patient details everyday. Seminars the medical community used to conduct are now transformed into webinars.
And that is how I find my mom, in distress, feeling like a dinosaur in the digital world.
What is excel? What does it mean to upload? How do I join a webinar? Where do I get my login details?
I try to explain on the phone, but it is too much jargon for her. I walk her through installing an app, and it is a frustrating journey for both of us. She doesn't understand anything I say--"play store", "home screen" are phrases she has never heard of. She finds a terms and conditions screen, and I ask her to click on "accept". She tells me that she's clicking it, but that it doesn't work. After 30 seconds of listening, I figure it out. There's a checkbox right above those buttons, you need to click that before hitting accept, I tell her. How do you know all this? She asks in despair.
At one point, I tire of this and ask her to open an app and give me remote access to her phone. When she struggles to do even that, I lose it and yell at her. Teaching you is harder than teaching a chimpanzee! You don't understand anything, just listen to what I'm saying.
She agrees and says sadly: Yes, I guess I'm too stupid to grasp all this. I feel terrible, that I lead her to think her ignorance stemmed from a lack of intelligence. That had not been my intention.
Eventually, she gives me remote access, and I quickly finish up whatever she wanted to do.
But the incident continues to rankle me. There should be a better way of teaching her, I muse.
I, like so many other millennials, never found it hard to use a smartphone or a laptop. It was quite intuitive, and the jargon was never heavy. Academia and industry further honed these skills, and I've never felt scared of technology. But how do I explain tiny nuances such as a grayed out button to my Mom? How do I tell her to pay attention to the circle indicating progress in green? These are rules from a language she doesn't speak. The more I formalize these things, the more she has to remember, the more she struggles, mixing up the rules and terminology. Formalizing technology makes it a big bulky book full of rules, a book my Mom shudders to read and learn from. I want to give her a one page cheat sheet, and ask her to have fun exploring.
Is it easy on me because I grew up with it? How can I make this a fun experience for her? I want her to learn intuitively, building up from the basics.
It is not that she is stupid, or that the jargon is too much for her. She is a doctor, and the medical field is one that is chock-full of jargon. My mother is just one of many such people in a country like India.
One of the interesting things about the lockdown is how it has propelled people towards a digital lifestyle, whether they like it or not. Earlier, if you were a technophobe, you could happily shrug off several things, and simply say: I don't need to know how to do that! Now, it is not so. You must learn, you must adapt. Teachers are asked to teach online, students are asked to learn online. Doctors are asked to collect and report data. Paying bills is online, banking transactions are online, ordering groceries is online.
In most cases however, there is no pipeline in place to ease this transition. There is no community to provide support. People who have previously trained themselves in the digital world are flourishing. The others are floundering, caught in this wave, forced to confront the demon of all their nightmares, technology. This is a problem for all of us to think about. Several of us have a parent or a relative who is scared of technology, who fears that the digital world is full of fraudsters and invisible traps. How do we help such people transition? How do we teach them the language of this digital world? How do we help them get over their fears and prepare them for the future? How would you go about this, Reader?
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