|
Galileo and Why Old People Can't Use Computers By Bob Oswald My mother couldn't use a computer to save her freakin' life. Every time I make the trip home, I give it my best shot. I carefully explain the concepts of windows, files, and the correct way to hold the mouse. I'm patient. I'm concise. When the lesson is over, she inevitably looks at me, disappointed, and asks the same question: 'But how do I turn it on?' I don't want to come down on my mom. She's an educated woman, in fact, she's even a college kid like me. This isn't a question of intelligence, or, really, even technical know-how. So what is it? I'm glad you asked. It's kind of like Galileo Galilei. Galileo has long been the golden boy of writers and other artist wanna-bes all over the world. After all, he's one of the few famous people marked by the distinction of being known solely by his first name-- right up there with Dante (Alighieri, in case you didn't know). Show me a writer who doesn't have at least a couple of poems (usually written during that flowering age of intellect, around the sophomore year of high school) down about good old Galileo, and I'll show you... someone who might actually be dedicated to improving the literary condition of this country. But I'm getting off the topic. In case you haven't read a lot of Brecht or history textbooks, here it is, in a nutshell: Galileo lived in the 16th and 17th centuries, mainly in Italy. He was a big- time scientist, inventing a lot of nifty stuff and stealing a lot of nifty ideas from other scientists. The reason writers love him so much is because near the end of his life, he made a more or less public proclamation that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun, instead of the Sun and everything else revolving around the Earth. The Catholic church, a big political powerhouse at the time (can you believe it?) didn't buy the heliocentric theory at all, and tortured and imprisoned the poor old guy until he renounced his theory, which, if NASA is to be believed, was and is actually true. And so, all artistic types have to love Galileo, because he spoke out with his own personal ideas at a great cost to his own freedom and happiness. Rah, rah, rah. What most people don't realize is that the theories Galileo was espousing were nothing new. Copernicus (whose name, despite four years of college, I still pronounce 'Cornicopius') was the first modern European person to come up with the heliocentric model of the galaxy; it was Galileo who confirmed those theories, through research with his telescope. So our golden boy didn't really endure the slings and arrows, etc. for his own, personal vision. He just got punished for standing up for something which was already known, but not accepted. That's the important part. The reasoning is this: Galileo's research was a threat to the church not because it challenged the scientific views of the time. The church was more than willing to accept all of Galileo's other theories. How the heliocentric theory was different is that it undermined a whole system of symbolic belief: if the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe, that meant, symbolically, that the human race was not the center of God's attention. It wasn't necessarily what the research was; it was what it signified that set the church off. And this is why older folks like my mother (boy I'll catch hell for that one...), have trouble with computers. It isn't lack of intelligence, experience, or the will to learn. Old people who have trouble with computers (and not all of them do... no nasty emails, please!), it seems to me, have problems not with the actual operation of the machine, but with the concepts the machine represents. So what do computers represent, then, smart guy? Well, first of all, they are symbolic of mass culture, mass information, and mass everything, in general. They represent a huge amount of power and information (and, in the case of the World Wide Web, misinformation) that wasn't really available to the average citizen, even 20 years ago. I have to admit--it is hard to grasp how Geek A can type a message into a newsgroup from Ithaca, NY, and Geek B in Japan can be reading his views on the supremacy of Captain Picard over all other Starfleet commanders within a few minutes. And consider having to adjust to that kind of info-overload after having grown up in a time when overnight delivery of mail still hadn't been invented (or had it?). I guess you can't win, though. I'll be old someday, too, and I'll have to rely on sarcastic college kids to teach me how to use my perpetual motion machine, or holographic teleporter, or whatever. But I'm comforted in this: Sit Galileo down in front of a computer and see how well he does. It's not a question of intelligence, only one of frame of reference. Bob Oswald is a senior writing major at Ithaca College. |
