Sunday, January 21, 2007
How it works?
A couple of weeks ago, I was home sick and had the TV on. I ended up watching some women's talk show and the specific subject being covered was how many people knew how stuff worked. The two items I remember talked about were television and cell phones. They'd survey the audience about how many knew, and then they had some "expert" explain it.
The numbers were predictively low. But what surprised me was the level of knowledge that an explanation did - or rather didn't - contain. Which to me brought up the question just what does knowing entail? The explanation for TV was basically a camera converts the picture into pixels which are sent to a satellite which sends it down a cable to your home to the TV that turns the pixels back into an image. To me, that is dumbing down to the extreme and really isn't knowing "how a television works." Their explanation for cell phones was even worse - basically the same without the pixels and cable. It was a good explanation for a satellite phone, but not for a cell phone.
By those standards, I think I know how just about anything works - while really not knowing how anything really works. There are so many details that aren't even hinted at.
It's interesting how much most people really don't know about how stuff works today. You used to be able to fix the stuff you had. Thirty years ago I was doing pretty good tuneups on my car with a small box of tools, a dwell meter and timing light. Now, I'd need $1000 worth of electronic test gear just to tell me what is acting up. Instead of adjusting the points using a feeler gauge, I'd need to reprogram the computer.
I can remember my dad taking television tubes to the drug store to test them and replace the bad ones in our TV. Now you basically replace the TV. And is the TV honestly that much better? A little bigger and more channels, but still basically the same thing. And having 200 channels doesn't necessarily mean the programming is better.
I just realized that this rant doesn't really "go" anywhere. I don't know if I'm complaining about the lack of people's knowledge about everyday life, or the needless complexity of it. People really should know more about how things work, but the improvement in things makes that impossible. I guess we just have to hope that everything keeps working.
