Stylish helplessness, "I can't get on the list!"
Someone reported on GDI-FreeSpeech that some Green's web form "didn't work."
It doesn't help Steve (or his web engineer) to say "it didn't work." It doesn't help you. It doesn't help the spectators who might benefit from your exchange with Steve. Nobody knows what you tried, or what you expected, or what happened instead.
We're all volunteers in the project of creating a Green web presence. Your part is, when you report a problem, to give enough detail that the web engineer can reproduce it. Remember the problem probably wouldn't be there if it were happening to everyone. Something is different between what happened when the web engineer tested it and when you tried it. She needs to figure out what that difference is.
There's a really great essay on the subject. It doesn't realize it, but it's a political tract. It's about transforming your place from helpless, demanding consumer to community member. Moving from being dominated to collaborating.
There's an ugly cultural current in Green politics, which I call "stylish non-technicalness." It's *stylish* among Greens to be helpless with technology, and to demand that others "make it work" without your cooperation. When we have trouble with email, we *refuse* to give accurate details, such as the exact name of the mailing list, even though it's easy to copy those details out of an automatic response and paste them into a form like http://greens.org/delist or another email. When the sign-up sheet comes around at a meeting, we scrawl our email addresses illegibly, and then gripe about how we "can't get on the list." It's a passive-aggressive way of resisting the onslaught of corporate technology and expressing our pastoral affinity, and it's dysfunctional as hell. And it's not Green.
Get over your stylish non-technicalness. Do us all a favor and read Eric Raymond's "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way." http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Thanks.
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The late Walt Sheasby once referred to the "legion of Steves" since we seem to have so many. To which Steve are you referring? (I hope you are not mistakenly referring to me, since I have no idea what you are talking about and I do not post to that particular email list.)
More than once, I've come to the brink of forming a Steve Caucus. I have a list of more than a dozen of us, starting with the original Steves for Unity (Welzer, Shafarman, and Herrick) from 1999 or 2000. If you're interested, I'll dig up the list.
How about Steve's for Democracy and Independence?
or something close to it. And I can't say I'm impressed with them.
Now, if you had said Steves for a Democratic Society, that would be cool.
I am able to do these things on a computer:
Write and send email.
Write and post to a blog.
That's about it.
I have asked you for guidance in the past and have gotten answers that are unhelpful at best. For example, when I asked you how to set up a domain so that I can get a set of local news sites up and running, your answer to me was "Get VIM and do it." That, frankly, is not much help.
I acknowledge that I am not very savvy, but how does it benefit us to have you accuse us of not doing our work because we want to be stylish? Personally, I am offended. I am 50 freaking years old, and don't have hours to pour over manuals. I have sought out classes at the local technical college and they have nothing to offer except Microsoft classes, and those don't address the "how to go from registration to live website" issues I want to deal with.
Cameron, what happened to the "You do your best, I'll do my best, and hopefully that will be good enough." you used to espouse? Now it seems to be "Get as educated as I am or don't use the Internet."
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I still do what I can. So do my users and the folks who's stuff I'm using. A user who is doing her best keeps at it. When I give her an answer she doesn't understand, or use a word she doesn't know, she tells me exactly where she got stuck. We make progress.
The stylishly not-technical won't do that. They're looking for any excuse to give up. I can't change that. They don't make progress.
went way over my head. Ain't got a clue. I'm pretty slick with Excel and not too shabby on AutoCad considering I have no formal training in either and we were still using card indexes and slide rulers when I was an undergraduate student at a Big Ten university.
I hear what you are saying but Gregg's comment was spot on - me thinks you are expecting too much. I've been one of commoner's greatest problem children since this site got up and running. Fortunately, for some reason she likes me a little bit, tolerates me and has helped me every now and then to the best of her abilities when I've experienced user-caused problems on my end.
My point is that what you speak of will come in time; however, I think your message would be better served by attempting to directly assist those who you refer to as non-techies rather than preaching to the choir here.
At my age, I'm pretty lucky to even have a grandparent still sucking oxygen. With a little help, she's learning to e-mail which is pretty cool on this end. She'd be a damned hurricane if she started posting here.
Peace.
Most of the work I do for Green parties and candidates consists of assisting newcomers to technology. I have several local users, succeeding with computers I set up for them, who had either refused to have computers in their homes or who had found the MS-Windows learning curve insurmountable. Over the years I've held hundreds of Greens' hands as they composed and posted their first HTML.
These people have one thing in common. They believe they can do it. They try stuff, and if it doesn't work they ask specific questions. They're the people who buck the trend. They're actively resisting stylish non-technicalness.
It's really got nothing to do with degree of computer literacy. There are stylish nontechnicals who are expert Microsoft Office users and build elaborate Myspace presences. And there are people who don't have the problem who are just getting started and don't know much yet. They become productive on new stuff pretty fast. The stylish nontechnicals who are also power users on some particular platform are the ones who have the most trouble on some other platform.