One not-so-minor assignment I’ve set myself at present is to change teachers’ thinking about tech support. Just a small thing, then.
It’s true that in the past — with clunky, difficult Web 1.0 technologies — we’ve had to rely on techies to do some proper hard-core stuff for us, such as fixing bugs in software or resetting webpages that we’ve managed to bugger up, or dealing with server issues. But now, with the much more stable and reliable technologies of Web 2.0, we no longer need someone hanging off the end of a phone, dealing with the numerous problems we’ve created for ourselves.
The reason is that Web 2.0′s software-as-service (i.e., online applications such as wikis, blogs and social networks) is pretty much bulletproof: you can’t break this stuff as you could break stuff in the old days of Web One. Which in turn means we have much less need of a help desk staffed by a real-live human person, just in case.
The point is this: once you are in the world of Web 2.0, you have to shift the model of support that you’ve got in your head. Help in WebTwoLand comes in the form of googling solutions for yourself, checking out FAQs, and trawling the web to find the geek who has already solved your problem for you and kindly posted a solution in a discussion forum.
Forget phoning the help desk. Forget The Manual. Forget, even, pressing F1 (always a trepidatious proposition to start with!). Instead, search YouTube and find a video tutorial or visit a how-to site (there’s plenty of them out there). You can help yourself in this environment simply by thinking differently about tech support and how you get it.
Tags: Digital literacy, Opinion, Tech support
