Thesis 17

The overwhelming majority of people experiencing everyware will not be knowledgeable about information technology.

When computing was something that took place behind the walls of corporate data centers and campus Comp Sci labs, its user base was demographically homogeneous. There were simply not that many ways in which a computer user of the mid-1960s could vary: In North America, anyway, we know that they were overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly between the ages of 18 and, say, 40 at the outside; they were, by definition, highly educated.

So it was entirely reasonable for the designers of computing systems of the time to suppose that their users shared a certain skill set, even a certain outlook. In fact, the homogeneity went still deeper. The intricacies of arcane languages or the command-line interface simply didn't present a problem in the early days of computing, because the discourse was founded on a tacit assumption that every user was also a developer, a programmer comfortable with the intellectual underpinnings of computer science.

Every stage in the material evolution of computing, though, has undermined this tidy equation, starting with the introduction of time-sharing systems in the mid-1960s. The practical effect of time sharing was to decouple use of the machine from physical and, eventually, cultural proximity. Relatively cheap and robust remote terminals found their ways into niches in which mainframes would never have made sense either economically or practically, from community centers to elementary schools, multiplying those mainframes' reach by the hundredfold. It was no longer safe to assume that a user was a fungibly clean-cut, bythe-numbers CS major.

The safety of any such assumption was further damaged by the advent of the personal computer, a device which by dint of its relative portability, affordability, and autonomy from regulation gathered grade-schoolers and grandmothers as users. The audience for computing has only gotten larger and more diverse with every reduction in the PC's size, complexity, and price. The apotheosis of this tendency to date is the hand-cranked "$100 laptop" currently being developed by the MIT Media Lab, intended for the hundreds of millions of semiliterate or even nonliterate potential users in the developing world.

But such assumptions will be shattered completely by everyware. How could it be otherwise? Any technology that has been so extensively insinuated into everyday life, at so many scales, in space both public and private, cannot help but implicate the greatest possible number and demographic diversity of users. Only a small minority of them will have any significant degree of competence with information technology (although it's also true that tropes from the technological realm are increasingly finding their way into mass culture). Still more so than the designers of personal computers, smartphones, or PDAs, those devising ubiquitous systems will have to accommodate the relative technical non-sophistication of their enormous user base.