Technology Literacy in a World Full of Technology Myths
What does it truly mean to be technologically with it? Does it mean having a counter argument any time anybody has an opinion on what Facebook means for society? Does it mean that you need to know precisely what sort of display or printer technology saves you additional money? The whole technology literacy question of knowing what incisively constitutes right and wrong and knowing good from bad tends to make a few people actually nervous. And for the beneficial reasons those who believe that they know right from wrong unluckily aren’t always headed down the right path. Maybe this small primer will settle a couple of sticky questions you may have.
Let’s start with a particularly stubborn myth that challenges our best technology literacy attempts – using your mobile phone on an airplane. Would you believe that the ban by the FCC in 2007 happened not because they felt that your cell phone would endanger the safety of a flight, but because when flying above a city, you are likely to be within reach of the cell phone signals coming from hundreds of towers simultaneously on the ground. Your cell phone would try to lock in into all of them and cause them to waste bandwidth over a call that is never going to successfully get accomplished. People imagine though (and airline crews help them in that) that turning their cell phones on mid flight will interfere with airplanes’ electronics and avionics and cause it to crash. There’s just single way to arrange an end to this particular myth – at least two airlines, Air France and Royal Jordanian – permit you to use your cell phone at any and every stage of whatever flight.
Moving on to an area where technology myths seem specially stubborn to attempts at removal, consider how people feel that if they do not defragment their drives, their computers will slack. This specific piece of advice used to make quite a bit of sense at once – when hard drives came in at under 10 GB. The computer required to make the best of every scrap of space available and would write its data anyplace that it could. With most hard drives made to hold hundreds of gigabytes these days, computers do not need to do save space that fanatically anymore. Defragmenting your hard drive is not actually going to give you performance that’s any better these days. And surely, if you have a solid-state drive of the kind the Mac Air uses, defragmenting is an irrelevant thing.
And eventually, with as much effort as people put into gaining a little technology literacy, there is something about staying safe on the Internet that seems to believe all these attempts.
For example, did you ever have anybody tell you to switch to Firefox because it was a safer browser than Internet Explorer? The US government’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team does not seem to think so. As far as they are concerned, Internet Explorer is the safest browser in the world – it only has 17 known vulnerabilities. And Chrome has more than twice as many. And do you believe that staying away from porn helps you keep your computer high-pitched clean? Not always. There are all varieties of regular websites that are reported to be far more dangerous than anything that smut has been known for.
