Couple of Notches up the Cool-O-Meter

Our collective technical sophistication is going up, steadily. In an article on the Essence of Geeks, ZDNet’s Matthew Broersma talks about how “technology and technologists were permanently lifted a couple notches up the cool-o-meter”.

“Technology companies suddenly became the focus of the kind of attention that had been reserved for the music or fashion industries. In the UK TV makers even went so far as to create a hip series, Attachments, based around the antics of a tech start-up.”

Look at us. Over 25 million people blog. Over 34 million use iPods to listen to music or read books. We perform over a billion Google searches in a day. Mathew calls this techno-lust. He recounts several instances where we use technology without even being aware of it. It is not uncommon for teachers to blog and student to collaborate on projects using wikis. A few months ago, I  set up a wiki for a parent-teacher’s association for a school in Los Altos, California.

“we may be coming to resemble geeks a bit more, but through the growing importance of design, technology is also changing to be a bit more human” says Mathew. The new gadgets are much easier to use than the earlier generation VCRs.