For many people programs are immutable. They just are the way that they are. Thinking about a computer program or search engine as something that you could shape or change to suit your purposes isn’t what our computer education teaches.

People expect to work within the limits of the applications and software— not play a role in shaping its design.

@futurebird

Yes. That's what we should be teaching people even if they won't write a line of code in their whole lives.

We are writing software by the very act of living. Culture is software. Whatever your "natural" language is, it's a programming language.

Computers are not fundamentally different from minds. They're way less complex, that's all.

One more hurdle to having these conversations is how many people will say "oh I don't use social media. It's so awful."

How do you know?

And it's mostly true. They don't use it often, but well they were planning the garden center picnic on Facebook, your nephew uses it... a dozen other things.

These social media users don't really see themselves as social media users, No! that is some young person taking selfies or photos of their food.

They can't be in danger of being influenced. Right?

I suspect there is a high correlation between thinking "social media is so terrible" and being very much bombarded by the very worst nonsense, scams, influence campaigns, and time sinks.

I tend to say "I love social media, I use it every day and I learn so much from it. It makes my life better."

People look at me like I have five heads.

When I joined, even as someone who had spent 15 years in the tech industry (+ many years before that studying online interactions)... I felt intimidated by the fediverse.

I probably joined Mastodon about 2 years later than I would have otherwise, had it felt easier.

I was confused by what all the servers meant and worried about choosing the wrong server.

@futurebird

@futurebird
I love social media

It is my direct conduit to beta readers, experts, and other writers. Building good stories would be soooo much harder without it.

(Turns out, according to many posts I've seen around here, I *did* choose the wrong server when I decided to go with mastodon.social. But thankfully most people are pretty welcoming, regardless.)

@futurebird

@kzeta

There are some things to complain about with .social but people will complain about anything here. For example that I am posting this from a mac and "only" using firefox.

Don't let it bug you too much. If you feel that .social works its a fine way to participate.

@kzeta @futurebird Don’t beat yourself up about it. We all had a Yahoo! account at some point, too. We couldn’t have known then what we know now.

@scott @futurebird

It's true.

And Hotmail.

And, now... GMail

@kzeta @futurebird oh god you used Gmail how embarrassing

(I’m kidding but also secretly pleased that people are finally turning against Gmail … at least here on #fedi)

@scott @kzeta

I use an email server I made from an old payphone and a paperclip. Anything less would be ludicrously insecure.

@futurebird This both leads to and seems partially the result of letting businesses dictate the course of computer education. Schools buy a set of PCs or laptops or ipads, and use whatever software that's advertised or comes with a student discount, because the alternative is relying on the one or two people internally who "know stuff" to engineer a whole setup of programs and system-admining whatever each class/teacher needs.

Maybe schools could have some sort of dedicated "Computing in Education Engineer" who can figure out needs/requirements and weigh up options? Though it's hard, there isn't a great precedent for how to do it, and it easily could lead to bespoke setups that get phased out when no-one can fix them.

But yeah, I've noticed some people find relying on companies, as opposed to individuals or smaller groups, for software stuff as giving themselves more independence, because even editing numbers in a text file is intimidating. Which isn't wrong, it's hard to navigate things when you don't feel like you understand them.

I think figuring how to fix this situation is one of the most important software/computing problems, either by having software that reaches people where they're at, or finding ways to demystify computers to a wider audience. People need to be made more involved in their software choices and it's creation? but how, that's the problem.