Technology Education Part 1: Virtual Faith

This is a special two-part post on technology in Santa Lucía. This first part is about my experience helping Nicas with computer skills and the second part will be about the town’s telecommunication history.

Sometimes I think about the fact that I can type like this: fast… I can almost type at the speed of my thoughts! And so I’ve found myself reflecting on how technology is implicated in the culture of my site…a place so rural in many ways but infused with a healthy smattering of the Internet age.

Recently I’ve been helping Nicaraguans (very informally) with basic computer skills, and it strikes me how much these skills have become, for me, second nature. For many Nicas, especially the rural schoolteachers I’ve been working with, the concept of doble clic is utterly new and foreign. It really puts into perspective the privileges I’ve had in having access to computers and technology all my life.

My dad has always had a computer…the first one I can remember was a Packard Bell raging a Windows 3.1 operating system and about 0 RAM. I was maybe 4 years old, playing around with the mouse and keyboard, delighting in the sights, smells, and sounds of the machine. That same computer eventually ended up in my room, and although it couldn’t do much, it could run Solitaire, Paint, and Oregon Trail.

(I was usually a doctor by the way, I started in May, and I always caulked and floated. Oregon Trail also taught me the words “grueling,” “strenuous,” and “cholera,” and that killing buffalo is easy.)

All throughout elementary and middle school we had to go to computer class. I can even recall that in 3rd grade, in addition to learning basic skills we were introduced to a brand new technology called “laser discs.” Later on in 7th and 8th grade we had actual typing classes. We were taught where on the keyboard to put our fingers and did exercises using a special program to develop muscle memory and typing etiquette.

  Not that my generation necessarily needed classes like that…

  As middle-schoolers we could run computational circles around all of the computer teachers, who for some reason always seemed to be in their 60’s. They were just so excited to be teaching young minds about this important new technology. What did it matter that they had to consult the textbook to change the desktop background from a picture of the band Korn back to the standard Windows blue?

  The point is, I’ve had so much experience with computers in my life that I didn’t realize how much of a complicated subject it can be for someone who hasn’t had any.

  Some things make sense of course, like the concept of drag and drop, but other things are quite counterintuitive, or at least subtly complicated. For example, why do you have to click on “Start” in order to shut the computer down? What is the functional difference between “Save” and “Save As?” One click or two? Left or right? How many “New Folders” can you make? (Apparently an infinite amount?)

  All of these things have been basic questions posed to me by the Nicaraguan teachers I’ve been working with. I admit that before helping them out, I had taken those things for granted almost as inherent knowledge—as something direct and sensual like seeing or smelling or touching—not something to be learned…and certainly not something to be studied.

  In watching and helping Nicas learn to use computers, I’m realizing now, on more than just an intellectual level, that what computer skills do is to essentially virtualize your otherwise very concrete experience. Your corporeality becomes transformed and translated; your fingers, hands, and arms (usually appendages that effect physical change in the world) become a dexterous and super-sensitive little arrow that flies around on a screen in a virtual space and does your virtual bidding. It opens, closes, cuts, copies, pastes, drags and drops.

  None of these incredibly evocative verbs does anything concrete however. Instead they’re an abstraction, operating metaphorically in an invisible substrate of 0’s and 1’s. I can only imagine how much of a paradigm shift in thinking it must be for these teachers, having to learn as they’re doing to believe in this virtual space.

  For my American peers and I (and now the youngest generations in Nicaragua), we never really had to transition from thinking concretely to thinking virtually. We grew up interacting with and thinking about computers; for us, our faith in the virtual isn’t really a faith so much as it is just another mode of understanding and relating to the world. But for the middle-aged rural Nicaraguans just learning computer skills, their learning experience must feel like quite a leap of faith.

  (As a side note, it would be interesting to do a study or something investigating the connection between faith in a religious sense and the kind of faith someone needs to have in order to learn to believe in the virtual space of a computer…)

Stay tuned for part two of Technology Education and learn how cell phones changed everything overnight!

• Technology Education Part 2: Cell Phone Revolution