On Accessibility, Trends, and Technology

I was taking my roommate’s car in for a check-up, and grabbed a quick cab back home.  On the way I had a fascinating talk with the cab driver, who repaired, restored, and resold old cars.  To him, eBay was one of the greatest blessings to his hobby, as well as various specialty sites.

He regaled me with fascinating tales of how he got obscure parts and historical doodads, often very cheaply, all thanks to eBay and the internet.  Frankly, there’s an entire world of cars out there I never thought of.  I almost wanted to pay him more to drive around a bit more and tell me other things.

He got me thinking that eBay and other specialty sites are in many ways like Netflix, Hulu, Google Books, and the like.  They’re ways to get obscure and unusual materials that others may not have, understand, or appreciate.  The internet is a boon to the specialist, the unusual, the odd, and the unknown.

Just as I’m currently indulging my love of Asian Cinema with Netflix (side note: Tsui Hark should have directed The Last Airbender), this gentleman could indulge in his love of cars.  The internet and other technologies change what is obscure and inaccessible – indeed, everything is accessible now.  If you want anime, car parts, books, pornography, religious texts, plans, etc. there’s a website for you, probably several.

This is not just a technical shift, it’s a cultural shift:

Nothing is truly “obscure” or “unknown” anymore – you’ll stumble across things you never knew about by accident, and little is hidden from serious research.  If you need it, you can probably get it.

In turn, I think this may be changing people’s ideas of what is “normal” or “common.”  With so much available and public thanks to internet technology, it’s also publicly known to people.  This changes social norms and cultural concepts as we’re seeing things we never new existed, forgot, or even tried to ignore.

This further increases the chance of not just cultural adaption, but of conflict.  How many times have we seen assorted kerfluffles break out over video games, anime, manga, pornography, etc. on the internet?  It’s going to keep happening as we have access to so much.

Now let’s take all this “stuff”, all this access and mix in our favorite subject of late – Mobile.  When you can get everything quicker and with less localization issues, when you can find out more faster, it chains how we live and work.

One cab ride reminded me of the sheer power of Access we have.  I’ve seen it from my end, the core geek market, but in this case I saw it broader, saw it through the eyes of an auto enthusiast.  That brought home just how fast things are changing – because nothing is truly obscure or hidden anymore.

I know I didn’t appreciate it.  I’m wondering how many people really do.

And, for those of us that do, who work in information and technology, what does it mean for careers?

- Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/

Steven Savage Steven Savage (2025 Posts)

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.


  • http://www.genjipress.com/ Serdar (GenjiPress)

    One thing that does seem to be happening is what I’d call a shifting of the burden of curiosity. It’s easier than ever to find out about and procure just about anything, but that requires that you care enough to find out in the first place. Many people tend to simply set up a kind of information bubble for themselves where only certain kinds of things ever get in, and anything outside of that bubble is either ignored or never encountered on its own terms.

    This is why I prefer a bookstore to Amazon’s algorithms. The former makes happy accidents far more likely. The latter is more efficient, but in the end that much less interesting. The sense of having actually discovered something is drained away and replaced with the far more drab feeling of having been provided something.

    • http://mathtans.ca/ Gregory Taylor

      Sometimes the information bubble is set up for you, without your even being aware of it. Not sure if people out there have seen Eli Pariser’s TED talk about online filters. But Facebook isn’t the only thing out there deciding what your ‘Top Stories’ are, search engines are guilty too.

  • http://mathtans.ca/ Gregory Taylor

    It’s causing shifts in the education sector too. It’s not that long ago that one needed to get an education to learn about far away places, to consult with experts, or to balance a budget… now you don’t even have to leave the house to find out this sort of information. More and more, high school feels like it’s becoming less a place for students to learn with others, and more a place to socialize… and, oh yeah, classes. I don’t think I’ve had a single day all year where all my classes have had perfect attendance (which isn’t skipping, though that’s part, so much as excused absences for sporting events or club activities or field trips or family vacations or illness or…)

    With things being mobile, it’s getting even harder to police academic honesty too. “Put that away.” “It’s just my iPod.” “No, I’m pretty sure you’re texting someone/taking a photo of my exam/looking up the answers on the internet.” And students actually need a calculator, not a calculator app for tests… funny how they can lose said calculator but less so their cell phones. The shift of course is that we’re marking a lot more process/thinking (“The solution is 5, generate possible questions based on material in this unit”) rather than the solution. Because you could just plug the question into ‘wolfram alpha’ and have it graphed in a few seconds.

    • Scott D

      With data at our fingertips, we’re going to need to learn how to process what we find.  That does mean a good education, but the big problem is judging if a source is real.  It may be easier to learn a subject than try to hunt down sources.  Wikipedia isn’t always accurate and may be deliberately seeded to cause subtle problems.

      And, heading to a different tangent…  Designers are not only going to need to know how to create the software to assist in finding information, they’re going to need to know why the info is needed to have the delivery method make sense to users.  Designers may have to become jacks of all trade just to keep up.

      (Amusingly, my aborted attempted at a Bachelor of Engineering makes me more valuable than just my B.CompSci does – breadth of knowledge will become important.)

    • http://www.genjipress.com/ Serdar (GenjiPress)

      My father is a college professor, and he has observed much of the same shift as well. He’s had to rethink his own course material correspondingly. But the biggest and strangest thing that happened to him was when a valuable textbook for one of his statistics courses was bootlegged in an overseas edition that was some 80% cheaper than the one available domestically.

      • StevenSavage

        There’s an entire story in that we could probably enjoy seeing here . . .

  • http://www.facebook.com/kevinbingham Kevin ‘Bynk’ Bingham

    I saw the glimmers of this almost 10 years ago. My mother wanted to get a NYPD tshirt for my brother-in-law. So, of course, I searched the Internet. I didn’t find any appropriate tshirts. However, I found some websites where people collected and sold embroidered patches related to police and fire. It blew my mind. Before that, it never even occured to me that people would do such a thing. And here it was happening on the Internet. It made me realize how much long tail there is out there.

    • StevenSavage

      Part of my family collects baseball memorabilia.  It’s changed due to technology, and is now ebay and online research and spreadsheets and stuff I can’t believe exists that you can find online.

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