I read the “TechNot” posts by Rochelle “the Jefe” Hartman (twice!) and Jenna Freedman and Laura Crossett with some interest. I could fairly easily come up with a list of technologies or technology skills that have passed me by:

  • Cell phones: Mine is cheap as can be and kept alive via periodic infusions of minutes rather than a monthly plan.
  • Computer hardware: Like Laura, I am a lifelong Mac user, and never learned to care about things like video cards, processor speeds, etc., and in fact feel slightly superior to those people who do seem to obsess over such matters. (That completely unwarranted sense of superiority is included with the purchase price of every Macintosh, btw.)
  • Programming and scripting: I can cut and paste just like everyone else, but I still have yet to sit down and really understand PHP or JavaScript or the like.
  • Databases: I can’t tell if I have trouble with relational databases because it is really pretty simple and self-evident and I’m overthinking it, or if something fundamental continues to escape me.

So why are we interested in compiling such lists? It’s fun to “come clean,” to demonstrate to others and ourselves that everyone has blind spots and tin ears for some technology. But what does it matter if we can’t program a VCR or play a videogame? I think this memelet says something interesting about library bloggers.

We are prone to conflate various interests, tendencies, and proficiencies into one big “techie” category. But we are really talking about at least two different things.

Are we talking about being able to create and maintain interesting and useful technology for digital libraries? Or are we talking about being down with what we think our user population is doing? In other words, would anyone care if it were to come out that John Blyberg didn’t own a cell phone or planet code4lib doesn’t have a World of Warcraft guild? They are too busy actually trying to build useful stuff, right?

Or, on the flip side, would it really matter if Jenny Levine couldn’t use regular expressions or if Stephen Abram was perplexed by phpMyAdmin? These folks don’t set themselves up as hands-on creators of technology, but as popularizers and surveyors of what users are doing and expecting.

I guess part of the anxiety around this subject is that many of us feel caught in between, falling behind on one end of this discussion or the other. For my part, I couldn’t care less about my first two tech-nos on my list. The second two are things I’d like very much to change, if I can find the time and the right project.