Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Despite their facility with familiar tools, despite the fact that they’re now just as likely to be providing tech support to their own elderly parents or older friends as receiving it from younger people, they still consider themselves “not really a computer person.” Their first reaction when encountering a new technological task is to ask for help from a person they know offline, such as their half-grown offspring or a younger coworker. Or sometimes merely the nearest available offline person—a middle-aged couple at a café once asked me to fix some app on their phone based on no other qualification than the fact that I was sitting next to them with my laptop. I can’t say it’s an ineffective strategy: I did, after all, successfully fix the phone. But it was a problem that I, too, had never encountered before, and I solved it by dint of the process described in an xkcd comic titled “Tech Support Cheat Sheet,” which reads, in part, “Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do → Click it → Did it work? → No? → (repeat) → I’ve tried them all → Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do.” I’ve asked people in coffeeshops for the wifi password or if they can pass me a menu, but for tech problems I turn to digital people: googling with the hope that a helpful expert has written a comprehensive how-to article, but willing to settle for a random person on a forum five years ago who had the same issue.