sure, you know a lot about computers, you've been on the net for a couple of years now, right? or maybe not, or maybe you're a comp sci major or systems administrator; well if you are, shame on you. and here's why:
it's easy to pick up the basic and more than the basics, you practically have to just to be able to get any use out of your comptuter at all, but beyond a certain journeyman level the information on the internet becomes less omnipresent and more like some kind of freemason society.
i would consider myself a power user. it has become irritating going to webpages for tips on computers because they cover the same shallow ground over and over again, usually with obvious stuff you would pick up right away. and often they post this stuff as if it were a secret they were revealing to you or, more gross, it is a hot news item. well, most of this stuff is shallow condescending old news to anyone who uses a computer. maybe i should just have a job at cnet or pc weekly or something.
but beyond a certain level of noodling around and reading tips and installing everything under the sun and try to get the damn things working, beyond that you hit a wall of empty cyberspace, information underload.
at 29 i find myself having to become one or both of two things i'm not: either a 14-year old whizkid who does nothing but hack and code, or a 50-year old been-in-the-business-since-it-began unix systems administrator. hell, i'm not even a early twenties comp sci major, but i have to go through that kind of eye-of-a-needle to get beyond where i am right now with computers.
i've read a lot of books on dos, macintosh, windows/95, hardware-these are easy, fun even. but the other books i've bought have been different, html, programming, systems administration. these books aren't so fun to just read straight through. they get goddamned dull, get left in a pile on the floor, never finished. and unlike the omnipresent user-friendly webpages chock full of tips, these skills aren't doled out in bite-size tasty morsels. they require an attention span, something the web neither offers nor encourages
so many of us are where i am now, power users, but inferior computer users. we cannot program, we cannot write cgi scripts or our own javascript, we're not doing any of the things with linux that it was really designed for: programming, systems administration involving multi-users, education beyond the kindergarden buzzword cnet level.
and we'll never get there until we develop attentions spans, think of comptuters more as tools for specific needs than as mere multi-faceted toys with which to sit at vacantly downloading binaries and "cruising the web." i've got to create a discipline that nothing in society, certainly nothing in the "internet" mirrors for me. i can't really rely on the web to teach me about computers, i have yet to find that kind of documentation on the web. i've got to read books and follow their exercises all the way through, i've got to stop sitting at my computer without anything particular in mind, i've got to work on the goals that i really want to achieve or i will continue to achieve not much of anything.
and we have to make the real community that the internet makes possible, where we can have an interchange beyond what any college offers. not the endless inanities of dream pc's and plugins galore, really using computers like people had to years ago, before computers were mere toys. it used to be that every computer came with basic and other progamming tools. dos always came with it until windows 95 (macintosh never came with it so far as i know), but here's the trend, grapical interfaces that create insipid playgrounds for those who do not have ideas of their own. find the basic tools that were once necessary and find the worthwhile person you had intended to become. not another cnet elvis sitting on your screensaver videogame throne.