Garrett Graff has an amazingly perfect piece on technology knowledge of politicians in today’s Washington Post. Why is it that we tolerate know-nothingness regarding technology from our politicians? I would say that 70% of the country at least has an email address, and that at least 30% of our workforce use “the Internets” and “the Google” at least once an hour to do their job, and as such it’s a critical piece of American infrastructure, not entirely unlike the highways and bridges, or the medical system.
It is consistently amazing to me how people can heap disdain on technologies they know little or nothing about because they’re either “too important” or “too old” to make them work on their behalf. That’s also called “laziness” and “stupidity” where I’m from. Making excuses because you don’t know how something works is antithetical to how America should be run, and the kind of ignorance, if expressed in other fields of American life, would be treated as a firing offense come election time.
Garrett, thanks for bringing this up in such a public light. The Internet isn’t a place just for freaks and geeks and academics, nor has it ever been such. It’s high time that politicians woke up and realized that.
This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
I live and work in the District of Columbia. I write at We Love DC, a blog I helped start, I work at Technolutionary, a company I helped start, and I’m happy doing both. I enjoy watching baseball, cooking, and gardening. I grow a mean pepper, keep a clean scorebook, and wash the dishes when I’m done. Read Why I Love DC.
