Achieving Technological Literacy

Kevin Kelly — the co-founder of Wired magazine and author of the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and What Technology Wants — decided to home-school his 13-year-old son … and wrote about the experience in The New York Times Magazine.

“One of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy,” Kelly wrote. “Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon.

“The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet,” he added. “Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be.”

The nine principles of technological literacy that Kelly taught his son are relevant for all of us — especially those of us who graduated from eighth grade more than twenty years ago. Here’s a sampling. (I urge you to read them all.)

• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.