Trying to teach my elderly neighbours how to use the computer was a harrowing experience.
I had to show them how to operate a webcam, take a picture off it, and send the picture by email to their son. This is what excited them about using computers.

For this I had to launch three different systems – a dialer to connect to the net, the webcam software itself( which I hadn’t used before) and the mail client.

The webcam itself was easy to use, but I got into trouble when I tried to email the picture. I had to choose an email client; I chose yahoo (browser based) because I wasn’t sure the other options were configured properly (I couldn’t ask because they hadn’t the slightest idea of the whole thing) It turned out that the yahoo mail account setup had been abandoned mid-way, and so it was asking me to complete the registration. I tried to do it, but then accidentally left a “yes” on in the registration options, so then it started installing yahoo companion for me. Frustrated, I abandoned the plan of sending through yahoo, found that Outlook Express was already installed on the system, and tried to find out where I could change my mail client choice in the webcam software. It turned out that the options once set was hidden really well, and so I decided to save the picture, launch Outlook Express, attach the image to a mail in the normal way, and send it. But then I had to ?igure out how to save the picture to the hard-disk. It turned out that it already was saved, and all I had to do was to pick up the correct path and attach the image. And of course, some stupid option was set to “yes” in OE setup, so as soon as it sent the mail, it disconnected from the Net, and I wondered about why my second mail wasn’t going.

It took me less time to do the stuff than it took to type the above paragraph, but for them, what I was doing was indistinguishable from wizardry.
The problem wasn’t that any software malfunctioned. It wasn’t even that the usability of any one software was particularly bad. It was just that because disparate systems have to work together, lower level abstractions leak through, confusing them.
They don’t know the difference between Internet and e-mail, don’t know that the pictures that they see on screen are actually “image” “files” that are stored on their “hard-disk”. They don’t know that these “files” are ordered hierarchically into “folders”, and can be found by giving a particular “path” and that they can be “attached” when sending an email. They will have to learn these things eventually, but confronting them with these lower-level abstractions when they are just trying to get a functional level knowledge of a software doesn’t seem like a good idea.

It looks as if the only way to be competent at using a computer at one level is to learn it at lower level of abstraction. Doesn’t seem fair to me.