Original:  http://quandyfactory.com/blog/100/the_appification_of_computing
Retrieved from Google cache, hence mirrored.
Author: Ryan McGreal

# The Appification of Computing

The historian and philosopher Walter J. Ong drew a distinction between 
what he called "craft literacy" and "social literacy". The former is the 
kind of literacy you find in cultures that have systems of writing but 
do not have cheap, ubiquitous publishing - like Europe before 
Gutenberg's invention of movable type.

In a culture with craft literacy, most people can't read and write and 
those who can - scribes - do so as a vocation.

When a society moves toward full literacy, made possible by universal 
access to both reading and writing material, a number of huge social 
transformations occur - but one such change is that the mere ability to 
read and write stops being a rare skill, possessed only by 
professionals.

For some time I've believed that computer literacy - by which I mean the 
ability to read and write computer programs - is currently at the level 
of craft literacy in our society.

I've expressed the hope that we will eventually move toward social 
literacy in computing, in which most people routinely learn to read and 
write computer programs in the same way we currently learn to read and 
write text.

## Computer Illiteracy

So a recent article in the Globe and Mail gave me serious pause. Titled, 
"Are we breeding a generation of app-living, web-addicted digital 
illiterates?", the article quotes Sang-Jin Bae, a computer animation 
technical director and instructor at New York University's Tisch School 
of the Arts:

> "When kids come into my class they divide into three groups," he 
> says. There are the pure geeks who love technology. There are those 
> trying to understand. And then there is the biggest group: "Those who 
> couldn't care less."
>
> As remarkable as it is to consider, this hip, articulate 36-year old 
> computer whiz makes a heck of an argument that the computer age is 
> entering a dark new era: the age of the digital illiterate.
>
> Today's teens grew up on SMS and Facebook. Everything is being 
> presented to them all the time. Web companies love it, since kids are 
> addicted to their products. But, he says, "They expect less and less 
> from the Web and the software they use."
>
> Mr. Bae is not just talking about obscure, high-end animation tools. 
> Instead, he sees an essential dumbing down of bedrock computing skills.
>
> "The kids I have, and that is roughly two dozen of the brightest 
> young digital artists a semester, often have no idea what Microsoft Word 
> is. They can't tell a Mac from a PC. And forget Excel," he says. He 
> struggles to get his students to use basic computing etiquette.

It appears that the relentless drive to simplicity in user interface has 
had the-side effect of serving as a disincentive for students to bother 
learning more about how computers work.

## Knowledge-Destroying Idea

Lately I've been reading Edward Glaeser's book Triumph of the City, a 
sprawling tour-de-force in support of the thesis that cities are our 
most important engines of creativity, innovation and growth and that we 
would do well to understand how cities work so that we can run our 
cities more effectively.

Writing about the spectacular decline of Detroit, formerly one of 
America's greatest cities, Glaeser argues that the seed of Detroit's 
failure was the invention of the assembly line:

> By turning a human being into a cog in a vast industrial enterprise, 
> [Henry] Ford made it possible to be highly productive without having to 
> know all that much. But if people need to know less, they also have less 
> need for cities that spread knowledge. When a city creates a powerful 
> enough knowledge-destroying idea, it sets itself up for 
> self-destruction.

I wonder if the 'app-ification' of computing is turning out to be the 
same thing: a powerful, knowledge-destroying idea that is actually 
crippling our collective ability to use computers as tools of creation 
rather than merely as vectors of consumption.