Computer Illiteracy: A Rant
Tomorrow will mark three months since I first started working in the DC Public Library system. It’s definitely been a good job for me--it’s relatively low stress, it’s not really physically demanding, I know I won’t get fired for being a queer trans man, I get along well with my coworkers and I get paid well for what I do. I’ve talked before about working in a public library and I’d like to expand on some of the things I talked about on there.
I want to talk about how there is such a thing as a computer literacy gap. It’s 2019, almost 2020, really. In the age of smartphones and tablets, you’d think that everyone and their mother would know how to navigate a computer. After all, a smartphone is really just a very small and much more portable computer device. But tell me why I regularly have to show patrons how to print something from a computer. Tell me why there are people that don’t know what Microsoft Word is. Tell me why I just had a man a few minutes ago ask me, word-for-word: “How do I type the Roman Numerals onto my resume?”.
To me, it all boils down to poverty. Sure, computers may be a lot cheaper and relatively more accessible now than they were, say, 30 years ago. But let’s face it, there are other things that are not getting cheaper as the years go by: housing expenses, healthcare, food and transportation (regardless of it’s gas or a public transit card) just being a few of these things. I have had patrons straight up tell me: “I don’t have a computer at home” and I don’t blame them. These things are costly--and why pay for one when you can just go to the public library to use them for free? A lot of our patrons have smartphones, but because they don’t have a computer at home and don’t use them often, they don’t know how to do things like log into their email account (I wish I was kidding, I’ve had people type their email address straight into the URL bar, instead of actually going onto their email’s domain first and logging in from there) or how to download a file from their email.
Now I’m not a sociologist or anything like that--I majored in Psychology in college, but my focus back then was on developmental and “abnormal” psychology. But my guess is that for our impoverished patrons, living in poverty has gotten them used to thinking that they can’t do anything and that they will always need the help of somebody else. I see this all the time at work. I try to teach an individual how to do something, but this person will never try it for themselves. They’ll say “Oh, I want you to do it” as if they don’t trust themselves to do something as simple as type in their library card number. After dealing with this multiple times a day, everyday, it gets really old really fast. It leaves me and my coworkers frustrated. People should feel empowered when they use technology, but I feel like for our patrons who struggle with it, they end up feeling stupid.
While DCPL does offer free computer classes for the community, it’s not in all locations just because of the way certain locations are set up. For example, my location is relatively small and doesn’t have a computer lab--all of our computers are in an open space and there’s no classroom/individual rooms either. This makes it hard when a lot of my location’s patrons could really benefit from going to a basic computer class.
At the end of the day, it makes me really sad that there are grown adults who come into my location and literally don’t know what to do. They want to move onto a better life by starting to make resumes, but it’s clear nobody taught them how. There was a man who had been in the library for over two hours and the most work he had done on his resume was his basic info and where he went to high school. That was all he had done. In two hours.
It’s always humbling and really eye-opening when I realize that even just knowing websites and what those websites do is something I take for granted. For example, a woman didn’t know that there are websites that one can go to to convert PDFs to Word documents for free and I showed her one to convert her bill from PDF to Word. She gasped in awe “HOW DID YOU DO THAT?” when we opened up the Word document. It is really mind-blowing.
I’ll end with this: I used to work in a Kindergarten classroom in a school with very limited resources. I remember during the first couple of weeks, my students had to be tested on their literacy and math skills. It frustrated me to no end that my barely five-year-old students were doing testing on computers. I remember thinking to myself “They barely have the motor skills for that!” and “It’s not like they have computers at home!”. But now, after seeing and working with adults who need help on the most basic computer tasks, I have hope that my old students will not end up with the struggles that their elders have. I have hope that by the time my students are in their 30s and 40s and applying for a job, they will know how to build their resumes, they will be able to use a computer comfortably and not feel stupid when they have to use it. But most of all, I hope that by the time my old students are at that age, computers will be much more accessible to everyone instead of being another hurdle that already disenfranchised people have to jump through.
