In a culture column of the International Herald Tribune titled “What Technology Has Taught us at Dizzying Speed,” Alicia Rawsthorn muses on some areas in which technological change has rendered some skills obsolete and introduced new ones. Of course, skill change resulting from technological advances is not a new concept, but the especially quick turnaround that the author observes today seems to be unprecedented.
“Just think of all of the skills that, if (like me) you’re over 30, you learned years ago, but rarely use now because something else does the job for you. Who needs to learn how to spell when you can use spell-check software? To read a map in the age of sat nav? To be good at math when there are calculators? To remember exactly where that great antiquarian bookstore is in Paris when it’s so easy to Google it? Those old skills haven’t suddenly become useless, just less useful than they would have been 10 years ago. What have we replaced them with?”
Rawsthorn identifies several categories of new skills that have been introduced by technological change, including multitasking, synthesizing, changing, visualizing, and thumb-flexing (you’ll have to read the full article to get that last one). I think each of these skillsets could be a blog post of ifs own, but I was particularly interested in her thoughts on synthesizing. More here >
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