The Future of Techno-literacy
Today, technology as a skill-set within many industries is siloed to specific software or hardware that is deemed as the “industry standard” that makes that industry more effective or efficient. But in the future, technology literacy is what will matter. No longer should we think to master specific software applications, only to become obsolete when a new version, or worse, a new application with new concepts entirely, is released. Instead, we should think of technology more like reading or writing, where there are foundational concepts — letters, phonics, words, associated meanings — that need to be understood, but once they are, you can read and write across multiple platforms and use-cases.
In industries that are very close to technology, like hardware design and programming, this is already the case, so it’s not farfetched to imagine a world where techno-literacy expands beyond those industries into ones where today we don’t associate as fully dependent on technology.
The big point here is that we should no longer think to be okay with knowing how to do something with technology. Instead, we should imagine understanding how technology works so that we may now possess the skill to conceptualize what technology could be capable of in the context of any industry. Today, that concept is still abstracted out: someone says, “I think I need technology,” but they don’t know for sure. They hire a consultant, who discovers and confirms the need, they hire a developer, and an app is born. But in the future we should imagine this process looking more like: “I think I need technology, let me use my techno-literacy to understand the need and build a solution”
Technology as a skill as fluid as using words to write a paragraph to persuade an audience? Yes, absolutely! The relationship between the human mind and technology will only continue to tightly couple in order for us to advance all industries. The need to learn interfaces ad-hoc will eventually slow us down too much, and we will need to transition to understanding core concepts, to which interfaces will become apparent rather than specifically designed. What are those concepts exactly? I’m not sure they’ve all been defined, but I think they’ll likely resemble the concepts baked into platforms emerging that currently enable software and apps today, like content management systems, data-systems, messaging systems, etc.
So how can we embrace this future? Even if you’re not currently in a close-to-technology industry, I think the most universal thing you can do is learn how technology works— both software and hardware. Learn some concepts of programming, understand the capabilities of an Arduino and how it works, build a computer. Understanding these concepts will quickly dispel the “magic” of technology and you’ll not only begin to understand what is already built, but what could be created.
