Did a day’s training on Wednesday. During one of the breaks, one of the trainees logged on to her email and picked up voice messages. Not something I’ve ever seen before or even knew was possible. It raises all sorts of issues.

One is that there are increasingly people coming into the workplace who are described as ‘natives’ in terms of technologies. This is a generation weaned on playstations, MSN, mobile phones, internet and so on. Their attitude and use of technology will be different to people who were brought up with three black and white channels on the television (which used to go off at around 11pm if I remember rightly), paper memos, filing cabinets and bakelite telephones (ok, maybe that is stretching a point). The psychological and social issue for this new generation is that they are not phased or surprised or scared by the exponential growth of digital devices, or the ability of these devices to do things for them. They are in control of the technologies and maximise their value and use.

Next issue is one of metadata - ah yes! good old metadata which surely needs a bit of a revival. Without some form of metadata, it’s going to be difficult to have common and shared retrieval over a range of formats such as .doc, .wav, jpg and so on. Interesting article in New Scientist this week about how the police have implemented a new search engine to very good effect - and how this is using a range of synonyms to improve retrieval.

However, no sooner done, than crims are trying to subvert it - which leads to anti-subversion techniques being built into the retrieval, and so the endless cycle of police and thieves continues.

The other issue is how these advances in technologies happen without most of us being aware of them until they start to impact directly. Makes me wonder what else is out there that I’ve no idea about - it’s the ‘how do you know what you don’t know conundrum’.

Finally, many people are now beginning to build up and establish their own technical capital. They have learned email and how to surf the web and social tools like myspace and Youtube, blogging and commenting has increased people’s confidence to engage with the technologies. Also it’s becoming easier. I tried yesterday to do some stuff in Photoshop and it struck me as being too complicated for the relatively (?) simple tasks I was trying to complete.

The establishment of this technical capital, or ability, will mean that voice into email won’t be such a big leap of learning as learning how to configure email accounts (which is what I remember having to do with my first Mac and Compuserve account, I think in 1995).
The entire vocubulary of POP server, SMTP and so on was completely unknown to me at that time.