“Make it easy enough for my mom to use.”
I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say “make it easy enough for my dad to use” because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless. Though granted, he did start using IM before I did and he has a Blackberry while I have the cheapest flip phone that Verizon was selling two years ago. But when that “contact your network administrator” message comes up on the PC or the Mac doesn’t show a blackened wi fi icon, my kids know I’m the one to talk to. I’m the one who can figure out the IP addresses on the printers. I’m the one who installs the software and troubleshoots it.
But even if your mom is technologically out of it–or your grandma or great Aunt Jane–you shouldn’t invoke her as an example of the technologically inept or uninterested. Because when you do that, you’re assuming that the other person puts together female + older and arrives at the answer of “doesn’t know what’s going on.” You’re acting on what you think is some shared view of the world–because we don’t know your mom or your grandma or your great aunt Jane, we know our own moms and our own grandmas and our own great aunts.
And we might actually be moms ourselves and instead of thinking “my mom” when you say “easy enough for my mom to use” start thinking of ourselves, then be frustrated yet again that the assumption is that moms are only object in the world never subject and certainly not as technically astute as you are, if not more.
Via James, I came across Isabel Wang’s writing. Her mom’s a literature professor in Taiwan and she knows what’s going on even if she’s not a techie herself. And man (or should I say woman), Isabel and her mom put the lie to the idea that women don’t get tech. That’s such a tired idea! And you wouldn’t believe how often it comes up in RedMonk work. Fortunately, I think I have sufficiently informed the monks of the heinousness of this particular cliche that now they call it out even when I’m not there.
6 Comments
Speaking as a female elder geek, I say thanks for helping raise the awareness of more people in the industry.
This gets me, too. Anne. I’ll occasionally do fly-by comments on blogs I otherwise don’t comment on, just to suggest alternatives to Your Mom, like Uncle Charlie.
And on the anecdotal evidence front, I’ve had to explain RSS to both my sons, 18 and 22, who make claims to geekdom.
Anne,
Your point is well taken.
I almost always agree with you completely.
Here’s the thing, though. Have you ever met my mom? She’s 70 and needs help setting her alarm clock. Seriously. Can I get a waiver on this one?
Anne, I’m with you on this one. I come across these kind of references all the time and not only is it incredibly patronising, it is also remarkably often utterly misleading.
Here’s a related post you might find interesting:
I’ve seen a few examples where this kind of patronising assumption about womens use and interest in technology has resulted in some potentially embarrassing and expensive design and product development decisions.
And yet… I have to admit. I do occasionally use *my* mum as a design reference point. But that’s not because she’s my mum… it’s because she’s the best example I have of an incredibly nervous adopter of technology who just happens to be my mum.
In an instance of serendipity, I found another formulation of this rule (perhaps not spelled out abstractly): the CEO should be able to use it. Yow!
A belated comment on this (great post, BTW), but I was reminded of this today when I noticed that Jon Udell used the tag auntmillie for a del.icio.us link to a story about the complexities of configuring and securing a WLAN. Perhaps Jon has an actual Aunt Millie. I don’t know. I do know that there are plenty of young men who cannot configure a secure WLAN.
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[…] Via Anne 2.0, I like this post, “The Most Tiresome Cliché in Technology Today,” which is “Make it easy enough for my mom to use.” To quote briefly: “I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say ‘make it easy enough for my dad to use’ because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless.” […]
[…] I’m not totally comfortable with the phrase end-user programming or with that moniker “nonprogrammer” that I just used. Let’s not talk about mashups for mom. Please. Any of those ways of dividing up people into broad categories obscures both our commonalities and our differences. […]