The Only Constant Is Change

The longer I deal with using technology, the more this post's title is true. The only thing that one can be certain of as a constant is change.

I spend months, if not years getting familiar and comfortable with a particular interface - be it an operating system for Windows/Mac, Android/Apple, ISP email box, and suddenly a change is made that throws everything I've learned into chaos and confusion again. Once again, I have to spend months, if not years, discovering and remembering where this feature is, or that particular function is now because some geek programmer created some supposedly "better" interface.

I had to replace my cell phone recently and while there are some features which allow for improved capabilities, like the quality of camera images and voice when speaking with someone, the design leaves much to be desired when it comes to intuitiveness of the interface. Before getting my new phone I went into my service provider and had them help me - a senior citizen who now believes there's a conspiracy to make it more and more difficult for us to use newer tools - turn on the "cloud" upload feature so that I could transfer all contents to the new phone.

A few days later I got the new phone and asked the store agent to show me how I could download the old phone contents from the cloud. Rather than actually showing me, he just tapped a few times on my new phone and said, "There you go!" As a career educator I wondered if he even heard my request to be given instruction on how I could accomplish the task. After asking him if it was finished and that everything would be there on the new phone, he assured me that it would even pause and continue the download from the cloud once I got back to my house and set the Wi-Fi to automatically pick up my router's signal.

However, upon getting home and bringing up the main screen, I realized that there was no settings icon I could find like I had become used to locating on my old cell phone. As a result, I had no way to set the Wi-Fi feature to complete the download from the cloud. Frustrated that I had to return to the service provider store eight miles back into town, I went the next day and sought assistance with another agent.

Upon explaining to him what I'd encountered with the new layout of icons and features on the phone, I asked her to explain to me how I was supposed to know where to find the settings icon for the phone if the interface wasn't familiar to me on this new phone. Her answer was that I should just "explore" things on the phone to see if I could locate what I needed. After explaining that that is precisely what I attempted to do the evening before, she pointed out to me a small carrot symbol just above the bottom row of app icons and told me to place my finger on it and slide upwards.

Hidden within, or underneath this little carrot symbol, was the whole bank of app icons for the phone. I looked at her again and asked, "How am I supposed to know that that little symbol there is where I'm going to find all the apps?" Her reply was priceless, "I don't know, just mess around with stuff!" Wonderful!

Then, I explained to her after looking around in my photo gallery that there were only two images on the phone, I asked her why after the download had completed there at the store the other 98 images weren't there. Looking a bit confused, she took my phone, fingered on my phone's face for a minute, then told me that my photos had to be downloaded from a different server; Google's, rather than where the rest of my old phone's contents was downloaded from. But, when I asked her why that was the case, she couldn't explain why my photos were on a Google server and not the other with the rest of my phone's contents.

Over the past couple months I've been using this new phone I've received notices that the OS was being updated. After the update completed and I went into use it, some of the features looked different and functioned differently as well; forcing me to reassess how to deal with it. This constant change is getting to be extremely frustrating because it caters to the youth who think nothing of such rapid modifications to how technology is designed for interaction. Instead of wanting reliance and certainty, they enjoy and invite anything new, it seems.

And what is this fixation Google has with needing to have permission to know what my location is, what photos I have in my gallery, and who my contacts are, just to allow an app to work at getting directions to an address? Of course, there's text among the set up for the new "gizmo" I want to use telling me that my personal information will not be share with anyone, but we all know after the revelations a few years ago about the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. that they gather our metadata voraciously. So, please, don't tell me my information's not shared with anyone.

New is clearly more important for marketing purposes as opposed to being consistent and reliable. But what of seniors who prefer that reliance of familiarity and certainty about how to do things and where to find them? We need those types of things to just be able to function in this age of rapidly changing technology. Forget it, we're living in a brave new world where technology is assumed to be infallible, yet it's always unreliable and glitchy, making our lives more frustrating and complex. I tend to wonder if it's really worth it.