Americans need computer help
PUNTERS in the former British colony of Virginia are finding the World Wide Wibble a bit too challenging.
According to a survey released yesterday, nearly half of Americans need help from others booting up their new devices, and an even larger percentage need outside assistance when they encounter technical problems.
Sydney Jones, co-author of the report by the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project said many Americans were buying gear because it was popular rather than having any idea how it worked.
Some users work out the technology a lot faster and they have a teaching role among other more dim Americans.
Forty-eight percent of the 2,054 adults surveyed by the Pew Centre said they usually need help from others and to show them how they work, and where the 'on' button was. If they have any problems just over a quarter said they could fix them themselves.
By fix we don’t know if that means hitting the device with hammers until it is not a problem any more. Since men are more likely than women to 'fix' the problem themselves we guess that most gadgets would end up with scratch marks on the casing from the occasional use of a nail gun.
More than 38 percent said they contacted user support for help, 15 percent said they fixed the problem with help from friends or family and two percent said they found help online.
More than 15 per cent said sod this for a game of soldiers, gave up on the divice and had a box of donuts instead.
Mmmmmm... donuts. µ
L'Inq
AP
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As a colonial "goto person" with respect to most home computer systems, I believe the study is grossly inaccurate. It's my personal experience in business, and personal life [I have one now that I'm retired], the percentage of computer ignorant persons is 90% or higher.

Most people I know trust the sales personnel at Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and etc. to provide adequate pre-purchase techy expertise. After the purchase most rely on geeky rescuers who relish the chance to bugger up just one more machine.

If for no other reason, computer games are helping to ensure the continued existence of tech-savvy people.
Okay, Merkins dumb and all that - by $Deity the last eight years are ample proof, okay.
But still, I feel that there is certain bias in how computer users in general are treated.
After all, more than 90% of car drivers go to the garage to get their car fixed, and nobody treats them like "dumb lusers".
Would it be possible to start commencing to begin thinking that PC owners just might also have other interests in life and cannot devote their entire waking existence to the exploration of the intricacies of OS quirks and hardware esoterics ?
What's worse is that we invented this stuff.. ; ( 

But we're in California and not actually part of the United States ; )
I agree, 90% don't have a clue. And yes, I have to help them. And yes, I think of most car drivers that don't know anything about the mechanics are dumb users too. It's sad how much people need others to think for them with no idea if they are being BS'd. I see too many people doing bad jobs in service because it's cheaper to hire those that don't know and 90% of the people don't know any better and so get screwed unintentionally. That leaves a lot of open space for people to screw other people intentionally. I recently had a boat furnace installed by a factory authorized dealer and they screwed it up for thousands of dollars. Ignorance is not bliss, it's expensive.
I'm sure that apart from india maybe(?) these numbers are the same everywhere, people are not just simple but also very lazy, women often ask men to fix such things simply because they figure men are actually interested in it, ie doing the learning of how stuff works and subsequently using that to fix thing, it isn't necessarily so that women are even more stupid than the male version.
All this is of course part of the original success of microsoft and the success of apple, microsoft for making a GUI for DOS available so people had to learn less, and apple for making computers for people that do not, and do not want to know much about computers.

Leading to the disaster that is vista where half the developing team was going for the "I don't want to know" crowd and the other half for the classical PC user, or worse; geek, and merging that into an OS that then was sold to the entertainment industry and then released early.
If the author is still referring to Virginia as a former colony I can't help wondering how current he is in managing his own technology-it being far more modern than his reference. Yes, many people are using technology they don't fully understand-and are challenged when getting devices from different companies, and sometimes different operating systems to work together in a coordinated way. At least the Pew Study is identifying the need-and I don't think it's unique to the USA, unless that's because we have more technology devices in our homes.