I suppose it is a lot like cars — many people out there cannot change a tyre, put oil or coolant in, or refill the windscreen washer bottle! But they know how many cupholders they have!

As an example, I know a MS Word wiz. She can even get automatic numbering to work within styles!! But I asked her one day “where did you save that document?” and got the reply “In Word.” I assumed that, in order to have a high level of skill with Word, she must know about files, folders etc, but no.

And my personal favourite is the call for help I got one day from a friend:

“I need help, the Internet is broken.”

Now there are two claims in that sentence, and only one of them was right!

@DaSuthNa: Agreed. It’s hardly “deathless prose”. Maybe that’s why politicians never act on report recommendations: they fall asleep before the good bits.

@Speedicut: It’s this gulf of understanding that really hit me both at PubCamp and the Politics & Technology Forum. All these thoughts are rumbling around the back of my head while I work at clients’ premises this week, and will eventually disgorge themselves into an essay. Some time.

Didn’t you mean:

“Here’s what our finest minds — and Corinne Grant — had to say…”?

As someone who can barely control a Blogger template I can’t cast aspersions on others lack of tech nous. What strikes me is the huge information gap between folk like yourself who get the pc/web/comm thing on almost a molecular level and the rest of us. This will obviously change in the future, meanwhile it’s interesting to see the varying rates of tech take up amongst different age groups and occupations.

We know and have experienced first hand the failure of government to engage online. I frankly no longer have an expectation of competence on the part of Australian governments when it comes to the Internet.

If you read the report, I think you’ll find very little that is truly groundbreaking. Or can you point to something which is groundbreaking?