The Controversy Over Technology on the Dashboard

I love my GPS and I know many other boomers who can't live without theirs. I've figured out how to put in the address I want to go to and how to turn it off when the voice gets too annoying. While my GPS system isn't accurate all of the time, it is usually reliable, and I do rely on it.

I also have a Bluetooth interface in my car that lets me dial my cell phone by saying "Call Randy's Phone" or by finding a contact in an imported phone book which appears on a screen on my dashboard. My car has trouble recognizing my voice commands sometimes, and then I turn to my imported phone book.  When I have to use the imported phone book, however, I pull over. I cannot select a name from many names while I am driving. It's just too distracting. Which brings me to the topic of this blog entry: the controversy over technology on the dashboard.

I've been reading all the news from both the Detroit Auto Show and the Consumer Electronics Show (which took place in early January) and especially the New York Times article that covered the pros and cons of putting more technology in a car's dashboard.

The debate seems to focus on the advantages of technology versus the danger of distracted driving. Another boomer, Fran Jones, put in her two cents on this matter on her blog Boomers and Beyond. Fran appears to be very much against this trend and for many good reasons! While she doesn't blame the makers of this equipment she says, "People, lacking the common sense to admit that hurtling around in a few tons of steel requires paying attention while you hurtle, are going to kill people with these new toys."

I was especially disturbed by the New York Times description of the Audi system, which lets you pull up a great deal of information as you drive. "Heading to Madison Square Garden for a basketball game? Pop down the touch pad, finger-scribble the word “Knicks” and get a Wikipedia entry on the arena, photos and reviews of nearby restaurants, and animations of the ways to get there," the article says.  I see how trying to read all this info while en route could be devastatingly distracting.

As far as I can tell, boomer drivers are just as guilty as all other drivers who drive with distractions. I still have friends who think it is OK to talk on a hand-held cell phone while driving, fiddle endlessly with their radios or eat in the car. However, I  don't think that many boomers would particularly want to Tweet (post messages on Twitter) or text, for example, while driving, just because it's not part of their culture. Yet at least one dashboard manufacturer is working on a way to let people Tweet using their voices while driving.

Unlike Fran, I think that the makers of devices for the dashboard and the car companies have a responsibility to make the technology they put into cars safe for ALL drivers. Manufacturers should be looking at the interfaces between drivers and their gadgets and make them as simple as possible. Here is one area where the needs of boomers intersect with the needs of the rest of the generations. We all want our cool technology, and we want to be able to work with it without swerving off the road or hurting someone else.

Ford seems to be getting the idea right. They previewed the My Ford Touch Connected Car at the Consumer Electronics Show and their Ford Sync technology which uses a better than average voice command system, consistently gets good reviews from car enthusiasts and technology geeks.

Ford's own research (if you can trust it) says that voice activated commands are less distracting than touch commands. Unfortunately, according to Jared Newman in PC World, there will be three tiers for the interface, so some car buyers will still get inferior, and more distracting, technology.

Voice activation, however, doesn't address one of the problems for many of us boomers: how to remember all the commands we should use to make this technology work. Will the voice activated systems be flexible enough for our boomer memories? This remains to be seen.
 

Facebook Privacy--What it means for Boomers

Facebook changed its privacy policy this week, and basically reset everyone's privacy settings so that everyone can see everything you post. And Friends of Friends can see your photos.  If you click here, you will be sent to an excellent blog post by Brian Krebbs at the Washington Post that explains exactly what Facebook did. (Warning: you  may have to close an ad before you can be linked to the blog. It's annoying but worth it.) 

I don't intend to go over the same material Krebbs covered in this blog post. I only want to warn my fellow Boomers, especially the ones who are only occasional users of Facebook, to get in there and check your privacy settings immediately. I think that Boomers have an expectation of privacy that the younger generations who have grown up with social networking don't share. Yet, we have to expect that everything we put on the web will be fodder for some search engine sometime in the future, unless we protect it.

Do you really want Google or Bing pulling up posts you made to update your status? Take something innocent, like a post about a sick member of the family. Once that post is available to be indexed by Bing or Google, it is on the web for posterity, my friends. Your birthday is another example. If you let Facebook make this information public, then you are inviting marketers into your life. This blog article by Kaila Colbin shows how Facebook's decision to pull the privacy rug out from under its users is motivated by the the ability to sell the information it is collecting on us. I understand there are many ways that marketers can get this information anyway, but why make it easy to be a target for them?  The only way to protect your information is to make sure you keep your privacy settings updated.

Like many of my Boomer friends, I use Facebook to keep up with family and friends. I'm not interested in cultivating a vast number of friends of friends. And I am angry with Facebook for resetting my privacy settings --really without much notice. Frankly, I think they should have used my old settings as the default, and asked me to opt in to their new settings, which I would have refused.

Also, there should have been more notice given. While there was a big banner telling me to update my settings when I signed on last week, the keepers of the Facebook community didn't email me, and believe me, they have my email address. We all should have been warned before they made this huge change.

Boomers' Attitudes Toward Technology

I saw this great article about Boomer attitudes toward technology  by  Michael Rogers on the AARP web site. Yes, I want to scream when I think of being old enough to benefit from AARP's wisdom, but here I am.

Rogers concludes what I knew all along. Boomers' "technology habits are not frozen in time. Boomers are thoughtful adopters who are open to new technologies that add value to their lives." We don't see ourselves as slow at adopting technology. However, we do think that manufacturers produce products that are excessively complex and have poor instructions.

AARP found that our generation is interested in some very cutting edge technologies.

• We would be willing to wear sensor-equipped exercise clothes, for example, to keep track of our physical condition and calories burned during workouts.

• We are willing to have our health records encoded electronically and maybe even to have a chip implanted with our health history. 

•  Boomers support online banking and are willing to see the mobile phone become both a credit card and cash equivalent.

• Our generation will also adopt "green" technologies en mass.

To be clear, these conclusions were not drawn from a large sample. Only 60 plus "influencers" participated in gatherings during May 2009 in San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, and New York. All of the participants had broadband Internet at home and so may have represented forward thinkers anyway. Here is the link to the report Boomers and Technology: an extended conversation. 

One example in the report said that Boomers will demand better security online and will pioneer the idea of true online Internet IDs, the electronic equivalent of driver's licenses or passports.  I have great faith in the power of our generation not only to adopt new technologies, but to help influence them. And so I ask you, readers, do you think Boomers will continue to influence technology? Or will it pass them by?