In the Era of Tech, Ignorance is Ordinary

Your camera can probably do things you don't know it can do.

Here's something that a lot of you will probably think is funny. I never knew that [this next has been corrected —Ed.] on my Mac with a Microsoft keyboard, Alt (Option) + backspace deletes the previous whole word, and that Command + backspace deletes a whole line. (YMMV.) Just learned that this morning. My first reaction was, huh, who knew? But then I immediately thought, Mike, a lot of people probably knew, that's who.

You might roll your eyes and laugh at my ignorance (I don't mind), but...are you sure you know every shortcut that might be useful to you? The Option + backspace is a keyboard shortcut. There are also shortcuts for working in files and applications, and another whole set of them for working in browsers on the internet. Do you ever look at lists of shortcuts and fish around for something new that might come in handy? (I guess I don't.)

Expanding on this a little, do you think you know everything useful your computer operating system is designed to do? I probably don't even have a complete grasp of the basics.

I damn sure don't know everything Photoshop can do. Furthermore, I'm secretly convinced no one does. That's right...my superstitious, primitive, ignorant folk belief is that there is not one being in the Universe who knows everything Photoshop is capable of. The people who design it sure don't, because they keep adding other ways to do things it can already do. I don't think even AI can know. As in Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Nine Billion Names of God," perhaps the Universe will end as soon as any single being masters Photoshop completely. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars will go out. I'm joking. Kinda joking. Also a tiny bit...not.

I never took a computer course. That's somewhat bizarre even to me. Everything I know I just...picked up. That's like telling a young person to go out and learn as much stuff as they can for four years and then giving them a college degree.

The pertinent point is not just that your camera can probably do things you don't know it can...but that our baseline, default attitude toward cameras in general and our own specific cameras in particular should be that they can probably do things we have not yet discovered. This should probably be just a normal, ongoing, everyday assumption. It's probably true.

Mike

UPDATE three hours later: Wow! What a coincidence. As if to illustrate this very post, a little while ago (after this post was written and published) I opened an email from Kirk. It was a link to an article called "What Science Says About Walking 10,000 or 20,000 Steps a Day," from NEWSWEEK, which he found on Apple News.

I wrote back and said:

Hi Kirk,
Let's see, if the average adult takes 2,252 steps per mile (that comes from from "Howdy Health" by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension), 7,500–8,500 steps (your article's recommendation) is 3.33–3.77 miles per day. According to an article called "Walkability Index for Elderly Health: A Proposal" at ResearchGate, an average >65-year-old (like me) walks 2.1 miles per hour, so that's 1 hour 35 minutes to 1 hour 47 minutes.

I guess that's do-able.

But really, the only way I could practically accomplish it is if I were to buy a treadmill and put it right behind my desk, and get up from sitting throughout the day and accumulate steps incrementally. That way I would not be prevented by weather (which should not prevent me from walking outdoors, but does), and I could read or watch video content as I walk (preventing boredom, a significant factor in exercise plans for me historically...).

After sending that, I went off to look for some kind of technology for counting steps...

...And learned, to my surprise, that not only will the iPhone I already have count steps for me (on an app called Apple Health that comes with it—it's white with a little red heart), it had already been doing it. Opened the app and there were my steps for today, my steps per day for days and weeks past, and even comparisons between where I am today versus where I was yesterday and where I am this year compared to last! 

Wow, talk about technology being able to do things we don't know it can. Cool coincidence.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Anthony: "Though I've been using Adobe Lightroom for the greater part of fifteen years, I would guess I only know about half of what it's capable of doing. And I just started using Photoshop again after a bit of use ten years ago, and I'm up to maybe 10%. I tend to treat tech on a need-to-know basis, with some good instruction manuals (and YouTube) at the ready. Works for me...."

James Bullard: "I walked 13,586 steps so far today according to the pedometer app on my phone. Five miles of that was in the halls, stairs, and indoor track at the state college in town. As a veteran they let me use the facilities for free. I do that 4–5 days/week. I could use the treadmill but as you observe, that's boring. If nothing else set an alarm and get up every half hour to do some kind of exercise/stretching (mix it up) for five minutes. You'll feel better for it."

Ken: "I only need to know enough to be able to do what I want from my camera, computer, or Photoshop. Otherwise, I'd spend far more hours than I have available to master skills and / or tools I don't have a use for. Life is too short for that. Besides, the devices would likely become obsolete long before I can master everything. But more power to those who have an insatiable desire to learn everything there is to learn from their devices and tools."

MikeK: "You know, I'm not sure I knew those ones. Having had to train people on various bits of software (including Photoshop) over the years, the thing that shocked me most is how little people know and use shortcuts, and just how bad a lot of people are with computers in general. The amount of people who don't even use cmd/ctrl + c/v/x/a for their copying and pasting needs always dismays me when I realise the basic presumption of computer competence is unfounded, and I'm going to have to show people the basics of using a computer as well as the software."

DavidB: "Re 'Your camera can probably do things you don't know it can do'.... This is one of the reasons I've been a fan of Thom Hogan's books on how to use Nikon cameras."

Trevor: "I use DaVinci Resolve for video editing. It has a 4,000 page manual, but fortunately also has excellent video tutorials."

Comments

[Chuck Albertson]

It's Ctrl on a Windows keyboard, not Command.

[Tom]

check out macmost.com to be amazed.

[Enrique]

I've been using Photoshop for over 30 years, and currently manage a studio of PS artists for an extraordinarily demanding client. Some are retouchers, the kind of work you can broadly explain to even the non-tech savvy—and I believe they may be the last bastion of outrageously talented pixel pushers who don't rely on AI assistance. The larger portion of the team do not retouch photos, they do something entirely different, using techniques that are both elegant and fascinating. Most of those techniques were developed by a colleague at the client's HQ whose grasp of Photoshop is, in a word, universal. He's said that he sees it as just a big calculator. When he very humbly shows you a way of doing something impossible, it makes you feel like an ape touching the monolith.

[Allan Ostling]

Mike, instead of clarifying, your post befuddled. My Mac keyboard does not have a backspace key. It took some searching to learn that only a Windows keyboard uses this label for the delete key.

[Sorry! Thanks for telling me. Fixed now. --Mike]

[Robert Roaldi]

And if you're typing in French you need to learn the keyboard shortcuts for accents.

[Jeff]

That app has missed all the steps I take using my treadmill daily, as my phone sits elsewhere when exercising. I’m sure Apple would like me to buy one of their watches, but I learned that I can use my phone for telling time.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Delete and backspace are different things, that's why they are different keys on Windows. Backspace is what you type to delete the character you just typed, and is in the upper right corner of the main keyboard. Delete is what you use in editing to delete the selected text, or the next character from the current position.

[robert e]

Complex gadgets may illustrate the problem starkly, but lists like this https://www.watchmojo.com/articles/top-10-things-you-ve-been-doing-wrong-your-whole-life/top-10-things-you-ve-been-doing-wrong-your-whole-life have been around for many decades, reminding us that we never bothered to learn how best to use toothpaste, or operate the boxes that aluminum foil comes in, or even which end of the banana to start peeling.

No, it seems that the human condition is to muddle along in ignorance, whether we're dealing with produce or smartphones.

[Kye Wood]

Just tested those keyboard shortcuts in Word and Notepad.

They don't do what you specified Mike.

Now my wife thinks I'm less brilliant than I fooled her into believing.

[Well, first of all, she's wrong, you are brilliant. Secondly, I just corrected the text of the post again. All I can accurately report is what works for me on my computer. YMMV.... --Mike]

[Skip Davis]

I know a great deal about computers as I have watched Tron movies 1 and 2.

[Christopher Perez]

It takes a LOT of "tribal knowledge" of software to get down the road these days.

I come from a time that ATT or Berkley UNIX came with a three or four foot long table-top instruction manual rack. You could thumb through it and think about how to string together commands that would do something you wanted, complete with use hints.

Now I find that most software is largely undocumented. When it is documented, there are few guides on what something might actually mean or do. For more complex sequences, like understanding _why_ you might use one command or another, forget it.

[Nick Davis]

I've been using the Apple health app on my phone for years. It's really useful and has lots of other functions too. As for Photoshop, I've barely scratched the surface. It's a huge, multi-functional program. Different cohorts will use it in different ways. For example designers will use it quite differently to photographers.

[Speed]

A thing I read decades ago -- Nobody uses more than ten of their computer's functions. But everyone uses a different ten.

[Dave]

You said, "I never took a computer course."

It was just enough for me to take BASIC in high school during my senior year -- the first school year our school had computers -- and learn that writing a program that would do something useful, such as word processing, would take more than a lifetime by myself.

We discovered the teacher's answers to the weekly computer assignment on the shared diskette and simply looked at the code that did what we couldn't figure out how to do. Then, if you were halfway smart, you would change the variable names in that code and finish your assignment. Some weren't so smart and were found out.

Back to the actual subject at hand; nowadays, the keyboard shortcuts are consistent between various programs. It used to be that "paste" in any Lotus product was Shift-Insert, or something like that. Now, even non-Microsoft programs follow the Microsoft conventions.

I know the shortcuts I use often, but don't go through all the available shortcuts, just to learn something I'll soon forget for lack of use.

It's a bit easier than having the keyboard overlays to determine what the WordPerfect commands were for each Function key!

[psu]

I think a lot of ignorance is a universal, regardless of era. If anything a lot more people these days know about a lot more about things that in the past would have been the purview of relatively few "high level" intellectuals. A lot of recency bias around relatively few people being much dumber than average makes it hard to see.

[Earl Dunbar]

I have used the Apple Health app for viewing my step/distance count for several years. Last year I got Watch and my numbers went up. A lot. Which is correct? I suspect the Watch is correct and the iPhone (I have an XS and will probably upgrade to the 15 Pro this Spring) is undercounting. But how can I tell?

In any event, I prefer to believe the Watch!

[Richard Tugwell]

Joke (possibly in poor taste)

"When granddad turned 80, he proclaimed he was going to walk 5 miles a day. He's now 81 and we have no idea where he is"

[Craig Beyers]

Corey Barker (http://coreybarker.squarespace.com/corey-portfolio ) is one person who may know the most about Photoshop of anyone else I know. He’s an absolute wizard about creating images that are meaningful, like creating movie posters that have been used by studios.