Thankfully, those days are fading; the blinking-VCR trope is becoming as
rare as a floppy disk. Americans today are more likely to see someone who boasts
about his or her nonfamiliarity with technology as a sign of incompetence or
just plain stupidity, as opposed to a character trait that signifies
groundedness in what's real. The vast majority of Americans perform
sophisticated digital tasks on a daily basis. Grandmas and grandpas e-mail
digital photos of their cruise trip, and IM their kids in school.
I think a tech illiterate President would be a huge liability when it comes to competing with the emerging tech powers we will be facing in 4-8 years. Already Korea and Japan have faster and deeper broadband that has been transforming their societies for years now. If not for head start given to us by Silicon Valley we would already be delegated to lesser power in Tech-Race. Of course Obama looks like a cool customer when it comes to tech:
Obama even charmed the geeks at Google during an appearance there when
CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly asked him the kind of question posed to prospective
employees: "How do you determine good ways of sorting 1 million 32-bit integers
in two megabytes of RAM?" A poker-faced Obama showed a high comfort level with programmer talk when he replied, "I think the 'bubble sort' would be the wrong way to go."
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