I was wondering what’s the real place The Technology occupies in our life. Try looking for “eclipse” in a search engine of your choice, and the first thing comes neither “solar eclipse” nor “mind eclipse”. It’s Eclipse IDE, which is of a specific interest only to a technically inclined fraction of the civilization. The fact it comes ahead of everything else pushes towards an interesting conclusion: people around the planet are interested in “natural” eclipses less than techies in their project. And this fact unavoidably wraps up into something really puzzling when it comes to techie-non-techie interactions.

When somebody asks me what do I do for a living, I usually answer “programming”. I know the following “what exactly are you programming?” is almost certainly the end of the sensible conversation. “A feed reader” collapses the most minds. It takes some long seconds to an average non-techie to adapt to a new unfamiliar and threatening environment making an attempt to digest the words; the brain work is almost audible. To lend a hand of help I would try giving some bonus clues: “RSS”, “web logs”, “news columns”… oh, news columns — the sparkling pleasure on the happy face — “So you are a journalist or something?” Well, sort of…

You see the point? The technology is all around us, it evolves and concurs new territories. Still inperceivably little fraction of it is used and understood to a reasonable extent by ordinary people. You have a question and the answer makes you even more frustrated, puzzled and confused than before. In order to understand the front page of the site-about-an-eclipse you need at least ten years of schooling and then some high schooling and after that it’s still not guaranteed you’ll be able to grasp all the nuances. If it not kills you, then most certainly make you late for dinner.

Sometimes I wonder how it feels: to surf the Web and realize no matter how hard you try there’s still not a chance to catch the meaning of the most things you see. It explains why people find forums, social bookmarking services and numerous portals so awfully attractive. They are familiar, sociable and outgoing. They are like safe and shallow waters of quite bays where ship wreck isn’t a real threat and comes only in the darkest nightmares…