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Barriers to adopting new technologies

The two attitudinal barriers to the adoption of new technologies are suspicion and confidence.  Of course, there are other significant barriers such as access to technologies and the cost of them, but here we are dealing with attitudes.

Suspicion of new technologies, due to assumptions and fears about the technologies, were a real barrier for some people, especially those who had never really engaged with them.  The Internet is a good example of this.  One individual who ran a community centre explained how its committee was against having available Internet in their centre due to fears over the safety of children.  However, once it was up and running their attitudes began to change,

“I suppose like, I don’t know about yourselves but we are run by a committee and a lot of elder people are on the committee so there was barriers from the start with the internet’s bad reputation and stuff like that with kids and its broken down the barriers really…I mean people are coming in the building all the time and they want to know what’s going on on the computers and then they are interested I suppose and then they gradually get involved…now I don’t know what they would do without it because they’ve got one in their office and they’ve got email and things!”

This sense of danger from the Internet, especially for children, was summed up by another person who said of the Internet, “It’s opened the world, but it’s opened the dangerous world.”   This is not to suggest that this fear is completely unfounded, but it was used by these people to ignore the Internet completely, seeing it as ‘bad’.  Others had concerns around the same issues, but also recognised the good the Internet can bring, and dealt with the issues by, for example, having their home PC in a space in the home where they can easily monitor what their children are doing.

Our research also showed similar issues with online learning.  In general, people were reluctant to think about doing a course that way, as it appeared so different to a traditional course in a classroom.  Individuals were concerned that they would not have anyone to ask if they needed help, that courses would be inflexible and not able to meet their needs, that they wouldn’t be able to receive information from a computer, and that they would suffer as there would not be a class of learners to interact with.  Again, these fears are not unreasonable, but a good online course can arguably deal with these issues much more effectively than respondents assumed.

Alongside this suspicion also comes the issue of confidence.  Our research “Getting IT Right” involved speaking to around 100 residents of Hull, and they were asked about how confident they were in using technology.  Around a third of respondents said that they weren’t confident with technology, compared to just over 40% who said that they were confident.  This shows that for a significant proportion of the population, a lack of confidence is a very real barrier to engaging with new technologies. 

Some of our earlier research (See Basic IT Courses) also touched on this issue and this lack of confidence was expressed clearly by the people below who we spoke to then,

“I’ve never done computer in my life, you know, until I came here.  I was scared to death of them…”

“Before I would not touch a computer, just in case I did the wrong thing, but the teachers have stated to me that it is very hard to actually damage a computer…” 

Age played a role in these attitudinal barriers, with older people more likely to feel suspicion or a lack of confidence when faced with some new technology.  However, it is not necessarily a determining factor, as the quotes above are from a 45 year old and a 19 year old!