Confused or just plain scared of technology?

It is interesting how the media sometimes takes the opportunity to pander to the general lack of public confidence in their ability to handle the latest technology. In-Car Satellite Navigation is a perfect - and right now extremely topical - example of this.

One of the UK local news networks carried a story some weeks back that involved a coach driver travelling with a party of school children from Farnham in Surrey to Hampton Court Palace, which is to the south west of London. Anyone who knows the area and distance involved would probably question why a professional driver would need a satellite navigation unit to get them from A to B in this particular case. But that aside, it should have been a routine trip.

What happened was that the driver arrived at Hampton Court in North London, a small street, and not at the world famous Palace. He would have had to almost drive passed the Palace to get on to the road that would take him to the other side of the nation's capital. And yet the news story focussed on the supposed fallibility of sat nav, rather than the user who clearly didn't check that he'd entered the correct address.

The news story went on to interview a spokesperson for one of the motoring organisations on how drivers tend to blindly follow the instructions of these devices. There is certainly some truth in that, because it is quite tempting to rely on the commands and switch off your own built-in navigator (or the one sat next to you). But I can't help thinking that as this professional coach driver passed sign after sign pointing to places he should have recognised were completely in the opposite direction and miles from where they needed to be, something might have just started to pull at his unswerving confidence in the machine.

But apparently not. Indeed, if it were not for the fact that the Hampton Court street in question is indeed quite a small street, he might have even tried to drive to the end of it in the hope of finding a Palace.

And yet the news story never once put any onus on the driver of the coach to apply any common sense. Instead it was purely the fault of this flawed technology. I've no doubt there were many frightened technophobes busy cheering at their televisions to see this public flogging. [kob]