Do you know your MP3 from your R2-D2? 23% of Americans don’t
The survey of nearly 2,400 adults in the U.S. found that common terminology for technology goes way over the head of many. Terms such as USB, HTML and even MP3 were woefully misunderstood.
Take the 11% who thought ‘HTML’ was a sexually transmitted disease, or the more significant percentage who believed a ‘gigabyte’ was a creepy crawly from South America.
For 12%, ‘USB’ is “an acronym for a country in Europe” (the United States of Belgium?), and 23% thought that MP3 was the name of a robot in Star Wars.
More than three-quarters (77%) could not identify what ‘SEO’ stands for, forgivable perhaps for those outside of tech-land, and for 42% ‘motherboard’ was the deck of a cruise ship.
But ‘Blu-ray’ being identified as a marine animal and ‘software’ as comfortable clothing is verging on the ridiculous, albeit funny.
“Technology is a huge interest for our user base, and month after month we see thousands of people visiting our site to look for coupons and deals to use when purchasing their favorite tech products,” a spokeswoman from Voucherclode told The LA Times. “It seems that quite a few of us need to brush up on our tech definitions.”
There was no age data to compare responses against. I suspect if I asked my grandmother, or even my mother, to correctly define these terms I’d get some equally confused responses.
