Hugh Robjohns wrote:desmond wrote:It's the old give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish, thing...
Some people just want that fish, now, and being hungry later is a problem for future them... (hopefully someone else will give them another fish) :headbang:
How true -- and this actually lies at the heart of why I left the BBC in the last century.
Of course I would expect a BBC technician (or a studio engineer) to be very knowledgeable of the hows and whys. But it's not the same context as the kid that starts to make music at home.
Again, as hard it can be to understand to all of us that are engineering minded, there's lots of people who simply cannot care less of the
how. They're interested only in the
what. Whatever "how" they have to learn, it's a painful and irritating experience to shorten as much as possible. A necessary evil, which comes in the way of doing what they want to do. Many old studio musicians were like that - they just went there and recorded, blissfully unaware of the uber-complicated apparatus of people and machines that made that possible (some didn't of course, and ended up producing and engineering.. it's all about curiosity). Or take people and phones... most people want to call, or message.. they can't care less of the marvelous ideas of cellular networks, and if the few times that they need to, they find it annoying and a waste of time. They still want to call tough.
I understand all about fish and rod of course, I've made a good living of learning things deep and quick and putting them to use. But - as much as I like a nice garden, I'm not interested in gardening. Gardening is not
hard, or impossible to learn.. but and god forbid should I ever need to do some in order to keep the garden, I'd probably ditch the garden. :-) Or simply hire someone to know the "how" on my behalf. The same, incidentally, goes for fishing: never really cared for it, and while I love eating fish, I cannot be interested in learning the first thing about fishing.
Of course the cheap digital revolution has promised to lots of people that the "how" is so simple that they can do it themselves. And while it's far simpler than it's ever been, thanks goodness is not entirely true, and skill still matters.
But it's good to remember that most people in the world are not engineers, and more importantly are not engineering minded. They all have some field where they love to learn, but technical ones, often, not so much.
So when we help them while wondering why they don't care to learn to help themselves, it pays off to remember that really that's the norm, and we are the exception.
Lots of these exceptions, I suspect, were finding places like the old BBC fascinating and great to work with..
