How do we talk about cool technologies in ways that make sense to new users? This is a much bigger question than whether an event is called BarCamp or Unsheffield – and it’s worth standing back and thinking about.

Remember: most people don’t think technology is that cool – and this is not a failing on their part.

Technology, as Danny Hillis put it, is stuff that doesn’t work properly yet. People who like technology for its own sake are a special branch of human evolution, born to be beta testers. The rest of the species is mostly just interested in what a particular tool does. Does it save me time? Does it help me make a living? Does it make my life more interesting?

As advocates for new technologies, we sometimes sound like we’re attacking the rest of the world for not sharing our peculiar obsession. This is made worse by over-simple talk about the way that technology changes the world. Edu-tech enthusiasts talk about the virtues of interactive learning as if there had been no interaction between teachers and students before the web. If we want to invite people to try out new tools, we should be careful of telling them things which don’t fit with their experience.

Another thing: most people don’t want to spend more of their lives in front of screens.

Immersive experiences are terribly exciting to those of us who like technology – and this can lead us to misjudge which innovations will reach the most users. Remember video calling on mobile phones? That was supposed to be huge. Instead, the greatest innovation in the history of mobile was SMS. People wanted less information, not more.

Something similar applies to virtual worlds: maybe one day First Life will have got so awful that it triggers a mass exodus into virtual reality, but – a couple of years on – the hype around Second Life looks a lot like a replay of the video calling misjudgement. Meanwhile, Twitter has much in common with the text message, and appeals for similar reasons. (I can imagine a future in which email addresses become something intimate and not lightly shared: only those I trust get the ability to throw as much information as they want at me, while most communication is done through a deliberately character-limited format…)

Another way to think about this is to see attention as a currency. Information is free, but time could be money. When people spend time interacting with the tools we build or enthuse about, this is time they can’t spend elsewhere. So the more attention it costs, the more value users need to feel they are getting.

So how do we talk about technology in ways that take account of these realities? And how do the terms we currently use shape up?

Some of the key terms thrown around in recent years just don’t work when you get beyond the community of people who think technology is inherently cool. The clearest case of this is ‘Web 2.0′. Think about that expression. It’s basically a geek joke – an allusion to the numbering of software releases, which is lost on 98% of the population. (People can’t even agree on how to say it: is it “web two”, “web two point oh” or “web two point zero”?)

That’s just one example, but it illustrates a problem: we get so used to the language we use, it’s not easy to notice how much it takes for granted. If we want to get new users doing cool stuff with these tools, we need to think harder about the way we talk about them.

It’s not as if the mainstream media are going to help – if anything, they are getting worse at reporting these technologies. As new tools become more social and less mechanical, the challenge of understanding and explaining them increases. The first time you put a search term into Google and hit go, you understood what it was for. How long did it take you to understand Twitter? Longer than a journalist gets to write an article, most likely.

This isn’t just an academic issue for me. With School of Everything, and now with Signpostr – a network for those trying to find their way through the worst job market in a generation – the sites I’ve founded have had to reach people who’ve never heard of Web 2.0. That doesn’t mean we’ve figured it all out, by any means. But if there’s one conversation I’d like to be part of at Unsheffield, it’s the conversation about how we get better at explaining these tools, at finding language that works for people who don’t think like us – and at recognising the difficulties of doing this.

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