"The Ideology of Ease"

This ideology is fascinating. I can't help but relate everything I read to my first year teaching experiences, and the author of this article that Dr. Day posted is commenting on his experiences with students. I do note a slight difference in gender; Mr. Dilger says: "ease is heavily gendered. In the simplest sense, the connection is expressed as 'Women can't handle difficulty.' Women are expected to identify with ease; men are expected either not to need it or to use it in passing on their way to superior ability." I have noticed, at least, a difference in the attitude of students based on gender, (or somehow, I don't know how to explain, but a different look on their faces in the lab), when going through new "technology" lessons. Truly, the young ladies have more questions! (and I, a female, trying to lead the pack--yikes!) But, I wonder if this is just an outward appearance of the way we, as different genders, process information; I know that I don't shrug from learning something new, and the female students in my class don't either. Dilger goes on to say,"an uncritical turn toward making computer interfaces and software easy to use has replaced the various metaphorical schemes, disrupting the GUI's relationship to spatial representation." I guess I just wonder how every program/application can use the same metaphors, and what then would occur? As I think John blogged about, at some point the excitement of creating something new rests somehow on thinking that "I can do it better; I can make it more understandable/usable for everyone." I guess we can't really ever do this completely, based upon the extreme differences found in subcultural language, etc. Dilger blames the students' lack of file structure manageability on the phenomenon of not having standardized metaphors throughout technology and he says "the culturally constructed desirability of 'making it easy' [or] an...uncritical drive toward ease is arguably the most influential force in desktop computing today...as ease becomes the end, rather than the means to the end, many things are set aside..." It seems like there can just be no easy solution for usability.