Introduction
How many times have you had the following happen? A person joins your community and makes a post asking about how to get their WiFi working on Linux. They are new to Linux and they have an .exe file they downloaded somewhere from the internet. Or how about a person who wants to install Linux but can’t choose a distribution and asks for the “best one” or better yet wanting to install “Linux” but not knowing what a distribution is. What explains these kinds of missteps? After all a seasoned user would easily point out the mistakes and know where to get more information. The answer lies in a phenomenon called incognizance.
What is Incognizance?
Incognizance in information science is the state of having a particular information need but being unaware you have this need. Take for a particularly dramatic example: a patient being diagnosed with cancer. They may be so overwhelmed by the diagnosis that they don’t have any idea what to ask their doctor. They may need to know how this will affect their day to day life or how to find emotional support but they may not know that they need these things until later. It may help to connect this concept with your life. Can you think of a time that you didn’t know what you needed to know?
Why Does it Matter?
If you want to make a system easier to use, you first have to understand where the problems come from before you can attempt to solve them. Going back to our previous examples, the user trying to get their wifi working doesn’t know that they need to learn how Linux handles packages. They also need to know how to find the right driver packages. Of course the best way to solve this is to have the driver loaded by default, but this isn’t always possible. Some distros attempt to fix this by creating a welcome tour that explains where to get your software. This prompts the user to understand that they get their software from a different place then they would on Windows, therefore reducing their incognizance.
In more generic terms: reducing incognizance means solving problems before they come up and giving people the tools to seek the information they need to solve their own problems, which means less work for everyone involved. It also helps you to have more patience with people who are new. When you understand where systems fail their users and where these problems come from it becomes easier to empathize and teach, rather than the normal Linux community refrain of RTFM or belittling them. And that is a goal well worth considering.