Take a look at any college catalog.

The computer science departments all advertise the field in the same way: developing the skills of programming, working with abstractions, and covering a range of computing technologies.

Take a look at the body of knowledge in the ACM/IEEE curriculum recommendations: they portray the field as 14 main headings, mostly technologies, covering about 130 subheadings. The consensus view of our field emphasizes programming, abstraction, and technologies.

So you're saying that our failure to communicate comes from a habit of mind rather than a defective story?

Exactly.

I'm not saying that this way of expressing our body of knowledge is wrong. It communicates well when our primary audience is technology-minded people like ourselves.

But today computing affects many people in all walks of life. Our primary audiences listen for principles deeper than technologies.

We can't sell our field to others simply by hiring good journalists to tell our technology stories. We have to be willing to tell our stories in a different way.

We have to find ways to discuss computing so that our listeners can see their own struggles in the stories and then see how computing can help them.