this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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It's scary how tech illiterate most teens / young adults are. Despite the fact that they live their lives through digital interfaces, the majority do not know how to use a keyboard properly.
I wrongly had assumed that by being surrounded by so much tech, young people would just soak it in and strive to optimize it's use through early mastery. It turns out that despite everyone using tech all the time now, it's still the same thin slice of the pie that scratch the tech any deeper than the top surface.
I feel like we’re getting old. Is this our “kids these day can’t even change their own oil” moment?
I couldn't imagine any of these kids having to deal with a dos prompt.
Then again the thought of having to be on instagram robs me of control over bodily functions.
They are the new boomers now. Like even basic folder navigation is something that is difficult for them.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Holy shit, yes. I took over some job stuff from a younger guy and when they passed me his files they were all in one giant folder on his Mac. I couldn't find anything!
It's like having everything from your house in a single room with the toilet next the the oven.
Tbf, I don't use prefer clicking thro a series of folders. I rather have a fuzzy finder that help me open any important documents regardless of its format.
But that kinda makes sense. They never had that period where tech sucked and you had to struggle through it. Even as a developer I'm noticing the junior developers amazed at the stuff i know how to do and they ask how i soaked it all up. It's cuz i had to just to get basic shit to function.
I feel this so much. It's so frustrating to spend 30 mins helping someone who basically gave up after 5 mins of trying. And it's not easy to teach that ability to search and learn because it's more of a mentality than a skill.
I think these days either being into PC gaming, streaming, video editing, etc is what provides the motivation to become tech literate with how lot of people these days may not own a device that runs a desktop OS and either uses a phone or console for gaming. Otherwise, being in an ecosystem that just hands people everything by design makes even folder navigation something that can be confusing for new generations as it was for boomers.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
But even those motivations only get you surface deep. I'm glad technology has gotten better but what streamer today has bought a new camera only to find the drivers haven't been updated and had to go into the system registry to add a new vendor id? Not that this individual task is important but it's the mentality of being about to fix and manipulate their system when things don't work...computers aren't walled gardens. That's totally lost on this generation.
No kidding. I'm in my late 30s and regularly have to help 18-24 year old coworkers with connecting their phones to the bluetooth speakers or help with stuff on the computer. I never thought that would happen when I was growing up. I always thought they'd be much better than me!
It feels like a bell curve of technological literacy… most boomers knew jack shit, gen x has a decent amount of tech literates, Millenials are the peak, and then it seems to have started dropping back down from there.
Young gen Z here. I remember time when casual adults (not nerds interested in tech) considered kids the experts. From perspective of time I can guess it was because they didnt have any 'digital sense' and saw kids playing on mobile devices.
However these days... I everyday see peers using tech in ways we living in tech bubble consider inproper. They use proprietary software, charge battery to 100% and discharge it to full 0, dont care about privacy, accept bloatware instead of flashing rom/uninstalling with adb, they dont know what bootloader is, dont check repairability of devide before purchase, accept everything soldered into motherboard, they think LLM arent just large next-word suggester, they dont boycott companies shitting on them, they use trademarked words while meaning generic things like 'googling' and 'ipad', post their real profile photos on facebook, they accept predatory monetization models.
I dont want to say Im smarter than everyone, but Im just sad that this gen fell so low.
Part of what happened is schools stopped teaching the muggle kids basic computer skills, assuming "they're young so they must innately know this," and went all-in on locked down Chromebooks for everything. The average household doesn't own a computer, just uses phones, and schools took away the only opportunity for them to have exposure to real computers.
I agree with the first part, but knowing about bootloader and flashing rom to a new phone is hackerman level, not a regular tech-savvy user.
New generations having hacking skills is more like a cyberpunk novel, reality is lower attention spans, worst reading skills and over-simplified UIs. People gravitate to the simpler way.
Exactly, I feel like what used to be a "ask a 14yr old" type tech question is now an "ask a 40yr old"
Using "to google" actually invalidates the trademark eventually, since it becomes generalized