Computer literacy is weird because it feels like millennials were born into it and had to learn how to use the tools available… Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them, and Gen Z was born into apps and saas and did not have the chance to properly learn
We generally only taught a single generation to master our tech, I think it’s scary, but also I trust the Zoomers to figure it out, they’re creative
I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).
I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.
Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.
I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.
(to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days)
The problem is if you don’t know basic concepts of computers you cannot transfer your knowledge from one program to the next. Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people and if they see one in program A, then they won’t understand that in program B it works the same way.
I have never had any issues learning any new software from scratch, but I see people my age not figuring out where to click next or where something they are looking for might be hidden in the options. Then an update comes that changes things and they are back to square 1 and helpless.
I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.
He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.
So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.
Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people
When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents
You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can’t use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of ‘dumbing down’ tech.
I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I’m not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
This is quite a few years old now, but I think the main points are still valid. As you said, everything is so polished, kids don’t need to figure out how it works.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
In my country, this generational divide doesn’t make much sense. But comparing those born in the 90s and early 2000s with those born from the late 2000s onwards, there is a fundamental difference: there was, even in the public education system, a variety of computer courses available to many people. With the arrival and hegemony of the app model, which is designed with the idea that it is intuitive and does not require anyone to be taught how to use it, computer courses have been disappearing. As a result, millions of young people use computers daily and have no knowledge of simple concepts such as shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, let alone advanced features of Office suites, not to mention that they have no idea what LATEX and Markdown are.
That’s super interesting, I do remember being taught as a kid how to use Google Image search (circa 2005), Gimp for photo manipulation around the age of 12 in 2008, we had technology classes with electronics, technical drawing, even some plastic bending machine, and light programming (made a robot figurine execute recorded moves in sequence)
I do wonder if it’s still the case in my own country
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of people regardless of age don’t know what LaTeX or markdown are. Not the best examples. I’m a millennial with a 4 year STEM degree and I maybe used LaTeX once because it was required, and before Discord became a thing, I’d never heard of markdown. Most people who use Discord probably don’t even know it supports markdown.
I agree that is a extreme example. That’s precisely why I started with keyboard shortcuts. I don’t think anyone is required to know LaTeX and Markdown, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer younger people know them. If there are fewer people who know the basics, there are proportionally fewer people who know the advanced ones.
It’s really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.
The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don’t care about tech.
The weird thing is I know a lot of millennials that could use a dos computer just fine but struggle with anything modern
Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them
Which needs to be reversed if we’re to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I’d wager 50% of them don’t understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies’ payrolls.
Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?
