I watched a gen alpha iPad kid play a Nintendo DS recently. He held it on his lap and only mashed his thumbs on all the controls, fingers splayed wide. Raged like hell at it. A piece of me died.
Joking aside I do actually worry about how superficial technical knowledge is becoming.
To play devil’s advocate, I imagine your view isn’t too far removed from folks who know to work on their cars being aghast that no one knows how to fix their own any more.
Computers are tools, and the more complex they become the harder it is to learn how to use and repair them.
I guess my point was more about it being an issue in professional settings as well, where the people should be technical.
One of technology’s biggest achievements is making it such that someone who doesn’t care how something works doesn’t need to worry about that in order to use it.
Oh aye, I do get where you’re coming from.
The company I work for is run by a guy who wishes it was the '70s still, so it’s been an uphill battle to introduce some level of technology into our workflows. We’re getting there bit by bit, but I still get regularly blindsided by people who just don’t know how certain technologies work, and worse; don’t really care to learn. I’m talking about people who don’t know how to scan a QR code to access a form we need them to input data into, that kind of thing.
That shit keeps me honest, and helps me to remember that while I might know to use SSH to run tasks on a little server I have at work, most people barely know more than how to access Facebook. But that’s fine, because some of those guys in the workshop can do things with an engine that mystifies me.
Millennials have technical skills, Gen Z has basic trades skills, big part of Boomers built their own houses. Every generation has its base skill that eventually becomes obsolete.
People these days couldnt even manually resolve an IRQ conflict!
We just need to integrate conversational AI into everything, so people never have to understand tech or learn to use it
Tap for spoiler
/s
Aye, we’ve almost all learned digital skills. And as time passes the skills required to perform digital tasks reduces as user interfaces and automation improve. What many of us don’t have however is digital understanding.
This is from a speech by the founder of lastminute.com and now member of the UK’s House of Lords
We have let these things come upon us, but it is not too late to wake up. If we want to change this dynamic and shape the future, we need to recapture some of the internet’s original promise and more of its positive transformative power. That means we need to understand – at all levels of society – what our digital world really is. We need to address the challenges that already exist and preempt the ones we don’t know about.
We live our digital lives this way because we have the skills to do so. 91% of us in the UK have the ability to use the internet. This is a remarkable achievement – and it’s important to continue the work to close the remaining gap and include those who are still without the skills or the access to use the internet.
But we also need to move beyond skills to understanding. Nearly all UK internet users have the digital skills to use a search engine, but only half know how to distinguish between search results and adverts. Around two-thirds of our digitally skilled population can shop and bank online – but a third don’t make any checks before entering their personal or financial information online. More than 1.4 million of us work in tech-related jobs – but, as the recent WannaCry attack showed us, hardly anyone is investing the time, resources or expertise to keep our systems safe. The list goes on.
Becoming a nation of people with digital understanding will be different and more complicated than becoming a nation of people with digital skills. For starters, digital skills are tangible and teachable: download this app, program this device. They also reinforce the idea that digital is something we do – time-bound and transactional.
But in a world where we spend more time online than we do asleep and where everything from our televisions to our kettles can connect to the internet, digital is something we are. Understanding is not a race to be run and won. It is a lifelong process of learning, one unique to each of us.
The full speech is available here. It was given in the House of Lords and is obviously directed towards UK parliamentarians but the concepts apply globally. I recommend reading the whole thing.
It’s always been that way. Even most people who used the internet “way back when” have no clue how it actually functions. Terms like DNS and IPv4 are vaguely familiar concepts at best outside of professional or hobbyist circles.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that either. There’s too much stuff for any one person to know. You learn the stuff that interests you and ignore the rest, which hopefully means somebody is interested in all of it. That’s why it’s good that there’s all different kinds of people out there.
Yup. It’s the old “you don’t need to be a baker to enjoy eating bread” thing. The tricky part is that technology has been shoehorned into basically every aspect of life, so there are comparatively a lot of people who don’t know how to “bake” it. If someone doesn’t like bread, they simply won’t eat it. But that’s not really possible with modern technology, outside of near complete rejection of modernity like the Amish.
Early Gen X here. I think there is something about having at some point to figure things out for yourself. Even if you don’t need to do that anymore, you have experienced the process of finding out for yourself (e.g., configuring TCP/IP the first time).
I think there is value in experiencing the process at least a little bit.
Oh it’s well fucked already.
On a side note, I would regularly get my silent generation grandmother to fix something on my smartphone when they first started getting popular. I miss her.
But both know how to use apps. What more can Corpos ask for?
I hate how true this is. Watching teens flail and panic at the library as they have to spontaneously learn how to use a non-chromeOS computer has been an upsettingly nostalgic reminder of one of my first jobs
The key concept conflict is they think files are inside apps (I teach some basic IT in one of my modules).
When asked to locate an excel file on their computer they point at excel and say the file is in excel. If you show them a .txt file, they’ll claim it’s in notepad.
The idea that a file is like a book, and the program is the glasses you use to read it, and their computer is the bookshelf seems to resonate well though. Then you just have to fight the clusterfuck that is Apple’s file storage, since most bring an apple device to uni.
It can be even more fundamental than that. I’ve seen people cocking their heads at the existence of multiple windows and programs running simultaneously. As in, “whoa, where’d my assignment go?” after they click on the browser. They’re used to everything running through a single window due to school computers offering everything through the browser. It’s terrifying to me.
Honestly, I’ve not had that one but I’ve seen something close. Some students are unaware they need to manually save sometimes, they just assume autosave is always there.
For Microsoft office this tends to be ok (OneDrive default doing something good for once), but once they step out (into SPSS/minitab/R) there is always some lost work in the first two weeks.
they point at excel and say the file is in excel.
Watching them use the card catalog.
There are YouTube channels with letting the youth try to figure out old tech.
You mean the Fine Bros.? The people who tried to copyright the idea of reacting to things on YouTube and wanted to make people buy a license to keep doing what they had already been doing? Those channels?
Use a slide rule and protractor to find the card catalog. Now write your name in cursive to check out a book.
Writing cuneiform on wax tablets with styli
scoffs
Writing things down?!?
If you do that you’ll cease to exercise your memory and will grow to rely on external means.
Back in my day we built our memory.
(If you’re not familiar this was basically Socrates’ (as portrayed by Plato) view on writing things down)
That better be in Latin this time, young man!
“Romans, they go home?”
I was born in the late 1900s, I can only go back so far.
those teens obviously were forced into consumerism by their parents and corpos
To be honest, it is complicated nowadays for no reason. So i can understand.
How so? Genuine question
Take windows 11. This os have multiple ui, ads are showed in your face, and microsoft ask you every month if you want to use onedrive or buy an xbox rent. Drivers for printers are a nightmare. Linux is amazing, but to much choice. And if something doesn’t work or it’s broken, it’s even harder to repair. And so on.
I know how to use a computer because i like to learn geeky stuff. But i understand that for someone that doesn’t care, it just want something that work.
Windows was always shit. We only know it because we grew up with it.
this is just an accurate fact
In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch argues that there are three waves of “internet people”. The first was “before it was cool”, the second when it became mainstream (give or take the turn of the millennium) and the third when internet was already a thing. The third are young people, too young to remember the 1900s and therefore the time before internet, and old people who go online because it’s unavoidable and also more intuitive and easy than ever before.
Despite the generation gap, they have things in common and in contrast to the first and second wave (which she also subdivides but that’s beside the point). For example they never used mail as primary communication and they have smartphones as first device and most often second hand from a family member.
Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk and sorry if I took your shitpost too serious but there’s truth and science behind it and I couldn’t not share it.
I wish we’d refer to early internet era as something other than the 1900s. WWW ostensibly started in 95. Maybe we just call it “The 90s” and be good with it?
When we start referring to the “turn of the century” as the early 2000s, I may just outright die.
I wish we’d refer to early internet era as something other than the 1900s.
Oh feel you. Saying 1900s for the whole century feels wrong but why tho? We do it for other centuries as well so maybe it’s time to get used to it.
WWW ostensibly started in 95.
That’s already part of becoming mainstream. I use “internet” in the broader sense that includes other technology I’m not really familiar with. But some precursors of the internet were around in the 70s and maybe even earlier? Donno, I’m second wave myself. Sorry if my terminology is confusion and not correct.
When we start referring to the “turn of the century” as the early 2000s, I may just outright die.
I used the phrase “turn of the millennium”. Sorry if old people thought I meant 1000 CE.
We didnt vote for Æthelred the Unready! Were an autononous collective.
I grew up when the internet was already a thing but I didn’t really get to use it until I was a teenager. We had a family computer with space cadet pinball on it, and as a small kid I didn’t know how to surf the web, I only knew how to play the games like solitaire. I knew you could connect your DS (It’s not a Gameboy, mum!) to the internet for online multiplayer, but it was too complicated to figure out without a grownup’s help. When I got a bit older, I got My own laptop for schoolwork and discovered the internet. I got hooked on webcomics and Reddit. I had a dumb phone for emergencies, which was later replaced with a smartphone on a prepaid plan, with too little data to use it for the internet. So I browsed the internet from the Ubuntu desktop I built at home. Eventually I got a monthly plan and joined the 21st century, but it was a long way getting there.
Technically I fall into your third group, but I don’t have anything in common with these kids.
I feel so powerful. I can develop in JavaScript, PHP and actionscript. All the hottest languages of the year 2000
I once wrote a game with hidden folders and txt files
I mean, both JavaScript and PHP are still widely used.
I’m pretty sure PHP has died 16 times since then
PHP is Michael Meyers
They keep trying, but they have yet to find a decent replacement
Modern PHP isn’t too bad though, especially with modern frameworks like Laravel. A lot of the bad parts of the language have been deprecated or removed over time.
A lot of the “PHP bad” crowd haven’t used it in 20 years.
I agree. I’ve only really used it for basic templating but things like twig made that a breeze
RIP Flash
Zoomers too
Dude, I’m an electrical engineer born in 02.
I’m an electrical engineer born in 02.
One one had, nice job dude.
On the other:
That’s not possible, you’d only be …
Oh.
Yep, the future is now, huh?
Get off my lawn.
No… I thnk your brain might be wrong.
Oh well, I dont respect Time, its an odeious concept.
*Oedipus
Pretty sure they did mean Odious, but to be fair Chronos did kill his dad….
dude, i was 1 year away from finishing high school when you were born. Holy shit I’m old.
The oldest zoomers are 29 rn
Wow, they’re almost people
Hm
Life begins at 30
…and ends at 35. It’s hardly fair.
The average gen-z person knows more about computers than the average millennial.
Lol. Lmao, even.
Are you sure you have “gen-z” correct? We’re all adults now
I spent 8 years doing tier 2 IT support with a tier 1 helpdesk staffed primarily by gen-z who were just entering the work force. Yes, I’m very sure.
Your generation fucking sucks at tech.
From experience, they mainly know how to navigate, not troubleshoot.
Also, bold statement. Millennials had to learn on computers that weren’t always user friendly. It didn’t always “just works.”
You’re talking about people that could be as young as 14. Do you really think a 14 year old knows what a filesystem is? What a CPU architecture is? Knows how to clone a project from GitHub and build it? Could they identify RAM slots on a motherboard? Could they install an OS? Do they know what a subnet is?
Then you run into the problem of generalizing about a wide spectrum of ages. I’m older genZ, and have experience with all of these things as part of hobby projects and my career. Obviously the iPad kids haven’t.
Boomers are reliably feeble with technology across their entire age spectrum. Gen Alpha has very few experienced enough because of their circumstances and age gap.
when i was that age (for the things that existed in your list), I did. I knew that stuff.
Yes…? I was 14 when I learned how filesystems worked in the mid 90, installing dos6.0, win3.1, and doom wads lol. I grew up in an analog world before that, there wasnt and internet I could fall back on for support, it was a ridiculously expensive appliance and if I broke it I had better figure out how to fix it again before my mother figured out I fucked something up.
A 14 year old today, I would imagine, would have grown up in a world filled with /bin and /var and /lib folders to explore (and break…)
They are like 4 tbf no?
Most definitions use 2011-2013 as starting range for Gen Alpha, so the older Gen Alpha kids are 13-15
hell, even zoomers cant tell the difference between windows and chromeos
There’s a push by younger boomers to change the name to “Jones” apparently.
Everyone just thought the same thing in response to that too.
Change the name of what to Jones?
Boomer. It’s a dumb as it sounds.
Honestly, I read about it a bit. I’m not entirely against it. My mom was born 61, and there was a pretty clear difference in her and her age peers than her older sisters, all 10+ years older than her. For instance, she was an avid progressive, as with most of the people her age she associated with, the older siblings (except her gay brother) are all trump supporters. I don’t know per se that that’s generational, exactly. But I could see wanting to distance yourself from certain aspects of boomers
I would think their best move would be to advocate for a split then.
So I was on the internet in 1995 and was visiting BBS’s for about 10 years before that so I’m good with computers. I feel for my parents and the young ones because I’m a basic when it comes to phones and tablets, if shit goes beyond touching what I want to do I’m full on lost
Gen alpha is six years old, they’ll get there
Most definitions use 2011-2013 as starting range for Gen Alpha, so the older Gen Alpha kids are 13-15
I don’t see why I have to agree with the mainstream opinion on generations when they don’t even exist. My brain craves simplicity, so I use this system:
1945-1959: Baby boomer
1960-1979: Generation X
1980-1999: Millenial 2000-2019: Zoomer 2020-2039: Generation Alpha2013 is a random year that makes no sense and takes actual effort to remember. I don’t want to put effort into generations because they’re nonsense horoscopes, so I’m gonna stick with the easy way.
nah some of them are already 10 years old
(I know 2 of them, that’s more than 1, my 16y.o. gen-z kid wishes to distance themselves from these “alpha babies” and so I am scientifically proven correct)
Isn’t that Gen Beta?
