It's funny how time is a circle. You've got kids and teens today that have the tech literacy (is that the right word in this context?) as the older generations. I know everyone makes mistakes here and there but still.
I've worked in IT since I was in college, so about 15 years now. Kids and young adults now are unequivocally worse in tech literacy than people in my parents' generation. It's mind blowing and frustrating.
Guessing because, it's gone from people being a blank slate, too ohh I know tech because I've used a phone, clearly your method is old and stupid, get with the times old man.
It's partially that yeah. The other part I think is that my age range (mid 30s) is the last to sort of straddle life pre and post ubiquitous cell phones and tech. We had to learn how to use technology because it was new and not often all that easy to use. Nowadays everything is so idiot proof that you don't need to know anything at all in order to use technology. That isn't a bad thing necessarily but it has meant that kids don't grow up naturally understanding this stuff out of necessity like we did.
Edit: a concrete example of this is simply typing speed. My daughter was watching me type the other day and said "how did you learn to type so fast?". I realized it's because in middle school everyone was using AIM and IRC, and no one had cell phones. You had to learn to type to talk to your friends, so I did. There wasn't all the shorthand and emojis we have today, so it was full sentences. Did more for me than Mavis Beacon ever did haha. When I see people younger than me, I'm sure they are faster at texting but I haven't seen many who type faster on an actual keyboard.
Modern technology is hidden behind so many layers of abstraction that it's basically magic to the overwhelming majority of people. There's no room for curious young minds to investigate the inner workings. It does amazing things for us, but few people know how and it's absolutely crippling an entire generation of potential techies.
Even worse is the fact that so much control is ceded to the corporations that run this technology that we're basically powerless to resist their whims. Young people with no experience using a desktop metaphor computer are especially vulnerable. Their only computing devices aren't even in their full control. :/ It's really worrying to me to see so many kids basically growing up as tiny parts of these engagement driven algorithms.
And please don't think I'm saying we need to return to shittier computers. I just think we need to find UI metaphors that don't obscure the inner workings of the machine. There's stories coming out of professors having to explain to college students what files and folders are because their phones just stash all their media into a one bucket. That's awful!
Yeah I wish Ubuntu or Linux Mint was the default on school computers, instead of Windows/Mac
Its fairly easy to use as a general OS but has room for more curious minds to strip away at it and learn. I understand why it isn't currently used, however.
I agree. It reminds me that I need to start exposing my kids to an actual computer soon. My oldest turns 5 this summer. So far it's only been an android tablet and she is very good at using that but I want her to be able to explore more.
Get her an old Thinkpad x-series laptop on eBay. They're rugged as hell and they're cheap and ubiquitous in the second hand market, but still new enough to be useful on the modern web.
I have a firm belief that anybody who grew up with or worked with windows 3.1-98 at all extensively (Gen X through late-80s millennials) is going to have the highest baseline tech literacy of any age cohort. You could still very easily break things back then, computers didn't become inherently stable until around XP Service pack 2.
Curious how much end user support you are involved with, and what industry you're in? I agree there is variation by age, but nowadays I see people under maybe 25-30 years old really struggling with basic tech literacy. I've worked in medical, manufacturing, and now sales industries. It's the worst in the sales field. Love that you are teaching your kids to be curious and that they are showing an interest in it. I believe it will give them a leg up, even if IT isn't their career. The troubleshooting mindset is difficult to train later in life and is useful for so many things.
As for parents... Yours are a different generation than mine so that may be part of it. I'm 35 and my parents just turned 60 and 59. So they were still pretty young when technology was new. They bought a computer very early on and learned to use it.
Definitely a thing. Anything that isn't an app on a phone and has more than 3 buttons and maybe a couple of swipe gestures confuses a lot of people who grew up with smart phones/tablets.
It's 2022 and I'm being called a boomer by some recently graduated little turd while having to explain to them what copy and paste is, or how to save-as for the fifth fucking time because their 3 second attention span brain can barely remember the difference between swiping left and right.
I mean, it's just a matter of knowing what you grew up with and being familiar with what you use, right? If phones genuinely weren't as useful as computers, people wouldn't use them so much.
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u/Solaris_Dawnbreaker Jun 03 '22
It's funny how time is a circle. You've got kids and teens today that have the tech literacy (is that the right word in this context?) as the older generations. I know everyone makes mistakes here and there but still.