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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
Joking aside I do actually worry about how superficial technical knowledge is becoming.
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.
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.
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
Oh it’s well fucked already.
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.
People these days couldnt even manually resolve an IRQ conflict!
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.
Hey, if only we could blame the generation in charge of raising Alpha and making sure they knew how to tech?
Fuck. Us? Really?
my mom made sure that we learned how to type effectively, and goddamn was she ever right about that. it amazes me how many people cannot type quickly on a keyboard.
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
Gen alpha grew up using tablets/smartphones pretty early, while they may not have had access to a PC. Seems like a failure of the educational system. Boomers just refuse to learn new shit.
My kid has “tech class”, where I (wrongly) assumed they would learn about computers and the internet, how they work and how to use them. Nope, they just learned how to use Microsoft Teams.
Learning new shit gets genuinely harder as you age. With how fast technology changes, I don’t think you can really blame them for it.
I’d like to think I’d keep up with technology in my old age, but who knows. I’m not even old and I’m already so damn jaded.
Trends are cyclical
Whelp, looks like PCs will become a thing of the past at this rate, no use denying it
Already there. Ask any major website what their user agent stats are. Amazon is something like 90% mobile. I can’t even fathom doing any serious shopping via app.
Millennials helped tech destroy the personal computer and computer literacy because they insisted on flocking to these stupid iphones and shiny apps instead of doing anything real and with their own ability.
Gen alpha is six years old, they’ll get there
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)
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.
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
Watching them use the card catalog.
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!
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?
those teens obviously were forced into consumerism by their parents and corpos
*schools and corpos
I know a teenager whose parents stopped her from using FOSS and getting Linux on her own computer because it was “impulsive and would mess things up”
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.
the clusterfuck that is Apple’s file storage
Out of genuine curiosity: What makes this so bad? I’ve been in similar teaching situations myself, and find that Finder in column-view is pretty helpful for helping people learn to navigate their file system. One of the first things I do is drop a link to the root folder in their favourites-menu in Finder, then tell them to try to navigate to whatever they need from there, and open it with “Open with”. Usually, they start understanding the concept of a file system pretty quickly after that.
Edit: The fuckery that is “iCloud trying to trick you into thinking that files on the cloud are actually stored locally” can go fuck itself though. I’ve had way too many cases of people suddenly discovering that they have exactly zero files on their computer, because “Desktop” and “Documents” turned out to be links to iCloud…
Yeah, it’s the iCloud-local issue. I swear, almost all of them default to that.
It plays fine with R 90% of the time, but when it borks it takes FOREVER to troubleshoot!
they point at excel and say the file is in excel.
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.
See I don’t entirely blame young people here. I downloaded a linux distro from their torrent mirror last year and my ISP started emailing me literal threats about piracy laws. It’s the corporations.
(Tho I am pretty young myself for lemmy standards tbf)
this is just an accurate fact
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.
