I was right in the edge of Gen Z and Millennial and grew up being the family’s tech kid. It still astounds me now that my younger sisters don’t know how to even look for solutions. They just get me. Having moved out I get texts and calls sometimes. I’ve had to explain that using a computer is a skill that is learnable. I didn’t learn by going to someone else. I had to learn how to learn. That’s the skill we should be teaching kids. Not how to solve the problems, but how to FIND the solution to problems.
As someone also near the border between Gen Z and Millennial, I relate a lot to this comment. I was also the family tech kid, and since like middle school I’ve always told people “I’m not good with computers, I just know how to use a search engine”
My “computer literacy” is literally just basic research skills; knowing how to formulate a web search and how to identify bad sources.
Right! This is why I say it has more to do with being stubborn than being smart. If you’re determined to find a solution and you’re half decent at research and following instructions, you can figure a lot out, but people treat it like you invented the thing with some magical knowledge that they could never possess.
You’ve just articulated a feeling I’ve had most of my life, but couldn’t have described better.
Solving trivial problems for people they could easily do themselves if they just muddled through the work of it. Then act like I’m a genius, when it’s really just ‘stubbornness’ and refusing to admit i can’t figure it out.
Thanks for that.
On this subject, my personal definition for millennial is someone in the age bracket where they had to teach themselves how to use windows as a kid
Teach a child to fish, basically.
If we keep making it easy for them… Ask and I’ll give you all the answers… They’ll never learn.
My first response these days is, “What have you tried so far?” And, “What are you searching for in ‘Google’?”
The late 90s Gen Z/Millennial DMZ is a painful place to exist. Constant and mandatory tech support.
The ones that is blamed for the ills of society by both the baby boomers and younger gen zs
Yep. I was born 1998. To Millennials, I’m a tiny baby Gen Z, to Gen Zs, I may as well be a boomer. It’s odd.
Growing up poor confuses things even more, because I have more in common with people born late 80s/early 90s than with people born only a few years after me. My first game console was a SNES and we had a VCR until we got a PS2, and kept using it well after.
Growing up poor confuses things even more
Yeah this is why generations aren’t actually a good metric. I might as well be from another planet lol
Hah, are we the same person? My family was poor too. I’m a bit younger (born 2000) but I grew up using a VCR, and my first console was a GBA where I played a lot of SNES ports. The internet has existed my entire life, but I still remember before smartphones were a thing. It’s a really weird place to be socially. I don’t connect with Gen Z culture in almost any way, but I’m also distinctly not a millennial.
Interestingly my older sister (1998) who has zero interest in anything tech is actually pretty tech savvy for how little she cares about it. I think she crossed that threshold of learning how to learn, where even when she comes across something she doesn’t understand she knows how to approach the problem.
I’m also between gen Z and millennial and was the family’s tech kid and still get calls. Are you me? :D
Just yesterday I got a call asking how to select all images in a directory… And then another call about how to get those images to Google Drive, which is literally just drag and drop… And one of the people involved was my gen Z younger sister.
Man, I didn’t realize that article was written in 2013, it could’ve been written today, and it still would’ve been true. I think one of the biggest contributions to the tech illiteracy of people is, 1. Schools don’t really teach you about that kind of stuff (in my experience, or unless you take a special course) and 2. Everything is basically done for you now, its incredibly easy to do anything basic on computers.
So when the author says it’s the 30-50 year olds that know how to use computers, today it’s the 40-60 year olds. I’d say it goes older than that.
One thing that used to bug me on reddit was youngsters going on about how over-50s wouldn’t know how to use a computer. That hasn’t been the case for decades now.
Nobody knows how to use a computer. If you’re not in a tech field (and sometimes even if you are!), the vast majority of people are totally clueless with computers. Young, old, rich, poor, the truly unifying experience among all peoples is that they can’t understand this device they use every damn day.
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day.
I’m not in IT but I work as an industrial maintenance electrician, and knowing how computers work solves more problems than people realize!I’m pushing 50 and when people ask me how I know so much about computers, my first comment is that I had to program my first computer for it to do anything.
My second is that I actively sought to learn, and you can too.
Later in life Linux played a huge role in understanding how these contraptions work. Ironically, I’m a human factors engineer, so I’m also guilty of creating part of the problem. User interfaces that “just work”… Until they don’t.
I’m seeing this with my oldest niece and nephew. They’re okay with navigating their android tablets; but if you ask either them of troubleshoot a problem on the PC, they both just end up coming to me. Neither of them know how to research solutions either. Ugh.
They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel
Oh how poorly has this sentence aged in the last 10 years. There’s another nice article about this phenomenom of kids not understanding folder structure here.
Back in uni I was the smart guy whom everyone would ask for help, both with tech and non-tech issues:
“Hey nudny ekscentryk, my phone won’t connect to the campus WiFi”. Oh yeah that happens I said, you probably didn’t fill in the login credentials correctly. This was actually rather tricky, because it used your.student.ID@separate.uni.subdomain.edu for logging in and required changing the default password at least once since registering, for database reasons I guess. They tried it, didn’t work. Are you sure you know your password? No, they don’t. Let’s check in their password manager. They have an iPhone, which I haven’t used since I indefinitely switched to Android a couple years back. Took me 20 seconds to find the password manager in Settings though. The password is not there. “Oh you mean my university password? It’s in my notes”. We go to Notes app. There’s nothing here, do you use Evernote or something else entirely for that?. They use a fucking Google Docs document for notes. It’s not very handy is it? Like you have to zoom in to edit, it’s all clumsy because it’s a document and the text’s formatted weirdly. Not a problem to them, because “well at least it syncs so I can access it from my iPad.” Okay, whatever. It’s not like your built-in iOS password manager doesn’t sync. We managed to connect to the WiFi network. “could you also do that for the WiFi in the other building?”. But it’s the same network, it will connect automatically to either. They know better: “nah it can’t be, the range is too far”. I explain it’s not the same hotspot but the credentials are shared and in fact since it’s eduroam, a global network, it will work in pretty much any university campus in the world automatically. “wow that is crazy, will that also work for my iPad”. Well if you log in with the same credentials. “could you do it for me? i’ll fetch my iPad”. No, I’ve shown you how to do it, you can do it yourself now. They can’t use a computer.
A different time I was proofreading a classmate’s thesis, see quadruple x’s next to each heading. hey, what’s up with these? I ask her, she replies: “oh I put them here so I can easily find each heading when formatting text. If I make any changes I can just search for <xxxx>” and it will automatically let me go through all headings easily without scrolling manually :)". I open the Navigator (I use LO Writer) and it’s empty. She wrote an 80-page document without ever using Styles. All headings, title page etc. were formatted manually. I enable the Formatting Marks. Holy shit. She uses spaces and tabs to move text around. Loads of line breaks to move text to the next page. I could tell the document looks off but I never though this was due to so poor editing skills. Or rather lack thereof. You know you’re doing everything the hard way here?. “What do you mean?”. There are tools for all that you’ve done here. Like you can use Styles to mark headings and then edit them in bulk. You can add automatic numbering, which will later let you create an index within a second. To move next to the next page you can use page breaks. “Okay cool but this is how I do it”. Alright, then you are just giving yourself extra work, what’s the point of not doing this correctly once and then never bothering with formatting ever again?. “Could you do it for me?”. I can show you all these tools but I won’t be doing that for you, as I’m already proofreading your paper factually. “Okay whatever”. Guess what, she never bothered and when handing it the finished paper (probably around 120 pages), her instructor made her do it anyway. She asked me to help her with that. I said no, because I offered help before and she didn’t bother. After submitting the paper, the reviewer returned it and made her re-do all citations in an, at least, consecutive style. “Oh fuck that guy why would he give me so much work!? You know how many hours it took me to insert all these in here.”. It was around 280 citations total, out of 30 different pieces of writing. She obviously did all of them manually by typing out footnotes. You know there are bibliography managers which do it automatically in a consecutive style for you?. “Will it automatically fix what he asks?”. Well, no, because (again) you originally did it incorrectly. This one issue was even stranger for me than her not using styles for formatting: one year later we both attended a “methodology of scientific publishing” class, where they introduced us to Google Scholar, Zotero, Impact Factor and other stuff she could use now. We even had a take-home project to create a bibliography in Zotero and she did it (with online help). But she didn’t bother to retain it in her skillset, so when needing to actually apply that skill, she wasn’t even aware this was exactly what she learned a year earlier. Crazy; she can’t use a computer.
I love how everyone is acting like this is a new thing. People have never been able to use computers.
This article looks like it is seriously a decade or older at this point. The writer goes on about how phones can’t be upgraded or repaired and go obsolete in two years but also buys a macbook pro.
Much of the article is some boomer going on about how they had no computers and they know computers better than people who do have computers. But I bet you this guy doesn’t know how to make laundry detergent but they rely on it all the time. Bet you need manufactur-dad to the fucking rescue for you eh?
I feel like he addresses this quite well in the conclusion. In regards to cars, “this is not a new phenomenon” and admits to his reliance on salesmen and mechanics.
Ultimately, he’s asking that the people who make decisions about how our world is shaped have some knowledge about the things that are going to shape the world. And that essential issue is still unaddressed. Remind me, how many years ago was it that US Congress was asking Google why the bad articles show up when you search their name?
Oh, and our car-centric society in the US largely sucks. That may or may not have anything to do with our general understanding of a motor, but maybe it’s worth considering how much thought has really gone into the implications of these massively affecting technologies.
- Dump on
tl;drs - Subject your readers to a minimally-edited 4000 word rant
You get to pick one.
The people who are them problem aren’t the intended audience. The intended audience are people who are in positions to direct youth education programs.
- Dump on
Website: coding2learn
http site only
Lmao
I am 28 and i have always thought that the as long as you know how to operate a search engine you can find out what you need. The reason computer people know computers better than you do is because computer people can use a search engine better than you
I learned how to use computer since i was 5 years old, mostly through video games, then by playing with the Microsoft office, i’m 25 now going computer engineering, and i’m teaching my dad how to use a computer lol
Good thing search engines are optimized for advertising instead of utility!
I use searx and DNS level adblocking. Online ads are almost a completely foreign concept for me as 99.9% of the time they just never even load.
I remember when Google used to be perfectly functional as long as you knew the right search tools. Now it thinks it knows what I’m searching for better than I do, and that almost always means pointing me towards something someone paid for lol
she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with
Reeks of “incel” attitude.
The entire thing reads like an edge-lord self aggrandizing. If they were an english lit nerd instead of a computer nerd I’d bet they’d write fan fiction about themselves being a god.
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “nom nom”. This blog post is not for you.
Well played Blogger. Well played.
The Ubuntu Touch reference was a real throwback…
I don’t care if most people are clueless around computers, it makes me feel smart.
I was a “Nintendo Switch Engineer” for figuring out over the phone that the AC adapter wasn’t plugged in, which is why the TV wasn’t displaying from the dock to the screen.
🤓🤓
This is some “I am very smart and sexy” cringe.