this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Not a very enlightened take. As @[email protected] correctly put it, tech savviness is the property of an individual and not of a generation. There are non-savvy Zoomers, just as there are non-savvy people from your generation.
Of course, but the percentage of capable zoomers who are actually tech savvy is much smaller than millenials, for the reasons already stated.
Just the other day I witnessed a zoomer grad student who didn't know how to use a file explorer on his new windows laptop because he had grown up with an iPad and iPhone.
People are saying it’s an individual issue but I will say that kids who grew up on iPads and iPhones definitely are less tech literate when it comes to using PCs. Utilizing file explorer or even a command line (gasp) is completely out of their comfort zone.
If something doesn’t work like it should, they generally call tech support to figure it out rather than Google and solve it themselves.
This is generally. I taught fifth grade math and science for five years and the lack of a true computer resource class has really hurt kids. I had to spend 4-5 weeks each year teaching 10-11 year olds how to use computers. What copy and paste is, how to sign on to programs, how to attach a document, how to navigate a web portal, how to type on a keyboard, how to navigate Google slides/powerpoint or Google docs/word, etc because before fifth grade they had iPads instead of Chromebooks. Out of the 40-50 students I’d have each year, maybe 2 would know how to do even three of these things.
Most didn’t even know how to sign on because they were able to use faceid or use a QR code to sign in before fifth grade.
For Boomers, cars was the latest tech that everyone was fiddling with. This caused even the boomer that wasn't very interested , to know quite a lot. For later generations, car became more of a means of transportation, and the knowledge of cars was only for specialists. For gen X, computers were the high tech thing, everyone was fiddling with. Most gen x can setup a printer if they have to. For later generations, computers are just tools, and the knowledge is only for specialists.
Video games and getting them to run on computers taught me most of what I know about them via "fiddling," so this checks out for this Xer.
installing minecraft mods are what got me to where I am today, I approach tech stuff with a "I'll learn how to do this" (fiddling) rather than a "oh i'll just call the PC guy" that my mom would do.
80s millennial here and same. Getting games to run was so much work back in the 90s that I learned about computers. I think I got my first IT job because I was able to install and setup Word.
The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.
That is, the total number of "tech-savvy" users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of "non-tech-savvy" computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)
You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80's or 90's that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that's because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.
Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you'll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.
A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you're a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you're a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19
Some day we may have little boxes like in "Diamond Age". Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they'll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.