this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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The millennials are in the absolute worst position tech literacy wise. They had the boomers on one end and the zoomers on the other.
Makes me glad I'm a millennial and had to deal with the times when technology wasn't so "nice" to you. When Windows would let you delete system32 with less hoops, random websites could drive-by malware into your machine, and you could tangibly customize your OS to look completely different.
Late 90s/early 00s computing really gave opportunities to get good at understanding what your computer did, scrutinize when downloading random programs, and made you think about what you were clicking on a little bit if you didn't want to get a virus.
My niece struggled with using a mouse when she was in middle school -- her experience with UI was exclusively touch screens prior to that.
The verge had an interesting article on this phenomenon
I'll add "it's not their fault". In the race to make technology intuitive and idiot proof we've removed the need to actually learn how technology works past a superficial level.
Very interesting! It’s something I just cannot fathom as a 20-something year old. Granted, I’m a software engineer, but I’m very much like the professors in the article. It’s just so intuitive to me.
Yup the first person i thought of when seeing this meme is my apprentice, he is 19 and has only ever had an iPhone and cheap Chromebook. Even at school and everyone he knows is the same. We work in controls and all the technician side programs are all interfaces straight out of the 90s, I let him use my laptop the one day and he can barely use the menus, cant use any office program, had no idea what an IP address is and if the default com port doesn't work there is no way he was going to end up at the device manager page. Not that most people wouldn't have a bit of a learning curve.
Its the "apps" and web-apps its just one more layer of abstraction to turn your computer from a tool into an appliance.
He'll be fine eventually, he's going to buy himself a real laptop and start playing with it he said and there's the internet to learn anything he could need eventually. (Well not always where we work but hell manage). But I'd have almost the same difficulty teaching a young man who'd never seen a computer before as I would him.
It's like how the generations before us knew how to fix cars better than more millennials. They learned because they had to, because their cars needed more maintenance than modern cars. Meanwhile, millennials had computers that needed more maintenance than modern computers, so that's what we learned.