I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
The average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less. The era of growing up with a home computer that required fiddling and dial up, etc is over. People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.
And for that reason alone I built a Linux PC for my 11 year old and told him to go to town figuring things out. (I supervise everything of course). Dude has been doing fantastic so far.
If he doesn’t solve problems with chmod 777 then he’s already more competent than the ops teams at my fortune 500 company
Oh, but you gotta drop a chmod nuke at least once to feel the terror having done something irreversible. As a bonus, you’ll also gain a brand new appreciation for snapshots.
sudo chmod 000 /for securityAnd it’s also so much faster than full disk encryption. Cool little trick the admins don’t want you to know.
Cool. I’m old enough that in middle school I begged my Mom to take to the mall to buy Linux. I got a Red Hat Linux CD-ROM pack from a store called Babbage’s. I couldn’t download the ISO on our modem and I don’t remember if we even had a burner at that point.
I used to love going to Babbage’s in the mall. So many King’s Quest boxes….
King’s Quest
Damn, that’s a good hit of nostalgia!
Hate to say it, but that technical literacy from having to operate computers the difficult way was a small blip in history. So things are just kind of going back to “normal.”
Now, the only real natural entry into “computing” is gaming. Pretty much everything else has to come through formal education, which is largely myopic and boring.
Don’t think I’ve even worked with a gen Z engineer yet. I assume they exist.
I have worked with a few gen z interns/fresh grads, and some younger millennials (I am a 1990 kid) and its interesting… Some of them have been very successful at passing the tests but have no mechanical aptitude at all. Some have been technically literate on first glance, then proven to be just confidently incorrect. In general though, it seems they just didn’t grow up being interested in how things worked like I did. It could be isolated to my small sample size or it could be a general trend. They also don’t seem to make connections across disciplines as easily either but again, that could just be a time in service thing at this point and not a generational trait.
I have not been super impressed with the new ones we get when we get them, some of them have been quick learners though and have impressed me with their adaptability. I am a huge proponent of proper mentorships or rotational programs and that is something that seems to get overlooked with younger grads in my experience.
One thing that really annoys me though, is that when prompted with something they don’t know, they will spit out some randome bullshit rather than say they don’t know. Saying I don’t know is a completly acceptable answer as long as it is followed up with “but I will find out” or “can you help/explain it”. Falling back to a first principle approach and talking through it is also valid but just making up some shit doesnt fly with me.
is that when prompted with something they don’t know, they will spit out some randome bullshit rather than say they don’t know
This is just the majority of people, not specific to any generation. Our minds are predisposed to use inductive reasoning to explain the world around us. We see something new and our brain immediately begins to make inferences based on prior information we believe we know (I say it this way cause our memories are incredibly faulty) that we think is relevant or comparable.
It’s essentially the Dunning Kruger effect: we think we know more than we do and, because of this, believe we can simply assume correctly about other things we know nothing about.
It’s an incredibly bad habit that is supposed to be trained out of us through our education systems but we all know how incredibly faulty those systems are.
The education system as I lived through it in Texas was actively hostile to saying you didn’t know, it was treated as being worse than being wrong or guessing. You can tell by the results allllllll around us.
Back to what, exactly? At what point in the past was it easier to use a computer than it was in the late 90s? Unless you’re talking about before computers, which doesn’t really have any bearing on what’s being discussed.
I grew up starting my computer use having to navigate DOS just before windows 3.11 was released. I work in tech today and I feel like just knowing about a lot of the automated things we take for granted today has given me a little bit of an edge.
I had to walk to school in the snow ten miles, both ways uphill!
at least you had shoes
You guys have feet?!
Lt Dan?
You mustn’t have been paying attention, Lt Dan ain’t got no legs, that doesn’t preclude him from having feet
The Rayman body type
you dont levitate, or teleport.
I’m extremely young, I don’t know how shit works, like at all. Because stuff works pretty well nowadays. Cannot imagine not knowing how to use a mouse. It could not be simpler imo. Can’t remember a time that I didn’t know lol
i also notice they fall for the simplest scams too online,
So a friend of mine went to a convention to show off his gaming project. The kids there were trying to touch the monitors to play the game. They didn’t grab the keyboard and mouse. They didn’t touch the controller. They touched the monitor. People’s framework of what a computer is and what it’s made of is completely different than what it use to be
Reminds me of my senior teaching days 15 years ago. Solitaire, same.exe and saddam.exe and whack.exe soon had those oldies clicking, double clicking and dragging.
Didn’t think then that the situation could reverse.
Same still exists on Android and is still a brain twister.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kubilayerdogan.samegamel
Even when I was like 4, I would’ve gone for the controller. I knew how to use it from Lego Star Wars. I knew how to use a keyboard, but I didn’t play on pc, so I’d have had to have been told the controls.
Exactly. Exposure to technology does not make you tech literate. Tech literate typically means engaged with new technologies.
For instance, people were using phones, fax machines, calculators, watches, etc when dial up came out. Those users were not considered tech literate.
The same happens today, an iPhone or Android user is not tech literate by default anymore.
Why there now exists “iPad Kid”.
That a friend I know of has a lot of his kids entirely on smartphones, while their family PC is hidden behind cobwebs and dust; if they want a document printed they just go out to some print shop.
if they want a document printed they just go out to some print shop.
In fairness, it can be expensive to stock the holy water necessary to fend off the demons that inhabit all printers.
Soon the era of hosting own VPN and tricking AI will start
Imagine studying at uni for years to become a programmer, only to be replaced by a vibe coder with an iPhone.
But remember, hard work always pays off!We all imagine that, is has yet to happen. Vibe coders can produce the spaghetti code of upwards of 10 unpaid interns! What value!
Ehhh maybe true for the US where they had a solid early tech industry and then made some questionable decisions. I feel like in the rest of the world progress is steady but forwards. Generally young stem university students where I live have all done a programming unit and a technology unit and each year more is added to curriculums whereas older generations might not have been given quite such an extensive education.
Also tech literacy = using a mouse is peak uppity midlife techy person. Get the fuck outta here there are more trans women and femboys wearing thigh highs and running arch off of think pads then there ever were of y’all older tech elitists back in the day.
Thafuq?
One time I said “Hey this TUI program works perfect on every single distribution and even BSDs, takes no performance issues ever, and just overall good program. I wanna check contributors on github.”
It was all either anime or trans flag pfps.
Yea, young STEM university students are obviously going to be more technologically literate than their counter parts. That isn’t a new thing and was true for the older generations too.
What questionable decisions are you talking about that the US made that you’re insinuating set them back compared to the rest of the world? The US does have more tech classes now than when I was in school in the early 2000’s. The problem is a vast majority of these kids coming up don’t know how to use computers effectively. It’s not just “using a mouse” that makes someone tech literate. Knowing how to navigate a mobile device, which is designed for ease of use to accommodate even the dumbest people, does not make someone tech literate. Some are power users, but most have nothing more than a surface level knowledge of how to use it. There’s little to no troubleshooting skills.
All of those mobile devices are programmed by actual tech literate people that understand coding, the network stack, security, and the general inner workings of how computers work. This generation coming out now doesn’t know any of that because they never use computers.
And lastly, holy fuck what’s wrong with you? Jesus fucking Christ you just came out shooting in that second half. The person you replied to made a valid, factual point, and you apparently took that as a personal attack. What the fuck do trans people have to do with this? What a fucked up transition to make and shit to take. You need help, dude.
The person I replied to said the “average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate” and his source is “kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.” Yet in the same sentence acknowledges “People grow up with phones and iPads.”
Yeah wow, kids don’t know how to use a mouse because they’ve never used one before. Truly society is regressing. Kids get taught how to use scissors. It’s just juvenoia.
Young people are more interested in technology then ever before. There are more people with computers, more people using computers daily and longer collective hours spent digitally then ever before.
But yeah tech literacy is down guys trust. these kids can’t even troubleshoot a fax machine. Just read the multiple studies that prove my point that I haven’t linked but I’ve definitely read guys trust.
Not knowing how to use a mouse is hyperbole for not knowing how to use a computer, but also, if you can’t use a mouse, you can’t use a workstation computer. Knowing how to navigate a mobile device does not make someone tech literate. In general it stunts computer skills, because there’s minimal tech knowledge required to download an app from a curated store or watching tik tok.
You’re proving our point in the second paragraph. Yea, kids aren’t being taught computer skills. Not knowing the fundamentals of how to use a workstation is a problem and it is causing a regression in technological literacy in society.
Young people tend to be more interested in phone and tablets than ever before. Some for sure are into workstations, but that is not the norm. Id argue less kids percentage wise are spending time on computers daily than 15-20 years ago. Everything is done on iPads or phones in schools, until college. Even if you didn’t want to, back in the day you had to know how to navigate a complex operating system, save files to removable storage, download files and install them, and a plethora of other seemingly simple skills, and that’s not happening now.
If you work in IT or around youth entering the workforce, it’s extremely clear that tech literacy is worse now than it was a decade ago, or at least it is as a millennial that bridged that gap and can clearly see the difference. I can see if someone is younger than millennials why they wouldn’t be able to see that difference, because they are in that demographic.
It would take 5 seconds to do a Google search for millennials and technology and find a couple studies on the topic. It isn’t some secret that’s being hidden and it’s easily accessible. Perhaps your inability to find these studies is the proof that tech literacy has degraded.
Phones and tablets are computers. Being able to use one is a form of tech literacy just as how knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard is a form of tech literacy. Bro it’s your argument, if you’re adamant the sources exist to support it that’s on you to provide it otherwise the person reading your writing will be unable to find specifically what you are referring to. I mean you are referring to something you specifically have read right? You wouldn’t make something up based on vibes right? All this talk about being tech literate and you’re not doing the basic literary work of source citation.
That wasn’t my argument, that was someone else. I’m just shitting on your response to them instead of doing the bare amount of research.
My whole point is, kids are coming out with less computer knowledge as a whole. Maybe they know more on mobile devices than older generations, but I’d argue that’s not even true compared to millennials who were also in the prime of smart phones and tablets hitting the market. The difference is millennials also know how to use workstations, making them more tech literate. Having skills on just mobile devices is very sandboxed and remedial. It’s not noteworthy in the slightest. Being able to work with a desktop OS, understanding a file system, and troubleshooting are tech skills that you get generations don’t have, making them less tech literate.
“That wasn’t my argument, that was someone else”
“If you work in IT or around youth entering the workforce, it’s extremely clear that tech literacy is worse now than it was a decade ago”
Yeah but it ain’t my argument guys I only said it and made a case for it. Come on man, just show the sources. I mean it’s really clear right so all those studies will unambiguously show it. And they’re right there in Google so it wouldn’t even be difficult to find them wouldn’t it.
The average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less.
There’s simply no evidence of this
What’s more, the prevalence of cheap, accessible technologies is having a host of knock-on effects. Case in point:
People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.
Feels like I’m listening to the Boomer complaining about kids today not knowing how to use a manual transmission.
Feels like I’m listening to the Boomer complaining about kids today not knowing how to use a manual transmission.
There have been some articles regarding beginning CS classes bring required to include teaching concepts like folder structures because a sizeable part of class was list on this concept.
To use your transmission analogy, it would be like truck driving schools now need to how to drive a manual transmission vehicle, which adds to the length of the class. Or all the company vehicles are manual and now the company has to deal with hiring new drivers who don’t know how to drive stick but will say they know how to drive.
LMFAO, bruh, your categories are 18-29, and 65+.
Your Source literally entirely skips over the age group we’re talking about. You’re not proving strong literacy skills of any kind atm.
And writing skills are literally entirely different from understanding how a computer works and how to trouble shoot it. Can you name what activity Gen z is doing that’s equivalent to texting that is teaching them how to trouble shoot computers that’s different then the way millenials learned?
I wouldn’t say that data is definitive proof. The table is missing ages from 30-under 65 from the table (at least if you’re not logged in, if there is a more complete table please share). Also not sure how good some of the questions are for determining tech literacy. Knowing that Elon Musk ran both Tesla and Twitter in April 2023 is more if you keep up with the news rather than knowing how to work a computer. Other ones are good like being able to identify 2FA or knowing what LLM/AI is capable of.
My wife is a teacher. Kids come to school without the ability to use keyboard and mouse which was not the case in the 90s. I also only drive manual :P
Bullshit, I went to school in the 90s, and half my class had never seen a computer before. I’m surprised you don’t remember how many kids struggled with Mavis Beacon.
It’s always different when it’s your generation. The fact that “keyboard class” was stuffed with Millennials in Freshman year of high school isn’t an indictment of kids’ keyboarding skills.
Only the Gen Z/A cohort has problems.
Something that amazes me that I often see is tech literate people wastly over estimating the tech literacy of an average person. Any amount of tech support would tell you that most people barley know the basics and doesn’t care for anything else.
Relevant xkcd:
It’s easy to forget the average person probably only knows terminal commands for Debian. And Fedora, of course.
They may not know all the commands, so we’ll just tell them
man manand they’ll be able to bootstrap from there
I know people who claim to be tech literate but then keep sending me actual photos of their screen whenever they want to share anything. :|
Admittedly, I do almost all of my messaging from my phone, and 100% of Lemmy. Most of the time if I have something on my computer to share, it’s easiest to just take a picture. If fidelity matters, I can take a screen grab and share it to my phone via KDE connect. It’s not a matter of knowing how, it’s the effort required for a slightly clearer image.
When something goes wrong the average response is some amount of confusion and anger with rapid clicking
The curse of knowledge; makes you lose the perspective of the average man in the field of your expertise.
Linux is second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just Ubuntu or Fedora.
And Debian GNU/Linux, of course.
Wait is this already in reference to the xkcd about experts overestimating the average person’s knowledge about their subject or should I go look for it?
It absolutely sounds like a reference to the xkcd.
This should be a copypasta.
Webcomics are second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just ADHDinos and Loving Reaper.
And xkcd, of course.
Of course.
The average person can’t even download the right authenticator app when prompted. The average person can’t type their password the same way two times in a password change field. The average person does not know how to plug monitors and peripherals into a docking station.
Whatever you think the average skill level is? It’s lower than that. By a lot.
I work electronics in walmart and you would be shocked at the questions I get on things like laptops from collage age kids. A very frequent one is ‘if it isn’t touchscreen then how do you work it’. One of my favorite ever was a girl who went down the line asking can you type on them because i need to be able to type. Every time I told her you can type on all laptops but she just kept asking.
I know a huge part of it is some kind of ‘location bias’ because the kids who know something about computers are shopping online or at microcenter or something.
We’re also two generations into those trained to use tablets and phones over all. Locked down, locked out, one USB port and that’s for charging
Once upon a time I worked for a company where I would be called with requests like “I can’t work because my computer is broken”. I would go and ask “Where is your computer” and the employee would point to her monitor. I would then press the power button on the monitor and they looked at me like I was a magician. I would point to the actually PC under the desk and say “btw THIS is your computer” and they would stare with confusion and disbelief.
Ha! That’s funny because I have a department here with some real… Non thinkers who do the same stuff. They’ll come in, one monitor doesn’t come on. Normal computer stuff. Especially with docking stations. I power cycle the monitor and it comes right on. They swear they did that and that I must just have the magic touch. I even ask them before I walk over whether theyve done that and they are adamant that they did.
I just dont get it. Surely my value in this world is not limited to making sure people get the right authenticator app and pressing monitor power buttons. Smdh.
You are completely correct and their comments prove it. The bubble is strong here. But it’s a pretty nice bubble
Very proud of all the special little techies in this thread who are definitely smart and different because they grew up troubleshooting a fax machine and not a touch screen display like the younguns of today.
“God damnit!” Kicks and punches machine out of frustration
-machine starts working
“You fucking right, better run correct, or there’s more where that came from, bitch!”
Walks off like a gangster
As they’re walking away they mutter under their breath
“Nobody born after 2000 could do that”
At least we could get the fax machine to do things. The touch screen is so many layers of abstraction away from any raw functionality it’s like the pull string on a See and Say.
Yeah it’s impossible to send a PDF over email from an iPhone. Never been done before. In theory it’s possible, but some computer scientists think it may never happen as tech literacy plummets and children can barely describe the best Linux distro before the age of 3 nowadays
It’s impossible to figure out where your PDF downloaded on Android. And then if I miraculously DO find it, whoops - my reader crashed because it doesn’t have permissions to read from that folder. All modern mobile OS tech is a disaster.
-search bar
-“files”
-downloads
“Impossible”
The search bar is an absolute disaster that not only searches your phone, it also sends your search to Google, and if you have, like me, a 128 Gb microSD card, it’s also going to SLOWLY search through the unindexed million files on THERE, chugging along and MAYBE finishing in 2 or 3 minutes.
“files” is an unnavigatable crapshoot, offering “suggested” recent files that didn’t populate because the last 10 most recent files didn’t even get picked up by the scanning service yet, reordering any list of files bigger than 10 things takes FOREVER, half the directories are aliased in 12 places so you’re navigating a loop, and even if you FIND the file there’s no guarantee you can OPEN it because the directory might be protected.
Downloads is a complete freaking mess. If you have a flash card, your stupid Android phone will duplicate all the user directories on it and half your apps will download to the card and the other half to your system memory, and Google’s useless scanning service that’s supposed to keep track of recent downloads goes off on magical adventures for hours at a time so you can locate your downloaded file TOMORROW if it gets around to it.
You’re right… The fact that I can fight with the stupid thing for 20 minutes to get to my file doesn’t mean it’s literally “impossible”. It just means it’s broken, barely usable crap that I refuse to tolerate because I like products that WORK.
Not me. I am so out of the loop here. But I loved the social aspect of reddit and was on it long enough to know how great it was when it was young. Hoping to find that here.
Honestly, Lemmy does have a lot of the early Reddit vibes. Reddit was largely started as a programming forum, and this user base definitely has a lot of similar traits.
And if you start using user tags, (not native to Lemmy, but most clients have the functionality added,) you’ll realize just how active users are, and how tight-knit the comments sections really are. I often end up finding myself responding to the same 10-20 users.
You’re now tagged as “user tag advocate”. See you around!
NGL, a lot of my relative tech literacy comes from just seeing all the programming posts too and getting curios.
Just the other day i learned that there is so called “snowflakes” that apprently work as a way to enter the tor network by pretending to be a video call. Crazy cool stuff some people come up with.
Why would normal people know how to boot from usb? Shit, if you clean the ads out of a windows start menu, a normie will think you’re a wizard for doing the inconceivable.
my experience is that normal people just accept it when faced with an inconvenience (such as ads), rather than think about ways to change it.
From my experience most people just don’t know that it CAN be changed. They assume that there’s nothing to do about it, or that if there is you need to be a tech wizard to understand how. They know that they don’t understand how their computer/browser/phone/whatever works so they assume that even if there was a way it would be too complicated for them to even try. They don’t care to understand how it works, and that’s fine. I also don’t care how my microwave works as long as it does work when I need it to. There’s not enough time or mental energy to learn everything. But when you show them that all it takes is going to a website, typing “ublock” in the search bar and clicking a big button, then it goes from “probably rocket science” to “hey I could actually do this!”.
like the early internet the tech gap was a natural filter and i see that as a good thing for the quality of the conversation.
It seems like a lot of people almost delight in their tech illiteracy. And the big corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.
Caught my teenage cousins bragging about how they can “make a video game without any coding”. It was this shitty iPad app I’d never heard of.
*with strong beliefs on random topics
How has nobody posted the geology XKCD yet?
makes sense, since Linux users (me) are drawn to foss projects like moths to a light
I can’t do any of the stuff you mentioned. I’m here because I hate traditional social media that are not social at all. And I hate ads. And have an interest in community driven stuff and DIY.
And I don’t feel like I am alone here.
Dw it’s easy just type
sudo computer open the pornography file
And that’s how you command line navigate
I’m with you, I can’t do any of that stuff. I don’t like most social media , the lack of ads and the 3rd party apps was a big factor for me to join.
Don’t worry, my fair tech-literate maiden. I, a tech-dyslexic, am here to bring down the collective IQ and make the chamber echo less. You can thank me later, for adding some much needed intellectual diversity to the mix.
in a simplified phrase, fediverse is the linux of social media. I’m not saying this is good or bad.
