My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife is a teacher and often amazes her kids (age 15-18) by doing “ctrl+f”. So jepp, they have only surface level knowledge of the tools they are using.
I’m a teacher too and it shocks me. Even kids who are successful in school struggle to use a file system — usually just dumping everything into google drive and “searching it up” when they need it. I almost never see a kid directly type a url (let alone know what a url is) since they google everything.
I’ve even had this interaction:
“Why are you googling everything?” “I’m not googling this is safari, I have an iPhone”
In a lot of ways I think they’re worse than boomers. At least they’re good at making tik tok videos!
Yeah, there are plenty of people in my generation who grew up with computers, have watched phones evolve geom nokia 3210s to iphons all manner of magic folding phones etc who still do t know how to switch a comouter on or even use their phone outside of swiping through social media and even then its really basic knowledge.
It doesnt matter what generation you are. Its all about what interests you.
There are “boomers” in my work how can run rings around everyone when using certain applications or tech because thsts what they do every day.
The idea that age or generation affects your tech savvyness is just a fallacy
I disagree. I don’t think it’s age specifically, but rather your date of birth if that makes sense. It’s not that once you reach a certain age you are incapable of understanding something new. Millennials are good with technology because we grew up in a time where the internet was blooming and it made sense to adopt it into our lives. A lot of what we learned with regards to how the world works was through technology. Boomers already had a life that worked fine before the internet and had good reason to reject it. Now that technology is at the heart of everything they are decades behind millennials in their learning curve.
Obviously there are boomers who are tech wizards (and many whom we owe for how technology has shaped us for good or for bad) and there are millennials who suck at it. But to deny that there is no trend is ignorant.
I wouldn’t deny the trend, but it’s equally ignorant to make assumptions regarding the reason for the trend. You make some good points, but correlation is not causation.
To be honest, i was with you until you threw in what felt like a needlessly insulting dig abount ignorance when you haven’t exactly provided any evidence. Only theroies presented as fact.
Sorry - I didn’t mean to be insulting with the word ignorant. I meant it literally, not pejoratively. That is, in order to believe that there is no trend of boomers having less digital literacy than millennials, you have to ignore the facts that not only present themselves in obvious and ubiquitous anecdotes, but also have been well studied and published.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattklein/2021/05/03/why-baby-boomers-need-digital-literacy-to-defend-themselves-against-the-retirement-crisis/
https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1500&context=etd
At least boomers know how to fix stuff around the house using tools. They are just useless at fixing computers.
I will admit to that. I have to call someone for anything more complicated than smacking it with a hammer or re tightening a screw.
Although at least I know if I wanted to, I could learn. Some older people will ask you for help doing the exact same thing, even without a difference in context or method, over and over again, like they’re incapable of learning. And I get that certain concepts are harder to grock as a whole, but they had to repeatedly ask how to save anything, when back then it was always just clicking a save icon, real simple.
Now if they were saving a new file I can understand the confusion over having to name the file and understanding where it’s placed. That’s a separate skill to learn. And even then they’ll learn how to make it do what they want, but then be totally clueless when doing anything different. Like they might understand that working on a different document, that might be in a totally different location, I can understand confusion at first as they get used to the difference and how to fully grasp that concept.
But after telling them how to find these locations, how to make the files, and how to read a file path and how to navigate them, you expect them to use that knowledge to fend for themselves while doing that specific task, at least. But they’re not learning how to place that file or move through the file system. They’re learning they need to go up a folder level to get to that file, or when they get to this folder the thing they want is the 3rd row down that starts with S.
They blindly learn the exact clicks they need to get what they want, but not understand why they need to do it that way.
Sorry that turned into a bit of a rant, but my point is, I can be taught how to do a household task, and the physical reasons why it works that way. They can be taught, but they seem to have a really hard time actually learning.
But there’s a motivation difference. The boomers want to know how to get a thing done. We want to learn how to do the thing that gets the job done. So they want to get a certain task done, they will just memorize click A, click B, type in C, and D gets done. Where we will learn why A does what it does and how it affects the rest of the process, and the same about B, eventually learning enough so that if there is an update that changes it up a little, we can still get it done.
Meanwhile if so much as a button changes color, they lose it, and have to ask for help.
Meanwhile since physics isn’t changing, there won’t be an update. Hammering a nail won’t change. The hammer may get a better design, but you’ll still smash it into the nail to get something to hold together.
But we learn that and factor it in early, and we know going forward that some things can always change a little. They’re used to things that can’t change. So our learning process got that much better, and the same will be true in the future.
I would argue that’s actually a good thing for the average user. Computers and other personal electronics have become so reliable that you rarely have to delve into those tools as an average user. You can actually see the trend of simplification and everything but Windows - Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android are all immutable operating systems where user data and applications live separately from a read-only operating system partition. This is obviously not the case for all Linux distros but the point still stands.
Working in IT, I’m glad to see that despite the move to immutability in the Linux world, I actually have access to more tools than I did on base Ubuntu. blendOS and NixOS allowing you to spin up an operating system of your choice in a container, pull down whatever programs you want, all without cluttering your system? It really is the best of both worlds. Plus I still need a rock solid system, Knowing that I will always be able to apply an update without anything breaking is a huge win for all users. Back to the original point, technology has become so reliable and easy to use that you feasibly can just open your browser every morning and leave it at that. No hassling with clearing cache or anything, it just works.
I can partly agree with that, a normal user should never be forced to edit things regedit or device manager for instance.
What I was talking about though was that many kids don’t seem to know the functions of the programs they actually use daily. It’s not just that they don’t know of default keyboard commands that have been used for decades, it’s that they, in my wife’s case, didn’t even know that there was a function built into the program to do a search on page.