Gen Z and tech literacy going backwards?

[Faceless Whore]

I read someone relate how their Gen Z coworker would turn caps lock on and off to capitalize words because that's how it's done on phones, and they had never used a keyboard before and didn't know what the shift key does.

 

[hideandgoseekchampion]

I went to this weird technical/vocational high school mix for my last couple years of high school and took the computer class, where the end of year 'tests' were the CompTIA ITF+ and A+.

Half of the students that were in the first year left by the second because they didn't give a fuck/were shit, and of the half that remained, 25% were still retarded, we just had lax standards because of COVID shit.

I'm forcing down a cybersecurity cert down my throat as we speak, so its not like all is lost though.

Its just typical cattle bullshit, I'm sure some of your generation couldn't stop eating paint chips and are retarded just like we are. It sucks, sure, but you could also look at it as job security/something to feel proud about for yourself

 

[the printer is outo fink]

My kid is late gen z/early alpha and he's genuinely pretty great with tech. Because I gave him an old laptop when he was pretty young and he had to learn how to keep it alive.

 

[foam rolla]

The Ipad thing with kids is horrifying. I remember going out to eat and there was was a bunch of adults at a large table with a baby. They had a tripod mounted up with an ipad on the table with the screen a few inches away from the baby's face. Like I know it means they don't have to deal with the kid while having dinner, but that can't be good for it.

 

[Civillian 18]

The Ipad thing with kids is horrifying. I remember going out to eat and there was was a bunch of adults at a large table with a baby. They had a tripod mounted up with an ipad on the table with the screen a few inches away from the baby's face. Like I know it means they don't have to deal with the kid while having dinner, but that can't be good for it.

I remember my mother showing me a Facebook video of a small child who had obviously been raised with a tablet/iPad being given a magazine. The kid was trying to pinch & zoom to zoom in on the colorful pictures. It was kind of depressing? I guess?

 

[IamnottheNSA]

obligatory

Ok but seriously this is the logical result of tech becoming more locked down. Zoomers get no desire to tinker with the tech they are using when it actively resists any attempts to tinker with it. I don't like how the term "sideloading" makes it sound like I'm doing something illegal by downloading and installing an app from some other source rather than the official store.

I'm curently trying to get my gen-alpha niece to become more tech-savvy. So far I managed to get her to start using a proper Windows laptop (with all the spyware shit blocked or removed), block ads with uBlock Origin, use various search engines if she starts experiencing technical problems, and not use her real name and address when creating Internet accounts, That's a start I guess.

It's because Zoomers have it really good now and by having it really good now I mean that nearly everything about tech these days is pushing a button and something works as expected so you don't need to be Neo from the Matrix to make something work on a computer or any other electronic device now most of the time.

Indeed, it is also the consequence of tech becoming more accessible to the lowest common denominator. Back in the day, connecting to the upper case I Internet required having a computer (which were also not a common household item), a phone line and a degree of technological know-how. Nowadays it's as simple as opening the browser on your smartphone.

 

[CoolDudeXD]

I think I'm on the tail end of the zoomer menace, I had to actually learn file explorer to customize the fuck out of MUGEN.

 

[We Are The Witches]

A Gen Z girl at work was talking about the "black box underneath her desk." Upon questioning her, she actually did not know that that was her PC.

Are they actually retarded? This is not just tech illiteracy.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

On the upside, if you know it and others don't it gives you an edge over them and the power to control decision making. Knowledge is always an advantage.

 

[foam rolla]

I remember my mother showing me a Facebook video of a small child who had obviously been raised with a tablet/iPad being given a magazine. The kid was trying to pinch & zoom to zoom in on the colorful pictures. It was kind of depressing? I guess?

It's completely fucking depressing.

Story time: Once I got my tablet out and played a video of gold fish swimming around on it. I placed the tablet on the ground and showed the cat. The cat went over the tablet and started trying to swipe at the fish at the screen. At first it was kind of funny but then I realized the cat was transfixed on it, but not in a good way. The cat seemed weirded out by touching flat, cold glass with it's paws. The whole thing made me uncomfortable and I switched it off and put the tablet away. For the next ten minutes the cat was pacing around where the tablet was sitting still looking for the fish it had seen and jumping and scratching at the carpet. I never did that again as it seemed so unnatural and wrong.

Long story short, imagine sticking a baby for hours on end in front of a screen as its prime source of learning an entertainment and not thinking it's going to fuck its brain up in some way.

 

[foam rolla]

Indeed, it is also the consequence of tech becoming more accessible to the lowest common denominator. Back in the day, connecting to the upper case I Internet required having a computer (which were also not a common household item), a phone line and a degree of technological know-how. Nowadays it's as simple as opening the browser on your smartphone.

I remember when I was a kid when most normies had no interest in the Internet and thought computers were for losers. Then dumb bitches realized they could go onto chat rooms and chat with random people and potential molestors. All of a sudden the school computers were taken up with dumb slappers sitting on there talking to Todd/18/Rapeville and they ruined it for everyone and I had my first The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race moment as a child.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

It's interesting cause really, do they NEED to know about file browsers etc? Can they not just in/uninstall apps for the next 50 years? We're at the pinnacle of computers in terms of know-how and ease of use. 50 years ago, any smith could make any fitting. Now, they don't need to know how cause they import it cheaper from China anyway. There's no professional pride nor any need for any such thing.

"Chatgpt, write me code for an interactive chat popup thatll use a customized AI mascot for customer service".
"UMhrr acshtually, you need to code that 4x3 window yourself, and then interpret the newest source code for your companion, and uh-"

I mean we're not far away from that already, are we? Making a website is drag-drop done by marketing folk, not the nerds coding all the features from scratch. Nah the only real doomer vibe I've gotten from kids and technology so far is how they're not learning to read and write cause they ask Siri to do it for them.

 

[AmpleApricots]

This is quite wished that way, makes for easier to handle corpo cattle.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

I personally blame public schools going full in on Apple products in the 2000s and 2010s and not teaching students on how to use an actual pc until highschool at best. At worse they never tell them anything except how to use apple apps.

 

[The Ugly One]

As millennials and Gen X you would learn the basics of torrents, downloading videos, sideloading apps etc to get what you need online

Most Millennials and Gen X never did any of that shit. The person today who doesn't know the difference between Ethernet and Wi-Fi is the same kind of person who, in 1998, said "computers are for nerds," begrudgingly learned how to use MS Word because they had to for work, and thought the Internet Explorer icon on their desktop "brought up the Internet."

Nerds are still nerds. The 21-year-old fresh-out-of-school straight-A CS student has been playing around with Godbolt, leetcode, and other online compiler tools since he was a teenager. Probably was writing CUDA code, too. Back in my day, I learned to code from books and only had Qbasic.

 

[Mortan Shekelstorm]

I've heard this said before but, older zoomers who modded minecraft or other popular games at the time know how computers work from trial and error

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

Dude the most perplexing thing is what's happening in my country. Computer class, especially at 5th-8th grade primary school level, is leaps and bounds above what it was like when I attended. All I remember is that we'd play CoD United Offensive or Battlefield 2 on LAN for half our time. Or we'd burn cracked versions of games so we can bring them back home since every PC was preinstalled with 10 games, that's how I found out about games like Deus Ex. Anyway, the most complex shit we learned was the bare basics of Word, Excel, and some shitty programming language that was only used to draw shapes. Nowadays? Kids learn basic Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, basic image editing, basic video editing, basics of programming in Python. However, as soon as they leave that classroom it's like they never were in there in the first place and suddenly they don't know how to fucking take screenshots or change the margins on a Word document.

 

[soulgains]

I personally blame public schools going full in on Apple products in the 2000s and 2010s and not teaching students on how to use an actual pc until highschool at best. At worse they never tell them anything except how to use apple apps.

The PTA at my elementary school fundraised for a computer lab and renovations to the library in 1995. We had a dedicated computer lab teacher and parents would volunteer to help teach us basic skills, like using office applications, MSPaint, etc etc. Ill always be grateful that my first experience with computers was Win95, I never understood why so many people favored Apple until I realized 90% of my generation were and still are Hipster consoomers who place no value on actual usability.

 

[Grub]

There's a meme going on that Zoomers can't torrent and it's because Zoomers don't need to. If Zoomers want to pirate content then they're going to go on emulation website for video games, go on a pirate website for books, or go on a pirate streaming website to watch movies and shows where you don't have to deal with torreting.

This. I haven't actually used torrents for years now other than very occasionally. I've never actually liked torrenting shit. It's always been a pain in the ass for anything even slightly obscure. Trying to find a torrent with enough seeders to actually complete a download. I can't even count the amount of times over the years I've tried torrenting things only to have downloads take days or weeks or just not complete at all. I really don't miss dicking around with that shit for everything. The technology behind torrenting is cool and I'm glad it exists but I'd rather not deal with it if I don't have to. It's much easier just searching for 'download x free' and clicking on one of the many links that appear.

 

[MrTroll]

As a millennial, I consider the total tech illiteracy of the generations preceding and following my own to be a good thing. Our knowledge of how to auto-fit the columns in an Excel spreadsheet by tapping the little triangle in the corner and then double-clicking one of the dividers between cells, or what a "C drive" is, makes us roughly equivalent in stature to shamans in a primitive, animistic tribal society, or people who can write in Latin during the Dark Ages.