[HN Gopher] Not all young people are 'digital natives'
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Not all young people are 'digital natives'
Author : thg
Score : 106 points
Date : 2020-03-14 07:57 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| PopeRigby wrote:
| This is mostly my experience. I'm 18 and a lot of the people that
| go to my school only know how to use social media, and come to me
| when they need tech help. My closer friends are more tech
| literate, but they still come running to me when they need help
| with something more complicated. I supposed I should be happy
| that they even have interest in getting help. Most would just
| give up.
| decasteve wrote:
| As someone who grew up tinkering with computers I can relate but
| then I remember the perception of my elders towards my
| generation. I remember all the things I couldn't do or didn't
| pick up on that my family (and extended relatives on the
| homestead) could do. They could so easily fix and build
| everything and anything around the house and farm. Everyone was
| just so incredibly handy.
| WJW wrote:
| Well clearly. Almost everyone alive today is an "electricity
| native", but it's only a very small minority that can safely
| install wiring and the like. Everyone else just interacts with
| the consumerized version of it where everything interesting but
| potentially dangerous has been abstracted away. There is no
| reason to believe that younger people are more savvy about the
| workings of digital technology just because they grew up with
| consumerized versions of it.
| echelon wrote:
| It's worse today than it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Back
| then the web was an indie experience. If you wanted your own
| blog, you had to host it. Or if there was a platform you could
| use, it let you customize the HTML and CSS. An entire cottage
| industry of websites hosting code snippets sprung up, and all
| the kids were using HTML and tweaking it.
|
| If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it. You
| had to learn how Linux servers worked, what MySQL was and how
| tables and migrations functioned, and might even need to write
| a little PHP on the side.
|
| When I was a teenager, I had a PHP website that did game
| matchmaking, lightweight article publishing, and custom (non-
| phpBB) forums. I put this under Subversion source control and
| let several of the members that were code literate contribute.
| We built a lot of stuff and had a whole thing going. Multiple
| websites. And then we stood up an IRC server, which gave way to
| bots and log ingestion and archival.
|
| We ran a MediaWiki instance (http://strategywiki.org), we knew
| the folks that wrote the Gamecube LAN adapter tunnel.
|
| When it came time for college, I was way ahead of the curve. I
| blew through all of the upper level courses before my
| electives, and I was a TA in my freshman year. (Second
| semester!) This let me take a lot more biology and chemistry
| classes (something I wasn't previously skilled with, but had a
| deep interest in learning).
|
| This isn't as widespread anymore since there are platforms that
| do everything. Even though the learning curve has dropped and
| the barrier to entry is lower than ever, the barriers of
| interest and necessity have been raised.
|
| Kids don't need to hack around as much, and it's sad.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| It's also assumed that anyone not using the "low barrier to
| entry" platforms is a professional (or else, trying to make a
| professional product), which, ironically, raises the barrier
| to entry for anyone trying to get out of the sandbox.
| eropple wrote:
| _> If you wanted a video game forum, you needed to host it._
|
| InvisionFree started in 2002 and was incredibly, bonkers-
| popular.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I initially sympathized with this line of thinking, but
| someone recently convinced me otherwise. The logic is as
| follows:
|
| * Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or
| Fortran? Not so much
|
| * How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it -
| but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and
| we need fewer and fewer C developers
|
| * The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of
| abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data
| pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc.
|
| If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and
| 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today
| surely looks different than it did decades ago - the
| primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is
| hacking all the same.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think you are overestimating the total number of kids that
| did the things you did.
|
| A higher percentage of kids that were on the internet had the
| skills you are talking about, but they weren't a higher
| percentage of the overall population.
|
| For example, there might have been 5% of young teens doing
| what you were doing, and that might have made up half of the
| internet users... now, it is still 5% of the total
| population, but that is now only 1/18th of the total internet
| population of that age range.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Seriously. I think their comment is good example of patting
| themselves on the back for their interests while being
| completely wrong about reality.
|
| I happened to run my own phpbb/vbulletin forums as a kid
| and I can confidently say I was the only kid even close to
| doing that in my high school. I also didn't need to know
| anything to do it except press buttons on CPanel and
| phpmyadmin, things I didn't really understand. And I was
| scared to tell other guys at school about this stuff
| because I'd be an instant loser. Even in uni I rarely met
| anyone with those interests.
|
| Meanwhile, these days, it's completely cool to spin up your
| own Discord server for your friends. It's totally
| mainstream to be into that sort of thing. Even gaming is
| cool now. And there's more kids these days doing more of
| what the grandparent post glamorizes because it's more
| accessible than ever.
|
| I'd be surprised if grandparent commenter was even working
| off any real experience with modern kids and instead just
| wanted to glamorize their own nostalgia. I mean, surely
| modern kids aren't as cool as he was.
| echelon wrote:
| > surely modern kids aren't as cool as he was.
|
| Surely.
|
| I don't get why you folks have to be so rude. It
| diminishes your argument. I was with you until you had to
| poke fun at me. I'm a human being capable of making
| mistakes and reevaluating my ground truths. Why be like
| that?
|
| > patting themselves on the back
|
| While there's a lot of nostalgia in my anecdote, it's
| mostly spurred on by my dislike of platformization and
| centralization. I think they produce many negative
| externalities.
|
| But thanks, now I'll clam up and stop talking about my
| personal experience.
| novok wrote:
| I think the more modern equivalent would be making games
| with various javascript game engines (twine, etc) in a
| web browser or similar and making art with medibang paint
| and so on.
|
| Then there is the entire linus tech tips make a cool RGB
| flashy gamer computer and poke at shit, where those kind
| of tech youtubers make get a million views per video.
|
| Or buy a rasberry pi at 13 and poke at linux on the
| internet.
|
| You have to realize, that even back then, only %0.5 of a
| school population is going to be into computers enough to
| install linux on anything. At my small high school, I was
| the only one basically.
| microcolonel wrote:
| If anything, there's kinda a middle ground age right now where
| you can expect greater general understanding of computing
| concepts, with both people young and older than that being more
| ignorant.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Yep. When I was 2 my parents got an old computer from my
| uncle's business that he was replacing and set it up in their
| living room for me. I was learning the command line as a
| toddler. I'm certainly no guru, but that kind of formative
| experience was certainly a big part of my choosing this
| career path. Kids of today grow up with ipads and iphones and
| have no cause to go poking around and experimenting with the
| basic functionality of their computers.
| DBYCZ wrote:
| Same here, some of my earliest memories are of an old ms-
| dos mickey mouse game, where you were required to look
| through a booklet and enter in codes to perform actions.
| xnyan wrote:
| Learned how to spell quite young to use a CLI, first word
| was "DOS" lol.
| [deleted]
| fastball wrote:
| That's a great point and something I've never thought about.
|
| I think it's something that would be helpful to think about
| when I'm raising my kids.
| Eldandan wrote:
| I'm under 35 and consider myself very 'digitally native'. It
| wasn't until I helped my 19 year old niece set up her laptop
| that I realized exactly the same thing. They're fine with
| youtube and spotify from a tablet or phone. She could pick
| things up fairly quickly for school assignments (Office,
| etc.). I think it was her hunt-and-peck typing that made me
| realize my assumptions were off. (I don't think typing
| classes in middle and high school are much of a thing anymore
| in my region.)
| jjeaff wrote:
| Is this in the US? I thought absolutely everyone was taking
| typing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Watching professionals hunt-and-peck all day drives me mad.
|
| I took a 2 week typing class in the summer after 8th grade.
| We learned on big heavy mechanical typewriters where you
| really had to hammer the key to get an impression. It was
| time well spent, as it has paid off for me continuously
| ever since. For example, I wrote this entirely with touch
| typing (not looking at the keyboard).
| Avamander wrote:
| I saw a lot of kids using caps lock to type capital
| letters, that is even more painful. Thankfully they
| quickly utilized the new knowledge about shift key, I
| like to think I changed the way they use computers, but
| who knows if they actually have the motivation to learn
| further.
| beefield wrote:
| I have occasionally thought to time to learn proper touch
| typing. But I never seem to get over the idea that my
| bottleneck is not in the fingers, but in the brain trying
| to figure what to type in the first place... Can someone
| prove me wrong and make me motivated to learn?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Touch typing really pays off when you're typing in things
| like notes. It literally doubles the speed because you
| can do it in one operation rather than two.
|
| The touchscreens of today make touch typing impossible.
|
| Also, with my laptop and its cramped, wretched keyboard,
| I use a full size bluetooth one (they are surprisingly
| hard to find) to touchtype on. I hate how every keyboard
| maker has to "innovate" by moving all the non-Qwerty keys
| around randomly.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| It's the same as any other higher-level skill: the faster
| you can perform the lower-level functions, the faster you
| can iterate.
|
| Your medium of expression also influences the speed of
| your thought. You'll notice that people who speak for a
| living seem to be wittier than those who don't; they're
| able to form thoughts and translate them into expression
| very quickly. Typing/writing is already much slower than
| speaking, but its advantage is the ability to revise a
| thought before conveying it. If you're typing slowly,
| you're probably forming thoughts slower than someone who
| types quickly. Anecdotally, spending so much of my time
| communicating via keyboard stunted the development of my
| ability to express vocally, because it lowered the rate
| at which I had to generate and, internally revise, and
| expel thoughts. It would be even worse if I could not
| touch type.
|
| That's my layman's take, anyway.
| 2snakes wrote:
| Find an alternative perspective like typing games.
| k__ wrote:
| I saw a report one day, where they interviewed many young people
| (<25) about their tech usage.
|
| Most only used a smartphone and many of them only knew about well
| known apps like FB, IG, SC and WA, etc.
|
| They were "natives" in their apps, but most of them didn't know
| much besides that.
|
| Which is probably what you would expect and its probably still
| better than the mindless TV junkies from before.
| dpeck wrote:
| Whether someone is a "digital native" or not has everything to do
| with whether they're 1) interested in creating something, and 2)
| what they're interested in creating.
|
| I may think they're really missing out on everything that a
| computer/the internet can do, but there are plenty of people
| really into cars that feel the same way about me driving a 23
| year old vehicle.
| keiferski wrote:
| This link is about inequality in the U.K., but what's even more
| interesting to me is the massive number of people that don't _use
| the Internet at all._ Only about half of the world population is
| online and there are dozens of countries where only 20-30% of the
| population has "accessed the Internet in the last 12 months from
| any device, including mobile phones."
|
| - DRC (8.62% of 81,339,988 people are online)
|
| - Nigeria (27.68% of 190,886,311)
|
| - Indonesia (32.29% of 263,991,379)
|
| - Pakistan (36.18% of 220,892,340)
|
| We truly are only at the beginning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
| reaperducer wrote:
| The United States has a shocking number of people who are not
| on the internet, as well.
|
| The company I work for deals primarily in healthcare for the
| poor, and even though we have a fleet of web sites, social
| media accounts, and a text messaging program, we have to also
| send everything out on paper in order to make sure we reach as
| many people as possible. And since we're in healthcare, we
| don't get to be all SV Bubble about it and say, "Well, they
| should just go buy some money and get a smartphone."
|
| My company requires that all departments have some amount of
| hands-on with our customers, including us button pushers, often
| in their homes and neighborhoods.
|
| It's amazing the number of people I've met who have no
| computer, no internet connection, not even a cell phone of
| their own. Often a single flip phone will be shared by all the
| members of a family. Sometimes, a single flip phone will be
| shared by four or five families living next to one another.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Sometimes, a single flip phone will be shared by four or
| five families living next to one another.
|
| Now that is an interesting surprise! Is that a
| cultural/knowledge issue, or is it poverty doing that?
| razakel wrote:
| I thought there was a federal program to provide phones to
| people on low incomes - the so-called Obamaphone (although
| it was actually Reagan).
| tomrod wrote:
| Similar space here. Don't discount SMS as a delivery channel,
| it hits a surprising number of folks, including those without
| a fixed address.
| microcolonel wrote:
| I mean, I'm a professional software developer (among other
| things), and when I'm commuting in highly populated areas
| on regional trains, the quality of Canada's
| telecommunications networks, the most expensive in the
| world to subscribers, is so extremely poor that SMS is the
| most reliable way to reach me during that time. It is pure
| luck that my workplace isn't in a deadzone for LTE or even
| 3G strong enough even to refresh Hacker News.
|
| SMS is absolutely necessary for me, I still have a basic
| GSM phone for phone calls and SMS because it is more
| reliable than current stuff and has a month of standby
| time.
| reaperducer wrote:
| You're right. Last I heard, we had about 90,000 people in
| our text messaging program.
| qwerty123457 wrote:
| Something like 99.9% of the people from 3rd world countries who
| currently don't use the internet would end up being lurkers
| even if they did get connected. So no, nothing would really
| change apart from ad revenue and view counts perhaps.
| Kaiyou wrote:
| What's the point of looking at third world countries? They
| don't even have running water everywhere, of course not
| everyone there has Internet access.
| keiferski wrote:
| The point is that designing interfaces and technology in
| general should not assume that everyone is a "digital
| native." It's only a matter of time until the entire world
| goes online and with that comes a lot of startup opportunity.
| [deleted]
| luckylion wrote:
| Sure, but you're not designing interfaces and technology
| for those that aren't online, are you? Like, you're not
| making an app for rural Pakistanis that can't read and
| don't have smartphones.
|
| The whole world might be online at some point, but you'll
| still not design your apps for Pakistan, because the
| difference in adoption speed of technologies, trends,
| cultures etc will not go away just because they are
| technically online now.
|
| That's not to say that Pakistan itself won't be a strong
| market to target. But It's a niche market, you'll likely
| not target the US, Pakistan, and France in one app, just
| like you don't today.
| ineedasername wrote:
| And not all slightly older people meet the expectations of tech
| use for that slightly older generation. I think it's not uncommon
| for HN, but I have a minimal social media presence, and am rarely
| an early adopter-- more like a stage-2 adopter once something is
| proven, and very much not on board with social media adding
| anything positive to my life. So-called digital natives are, I
| think, becoming increasingly skeptical as well, in a grass-roots
| phase of limiting contact to closer, well-known
| friends/acquaintances. Not yet a majority, no, but the beginning
| of what has the potential to be a trend.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I teach at a community college in the USA. Maybe 10 percent of
| them are what I would consider computer literate. 80% can get by
| but the other 10% are very computer illiterate.
|
| On reddit I will sometimes see memes about tech illiterate
| professors but they only think that because they don't see the
| rest of their classmates try to use tech in front of them.
|
| I had typed up a list of things that I see students struggle with
| when they try to use computers but I don't want to make it seem
| like I am sitting around "look at these kids these days!" because
| in reality in a class or say 20 there will only be 1-2 that
| really struggle with computers.
|
| -- Of course this will make it a real shit show with all the
| schools at all levels going to "elearning" to deal with the
| Coronovirus.
| hinkley wrote:
| There was a period not too long ago where half of my friends
| were in the landscaping business. Volunteer work tends to
| introduce you to very different demographics.
|
| That is a lot of 20- and 30-somethings who are not at all
| enthused about technology, informatics in particular. Which
| pretty much killed my enthusiasm for a side project I had in
| mind.
| Avamander wrote:
| I teach cybersecurity for middle school kids and organize
| events, I'd say the same, approximately 1% is actually
| competent.
|
| Though, I think one of the biggest obstacles for a regular
| student is their utter lack of knowledge how to actually use a
| keyboard, teaching that the shift key exists is new knowledge
| for so many. Thankfully it can be rapidly improved with very
| little teaching, and things like coding actually become much
| easier when they make fewer typos and waste less time typing.
|
| Telling middle school teachers that instead of Word, spend four
| lessons at the beginning actually teaching the tools they're
| using, is usually received with a lot of negativity, it's
| somehow considered outdated to learn how to type.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| totally agree with the lack of experience with keyboards. The
| shift thing reminded me of a student last semester who I saw
| working and put the caps lock on to type a short acronym like
| APCA or something.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm far from experienced with keyboards but I do that
| sometimes. I use shift for starting words or sentences with
| capitals but every now and then will use caps lock for
| upper case acronyms. The two extra key strokes to toggle
| caps lock are easier than keeping the shift key(s) down
| when typing, especially when typing acronyms I'm unfamiliar
| with. It's just a force of habit.
|
| People toggling caps for every capital letter will make me
| shudder though. I've seen them even in (introductory)
| programming classes. I suppose in an age where most typing
| is done on smart phones, it makes sense that people use the
| software-keyboard-style toggle instead of the "old-
| fashioned" shift keys.
|
| Then again, every day programmers learn about stuff like
| control+delete/backspace, shift+arrow keys and other
| keyboard navigation tricks common in almost any program
| these days. It's a set of tricks and tips that you need to
| happen to stumble across to learn about, and if the teacher
| doesn't know how to type properly an entire class of school
| children will suffer the same faith. You can easily spend
| your entire high school time using caps lock for
| capitalization without anyone even noticing or correcting
| you.
| ihuman wrote:
| Wait, do they not teach typing in elementary school anymore?
| Hokusai wrote:
| > But our social and media users are a group marked by narrow and
| limited digital media use and a lack of data literacy. They are
| likely to come from some of the poorest households in the
| country.
|
| I see this when I open Youtube in a private Window. My feed is
| full of videos about movies, software engineering, history, ... I
| just do not get what the most popular videos are about.
|
| With TV there was a similar drift toward low quality content.
| But, there was a limit how low it could go and at prime time they
| needed to cater to everybody, including the middle class.
|
| With Youtube and social media, you can live in your own bubble of
| low quality content. Facebook is just the same but much worse.
|
| Many young people are as close to be digital natives as I am of
| being an airplane pilot for flying frequently.
| wuunderbar wrote:
| By what measure are you determining what YouTube content low
| quality and what is not?
|
| I just opened it up in incognito mode (IP located in
| California) and I see the first 5 as: - Eminem music video -
| Gordon Ramsey - Jimmy Kimmel - 4 levels of onion rings - A
| couple building a shipping container home
|
| Nothing about these seems low-quality at all. Is it just
| because it's not that educational like software engineering and
| history?
| martin_a wrote:
| Well, for Germany it's normally some rap songs (where views
| seem to be bought to push unknown artists), turkish soap
| operas and low quality circle-jerk clickbait where some
| Youtubers comment on what other Youtubers did. It's really a
| shame.
|
| These days there's some Covid 19 coverage in there, but that
| only slightly makes it better.
| harikb wrote:
| I am not sure if incognito will help you avoid Geo and other
| non-cookie based personalization
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't think there is non-cookie based personalization,
| just geo localization. Removing cookies makes this obvious:
| there isn't even a crumb of my recommended videos.
|
| Which makes sense because a list of trending content is a
| bit nonsensical without a region in mind, e.g. language.
| [deleted]
| fock wrote:
| In Europe, I get: a youtuber telling you about his "battle"
| with some other youtuber and how he converted him "back to
| islam, inshallah" (on tape obviously). Both people seem to
| have a problem with some body parts near their crotch,
| judging from their gestures. The same "environment" produced
| a mob of dozens of people, attacking each other in Berlin in
| broad daylight, because one guy claimed "Don't come to
| Berlin, it's my territory, you, who dared to tarnish my
| mothers honor in your vid".
|
| Basically it's tribalism 101 spread to thousands of people of
| general low education at an amazing rate. And thanks to the
| bubbles, we all know about, knowbody challenges this...
| tallyhotallyho wrote:
| Yes, people seem to be taking against these mediums now
| that they are exposing the pitfalls of their own political
| delusions. Turns out multiculturalism was stupid thing to
| impose upon a country. Turns out immigration has negative
| effects. Turns out the "democratisation" of media means
| those people you thought you could ignore can not be
| ignored. Must be the website! stop it! regulate the
| website!
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Keep in mind that when you open YouTube from a blank history,
| you're not seeing what most people see when they're on youtube.
| In fact, due to their personalization algorithm, I doubt that
| there really is such a thing as a typical YouTube user.
|
| A quick web search suggests that there are 2 billion MAU on the
| platform, with 73% of US adults using it (roughly 180 million
| people) [0]. Opening YouTube from a private tab in the
| Midwestern US, I see a range of recommended videos published
| over the past five years, with about 1-100 million views each,
| most of them between 20 and fifty million views. This content
| is all largely inoffensive, clickbaity, and in-line with what
| you might expect from a publication like Buzzfeed, or viral
| content in the 'tens.
|
| These videos aren't the fastest growing, in fact it given their
| view:age ratio they've mostly peaked, so they were likely
| selected to appeal to the broadest swathe of the population
| possible, in order to kickstart user engagement.
|
| Even assuming this content is only seen by Americans, the most
| popular videos presented have only been seen by fewer than half
| the platform's users.
|
| Interspersed among the cute animal videos, the movie ads, the
| top n lists, and late-night TV compilations, there seems to be
| a selection of niche content which could be used to begin
| sorting you onto different user buckets. Sports videos, gaming
| channels, indie animated shorts, youtube poops, some Spanish
| content, etc.
|
| The trending tab seems even less representative of the
| userbase. Its engagement is in the hundreds of thousands, to
| maybe a couple million over the course of a few days, with
| notable exceptions being a few music videos, and a recent
| episode of JRE.
|
| I work with a lot of technically and "high culturally"
| illiterate people. A few that would be truly considered lowest
| common denominator.
|
| Not too many of them are clamoring to see the latest music
| video, or gushing over that Minions movie ad that YouTube
| thinks a new user might want to see. Nobody really gets on
| YouTube just to watch top ten cute animal videos unless they're
| really high.
|
| Videogame videos? Certainly, but there's a huge variety in
| those. A lot of using YouTube to learn new skills, or view
| product reviews. Not everybody's after the same kind of high
| brow content in niche x. In fact, they're likely after
| relevant, intelligent content that you don't even consider
| exists assuming they're older than 17. There's just too much
| variety in the population for that.
|
| But sooner or later everybody watches a movie trailer, or a
| music video, or a fall compilation, or a top ten list that fits
| their fancy. Their typical view? Not likely. But it's something
| everyone will probably watch. So that's what YouTube's going to
| show an unknown user.
|
| If you're disheartened by what you see, don't be. Just because
| everybody watches schlock doesn't mean nobody's watching in-
| depth, intelligent content. I'd wager most are.
|
| [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
|
| [1] https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-adults-live-
| usa-b8...
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I agree with other commenters about "low quality content" being
| subjective. However, on a couple subreddits I will sometimes
| skim I often see tons of people posting links to videos that
| are just someone's take on a current event or just summarizing
| it. I have largely given up clicking on those because most of
| them can be summarized in 2-3 sentences much more quickly than
| watching some video and yet, on the times I actually do click
| on one of those links the video will have tens of thousands of
| views. Who is watching this stuff? I understand that the
| creators are trying to make a living but I don't understand why
| people watch the videos when they could learn the same amount
| of information much more quickly by reading it.
| knzhou wrote:
| Yeah, there's an annoying genre of videos that's just a dude
| in his basement talking to his webcam for an hour. Not only
| is the format low information density, but you can't even
| extract the key bits by skimming through it.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _but you can 't even extract the key bits by skimming
| through it._
|
| I generally avoid that format of video entirely, but using
| the subtitles as a searchable index helps a lot.
| 6nf wrote:
| This is all Youtube's doing. Youtube rewards channels that
| upload a full video every day, and for individual creators
| the only way to do that is to talk into a camera for 30
| minutes and just upload it.
| jacobolus wrote:
| This is also 99% of "podcasts". Except instead of 1 dude in
| a basement, it's usually a few people on a conference call.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| I think computers used to be cool but are no longer perceived
| as such.
| krapp wrote:
| I don't think computers have ever really been cool, except to
| a niche demographic.
|
| Prior to the ascendancy of the web, computers were the
| exclusive domain of nerds (who, as far as the mainstream was
| concerned, were very much uncool) and business people
| (eternally uncool.)
|
| After the web, _the web_ was what was cool, but computers
| (and their use) just became mainstream.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I think business people were definitely cool into he 80s. I
| wasnt there but the whole wolf of wall street Reaganomics
| thing was definitely cool even if it was destructive. And
| startup founders were definitely cool for a bit until we
| started hating tech. Rich people making money is almost
| always cool in American culture, whether it's startups or
| wall street or mob bosses
| krapp wrote:
| Maybe, I barely remember the 80s, so you might have a
| point. But even so, the cool business people tended to be
| the rich CEOs and Wall Street types (and I remember
| plenty of those as villains as well, think OCP from
| RoboCop) but still, they weren't the ones using the
| computers.
| asveikau wrote:
| Bill Gates was quite rich and ordinary people used to
| talk about him a lot. He was never seen as cool in that
| time.
|
| He's had a bit of a reputation increase since then, part
| of it is probably his philanthropy, but also nerdy people
| are much more accepted and celebrated these days.
| Ghjklov wrote:
| http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283
|
| Just posting because I was reminded of this
| sorenjan wrote:
| I saw a teacher somewhere say that he had noticed that kids
| increasingly have trouble understanding how file paths work in
| computers. It's something I think is very intuitive and key to
| use a computer, but I guess when you're only used to smartphones
| you rarely if ever have to think about files and folders.
|
| This is exactly why the Raspberry Pi was created, to enable kids
| to get computer experience in a world full of locked down phones
| and tablets.
| luckylion wrote:
| I blame Apple for people not knowing about paths. An
| acquaintance always used windows and then switched to Mac. She
| usually had her stuff neatly organized, but a year later, there
| was zero organization any more, she was just using the finder.
| If search is good enough, you don't need organization. Folders
| and files are hierarchical categorization, you don't need that
| if you can access everything by search.
| vikramkr wrote:
| For security purposes and everything it's probably better to
| abstract away the idea of files and wall off apps like on
| mobile, and usability wise this is probably making tech more
| accessible to users to have super efficient search. They
| might not know how to use a file manager, but they still know
| how to use their computer
| luckylion wrote:
| Yeah, it's absolutely fine for casual consumers, but
| similarly to cars, you're going to be _really_ lost if
| something on one of those multiple layers of abstractions
| malfunctions.
|
| People will have to accept paying for computer repairs like
| they do for car repairs. Moving everything into the cloud
| won't help; Google will be weird and generally has no
| support, so you'll need somebody to figure out why those
| docs aren't visible in drive.
| Adaptive wrote:
| I spent a WEEK out of my computational basics curriculum
| teaching middle school students just about paths. Just about
| FILES and paths. Did this with a VPS and chromebooks SSHd in.
| Also, later, Raspberry Pi units.
|
| They simply don't understand computers when they walk in my
| classroom door. They understand mobile app user interfaces.
| dorkwood wrote:
| There's something about a computer's file system that makes it
| a difficult thing for people to learn from scratch. I suspect
| it's something to do with how folders can be nested inside
| other folders to an almost infinite degree, and how nothing in
| the real world really behaves that way.
|
| I tried explaining folders to my uncle once. He said "I don't
| need to understand all that mumbo jumbo, just tell me the
| steps!" What he wanted me to do was write down the folders he
| needed to double-click, and the order he needed to double-click
| them in, depending on whether he wanted to get to photos,
| music, or whatever. To him, that was easier than taking the
| time to learn what was actually happening in front of him.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| I don't understand how this is surprising. We have reached a
| point where devices and software are working well enough to not
| worry about how they work. The same happened with cars and
| probably a lot of appliances. Some decades ago you needed to know
| how they work so you could repair them. Nowadays not many people
| have even the foggiest idea how a car works. They just use it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I've seen HNers assert that everyone should learn to code or
| know how a computer works which I think is just a level of
| hubris because they themselves happen to care about those
| things. Or confuse it with something particularly positive
| about themselves.
|
| Meanwhile, there are plenty of things those same people don't
| care about knowing, like how an engine might work, how their
| girlfriend of five years puts on makeup despite her doing it
| daily, how electrical/water/gas works in their house, the
| history of civilization, how their government works, etc.
|
| Life is a crap sandwich in so many ways that I don't think
| these expectations are fair until we're immortal with infinite
| leisure time.
| dsalzman wrote:
| Classic blog post from 2013 on this subject.
|
| http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
| heyflyguy wrote:
| I changed my business recently to a situation where I deal with
| alot of millenial aged college graduates. For all the talk of
| this generation "growing up with the internet", I am consistently
| surprised by how poor their non social media skills are. Things
| like copying files from a thumbdrive to a computer, filling out a
| spreadsheet, adding a header or footer to a document - sometimes
| it is quite shocking.
|
| I graduated from High School in 1994 and had some computer
| classes leading up to that. I learned how to type a letter in
| wordperfect. I learned how to save it to my floppy disk. I
| learned how to use a spreadsheet to make a budget.
|
| What has happened that we don't teach these basic things any
| more? Social media is important as a medium but basic job skills
| are really being left to the employer to teach.
|
| Of course, it could be the kind of young person I am contracting.
| But they are finance majors, political majors, and so on.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Growing up with the social implications of the internet isn't
| the same as growing up with PCs. Smartphones are now what
| people know how to use and you don't interact with them the
| same way you interact with a desktop PC. Files? What are files.
|
| There was a time before technical literacy and now we're in a
| time after it. It was fun while it lasted.
| shoo wrote:
| Smartphones offer a much more user friendly, accessible way
| of doing common tasks, but there is a much higher barrier of
| entry to go from "software user" to a hobbyist "software
| creator".
|
| Compare to microcomputers that might be sitting in primary
| school classrooms 25-30 years ago, where you turn the machine
| on and seconds later you're staring at a command line that
| directly interprets BASIC.
| dorchadas wrote:
| I'm a high school teacher, so focusing on a younger age group
| that your demographic, but they absolutely _don 't_ teach kids
| these things. The only class we have with a computer is a
| typing class that lasts 12 weeks where they essentially play
| games online (the teacher is also a nutjob; anti-vaxer and
| flat-earther!)
|
| These kids type their entire papers on their phones and save it
| via Google Drive. It's not surprising they really don't know
| how to do anything with computers.
| krapp wrote:
| >It's not surprising they really don't know how to do
| anything with computers.
|
| but... they know how to type a paper and save it to Google
| drive.
|
| I'm not trying to be pedantic but that's how computers are
| used nowadays.
| midasz wrote:
| Being able to sufficiently handle technology can be a
| matter of learning a trick and sticking with it. A
| difference in mentality or 'skills' is the ability and
| curiosity to learn new tricks when a situation calls for
| it. So it's not really a generational issue (now that I
| think about it, generational issues are not really related
| to the 'quality' of the people in it, but the environment
| that shaped them - heh), it's a mentality/skill issue. The
| will to actually solve the problem in front of you is a
| skill that can be learned, but if everything around you
| 'just works' you never have the need to develop that skill.
|
| You've been happily using your Generic XPad your entire
| life dealing with minor UI changes that are explained to
| you via small tutorials or w/e. You learn your job on the
| job, specific things in school etc. The furthest you'll go
| is the search bar on Facebook or a marketplace.
|
| If you encounter something that doesn't just work, how do
| you know how to figure it out if you've never developed
| that skill. To me and you it's not that hard, it's pretty
| obvious.
|
| People just learn the trick, but not how to be curious. Or
| maybe they just don't care, that's fine too I guess.
| jkinudsjknds wrote:
| > These kids type their entire papers on their phones
|
| Um... what? This would blow my mind to observe.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| They don't use google docs?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Drive and docs are tied together.
| Awelton wrote:
| The thing I've noticed about the younger generation is that they
| are better at consuming tech intuitively, but mostly have no idea
| what makes it work. They seem to be able to use technology almost
| instinctively, but if they have to troubleshoot or create
| anything they don't know where to start.
|
| You have to design UI for 'digital natives' to be just as user
| friendly as you would for baby boomers that didn't see their
| first computer until after they were grown. Both of them would be
| equally lost if you plopped them down at a terminal with nothing
| but a blinking cursor. This is generalizing, of course, there are
| exceptions.
|
| Anecdotally the only thing that separates a 9 year old and a 60
| year old is that the 60 year old won't want to touch a computer
| because they are afraid they will break something and the 9 year
| old will mash away until they get where they want to go. Neither
| knows or cares how or why it works.
| irrational wrote:
| This has been my experience. I have kids from 6 to 23. They all
| come running to me anytime they have a technical issue. I've
| tried to teach them troubleshooting steps or how to search for
| help, but they aren't interested. As far as they are concerned
| it should just work and if it doesn't it's someone else's job
| to figure out why. Their friends all appear to be the same. I
| know of only one teenager who has a glimmer of interest in
| understanding what is happening behind the screen.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| TV and radio was the same way. My grandfather knew how to
| replace tubes and test circuits. I knew about adjusting
| antennas.
|
| My son's technical knowledge of TV is charging the remote,
| rebooting the router and reseating connectors.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I was talking to some of my fellow Gen-X friends and we are
| jokingly complaining that kids these days don't even know how
| to pirate things. If it isn't on a streaming service they don't
| know how to access it.
| neuralzen wrote:
| My siblings are 10+ years younger than me, and have very little
| technical savvy, despite holding advanced hard science degrees,
| whereas such things are of my profession. I think part of the
| difference was growing up in an era where I could break things
| easily, and would have to understand and investigate them in
| order to fix them. More modernly, this sort of understanding
| isn't needed, so unless you have a burning curiosity, there isn't
| an ambient technical nourishment that is required to imbibe. No
| eLan Vital, as it were.
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