this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
256 points (96.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43802 readers
1122 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I actually teach teenagers programming and 3D modelling. The past 5 years has been the first decline in tech literacy I've ever experienced between generations. My personal theory is that only the gamers actually have computers at home now. Everyone else only use their smartphones, and that only gives a negligible increase in tech literacy compared to using a computer.
Yes, computers in their various forms are now so user friendly (and often locked down, because fuck you) that you don't learn much using them. The golden age for learning tech on the fly seems to have been 1990-2010 or so, because computers were both accessible and still had exposed inner logic.
I think the dawning of the Chromebooks was really a huge sign. Sure you could install Linux on some of the early models. But then Google just caught on to this and decided to take even that away. So now you had all of these Chromebooks that can only ever run ChromeOS and whatever Google approved that could run on them. You just can't do jackshit with them because they were also online-only.
And those were pushed onto everyone, particularly schools.
I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn't know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.
Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends
Yeah but this also has to deal with how many pc gamers there are per generation. So what you're saying is gen z and alpha has less pc gsmers.
In my experience it has more to do with how much less frequently issues happen and/or how often you need to go manually move files/folders around. Just not nearly as much need imo.
Similar situation with mobile devices, I remember rooting/roming/jailbreaking being much more common in the past.
Yeah devices are really easy so they just work out of the box. Unless you seek out challenges and issues, you'll probably be computer illiterate.