this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Sad but true.
As one of those IT people (who was taught on punched cards), I'd had some hope that by the 21st century only GenX and Boomers would have this issue.
That young adults don't know this stuff is very frustrating.
Most people cant explain how a toaster works - it may as well be magic to them.
There is actually a theory floating around, that people growing up in the 80ies-2000 were the most tech literate, because they had to tinker to get thinks to work. Want to play a game on DOS 6.2 and it did not work? Edit some system files for more memory. Today the technisch hidden behind false physics and got really well.
My son is nine. I got him a Kano (the old one with a raspberry pie as base) and he has to learn why we need to connect a display to the processing unit and connect peripherals to do things. His friends own a tablet, a smartphone and a gaming console. You cannot see behind the tech in those, if you don’t want to destroy them and explore hobbit works (on a basic level).
Kano. Never heard if it...of too the webs I go!
Thanks!
It is a great project, but unfortunately I guess it is not running very well. They did the setup with raspberry pies first with additional modules like a screen, an LED matrix and other things you could program. The software experience is pretty awesome. The whole manual is telling your kid a story and describing everything in just the right language for a kid. You plug it and the story goes on at terminal level when your kid is promted to write their name. After this it boots into a really well made desktop with a adventure game to get to know the computer, a bunch of programming tools and a browser.
Schland detektiert
It's genuinely crazy. I've had to remove viruses from my friends (16 or 17 at the time) and just didn't understand. Why are you allowing things to make admin changes? Or just having to explain the difference to people what a "zip drive" is and a USB drive. As things get more "convenient" tech literacy definitely goes down.
I worked in my university's computer lab and one time I had a girl complain that the computer wasn't allowing her to do something (like download or save a file, this was over a decade ago) and she was frustrated. I asked her to show me what the issue was. She did what she was trying to do, a pop-up appeared and without reading it she clicked "no" and then proceeded to bitch about it not working. I did it again and the pop-up was asking for permission but she kept denying it, and then complaining that it didn't work 🤦♂️
Though I do see that these two have the opposite problems. One clicks yes without understanding, the other clicks no without understanding.
Though I will say I wish the admin access requests had more information about what the app wants to do with that admin access. And that programs that request admin access for things they don't really need it for were generally treated with disdain.
It's not that she didn't understand what it was asking, she straight up didn't even read it, as soon as it came up she clicked "no" in a split second. I watched her do it like three times.
Yeah, that was a part of my assumption, that her misunderstanding was about whether she should read it rather than about what the words themselves said. Those who do at least read have a better chance at understanding, though messages aren't always easy to understand.
In a way, the two have the same issue: they think that these message dialogs are things that get in the way of doing what they want to do. They just act on that in opposite ways so the yes guy allows everything to happen (including bad stuff he doesn't actually want) and your friend disallows anything from happening, including what she does want.
They are both trying to run before they have learned to walk properly.
We started with Boomers etc who never used tech so had no idea what to do. Then a couple generations of people having to learn tech to use it. Now we are at the point where it’s so easy to use that people can use without ever having to learn about it.
My toaster now gets regular updates and needs constant internet access
My oven asked me to allow cookies 🍪🍪🍪
On the plus side it's going to keep you employed, a bit like COBOL programmers today.
Back when I was in college (mid to late 2000s) I worked in the campus computer lab. People frequently asked "how do I print stuff?" because they had to pay for it ($25 was included, it was to stop people from printing out a few hundred page books for free), they just had to swipe their ID at a touchscreen terminal, select the print jobs and hit "print".
This girl came over asking this question and I repeated the above, then she said "No... how do I print from the computer?". I was dumbfounded because this was a very large statue university that didn't accept just anyone. It was Microsoft Word (when they switched from the menu bar to that stupid start menu style button in the upper left hand corner) and she had zero clue how to use it. I was thinking "damn girl, how did you make it through high school and get accepted here?!". She was apparently your typical hot blonde airhead.
Please don't be sexist
Oh shut up. Lemmy is quickly turning into Reddit where people get butthurt and cry foul over the dumbest things.