
Not all young people are ‘digital natives’ - thg
https://theconversation.com/not-all-young-people-are-digital-natives-inequality-hugely-limits-experiences-of-technology-133102
======
heyflyguy
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.

~~~
dorchadas
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.

~~~
hilbertseries
They don’t use google docs?

~~~
Dylan16807
Drive and docs are tied together.

------
Hokusai
> 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
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?

~~~
harikb
I am not sure if incognito will help you avoid Geo and other non-cookie based
personalization

~~~
hombre_fatal
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.

------
jccalhoun
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.

~~~
Avamander
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
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.

~~~
Dylan16807
Huh? Both ways of typing that are completely fine. Especially since the
'correct' way of using the opposite-hand shift key is probably the worst way
to type an acronym by a significant margin, since it requires so much
shuffling back and forth while coordinating chorded keys.

~~~
Avamander
Holding shift doesn't require any shuffling back and forth?

~~~
Dylan16807
Using the _opposite-hand_ shift key, when pressing letters that go back and
forth between sides, requires awkward shuffling.

~~~
Avamander
You use your pinkies and there's barely any movement.

~~~
Dylan16807
Just as much movement as hitting any other key. Plus slightly more because you
have to keep it held during the next key. It's really easy to do, but it's
still more than double the effort of hitting a single letter, and when you're
hitting many keys per second that makes a difference.

Shift, letter, unshift is great for a single capital letter, but if you're
doing that several times in a row then capslock is a lot simpler. As is
holding a single shift, if you're used to it.

------
code_duck
I was friends with someone who had a couple of kids who were obsessed with
video games. For me as a kid, that naturally led to some sort of hacking. If
something didn't work, I would try to investigate or fix it.

For them, it was playing games while constantly talking to their friends, and
if not that, watching videos on YouTube of other kids playing games.

One of them, a 13-year old boy, was upset that his laptop screen didn't work.
He had been complaining to his mother for months about it. I pointed out to
him that his laptop had an external monitor port and that he could plug it in
to something else and it worked fine. He had never investigated this
possibility. I also took the laptop and cleaned it out viruses and spyware...
Something like 42 different packages were removed.

Basically if something didn't work, they would just give up and say that it
was "broken".

------
sorenjan
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
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
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
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.

------
keiferski
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users)

~~~
reaperducer
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.

~~~
tomrod
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
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.

~~~
tomrod
It's also one of the cheapest channels, and having worked with transient and
Medicaid populations it has become essential.

------
Ididntdothis
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
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.

~~~
bitcurious
I’m of the opinion that everyone should learn to code, but not because the
coding is universally useful. Rather, it’s because learning to code is the
best way I know to learn to be okay with failure. Shit breaks, you try again.

~~~
smabie
I think just living teaches you that lesson.

------
dsalzman
Classic blog post from 2013 on this subject.

[http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
co...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

------
dpeck
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.

------
Awelton
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.

~~~
Spooky23
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.

~~~
CDSlice
That actually seems pretty good, especially since if you aren't using an over
the air antenna there isn't much else you can do with modern flat screen TVs.

~~~
Spooky23
I agree! As things get mature, there’s no need to tinker.

------
PopeRigby
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
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.

------
ineedasername
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.

------
neuralzen
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.

------
rndmize
In recent days I've been starting to feel this idea of "digital natives" is a
silly one. There's no such thing as a "reading native" or "math native" –
these are skills and concepts we learn in school because society at large has
decided they are important enough to warrant the investment.

On the other hand, there's no standard curriculum or expectation around
computers and software (afaik). We have this expectation that people will
learn how to use things by osmosis or will be taught by the thing itself,
perhaps because some kinds of software are extremely good at this (primarily
games) and some types are easy enough to get started and have a motivation
(eg. social) that they can "pull" users through their difficulties (or they
can ask friends). People jump to conclusions - "if the kids can do that, they
can do everything" \- which is clearly not the case. My knowledge of Excel
won't help me with Snapchat which won't help me with Blender - and the
difficulty difference between commonly used consumer apps and work apps can be
significant.

The issue is that outside of the easy spaces, learning about computers is
boring, difficult, doesn't have obvious usefulness, provides largely useless
feedback, is often wildly unintuitive compared to how things work in the real
world, and tends to require a baseline of knowledge most people won't have the
interest to develop. This isn't surprising - the same applies to many subjects
we learn in school. Most people will have no more interest learning common
computer abstractions and mechanisms than memorizing their times tables or
writing essays with an opening, body, and conclusion or looking up words they
don't know in a dictionary.

In short, computing is something that should be actively taught in schools.
Typing is a basic skill that should probably be taught in elementary, when
children are learning to write (or shortly after). UI abstractions like files,
folders, windows, searching should probably follow. Word processing should be
covered before middle school, other productivity software during, along with
more complex abstractions (clipboard, storage, paths, permissions, networks,
accounts/passwords/security, scams, where to get help). Introductory
programming should be taught as well.

None of this is to say that the average student should be a capable programmer
after completing K-12. But I think that almost everyone should know enough to
draw reasonable conclusions about systems and problems they encounter without
outside help, if for no other reason than to avoid being exploited by scams,
ransomware, ads, and whatever new attack vectors show up in the coming years.

------
Ghjklov
[http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
co...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283)

Just posting because I was reminded of this

------
buboard
the tech community (i.e. us) celebrated the mobile "revolution" and simple
(i.e. dumbed down) UIs for more than a decade. You reap what you sow though,
you have kids growing up not knowing what a file is. This is no testament to
the success of the mobile and dumb-down revolution either: people use their
phones more, but the only action they know is scroll and like, so it s not
like the UX empowered people, it just steered all their energy to consuming.
There is less and less features everywhere, and we are now celebrating new
emojis. We are essentially creating a new inequality with the "dumbit down"
revolution which pushes people to walled gardens and single-function apps to
avoid the pain of learning elementary configuration.

In more concrete terms, Apple is probably the first preacher of hiding
complexity behind a mask, and then almost everyone followed, even those that
shouldnt (e.g. linux, windows). Gone are the logical, consistent ,
hierarchical UIs like windows 95, now windows doesnt even have a start menu
and you need a search bar to navigate the control panel. Of course people will
never learn about a directory tree if they never see one, but those concepts
are key and undestanding them simplifies the understanding of just about
anything.

------
steve_adams_86
My kids were unfortunately indoctrinated by chromebooks and iPads in our
public school system. Using real computers to do things is way too complicated
and frustrating for them. Most kids are just like them - they're great using
very limited technology for very specific things. The rest of computing is a
mystery to them. They type on keyboards at less than 30WPM. At their age, I
was doing 50 or so - a requirement for the typing class to 'meet
expectations'.

------
WJW
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
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](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.

~~~
cortesoft
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
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
> 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.

------
k__
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.

------
sings
“Data thinking”, “data doing” and “data participation” struck me as an
unintuitive way to categorise digital literacy, especially as the example for
“doing” seems to fit more squarely under critical thinking: “being able to
identify and highlight the source of information others share”.

------
allovernow
The sooner we dispell the notion that all people are equally capable at
everything, the sooner we can get back to prioritizing merit and see it return
to the country. It will take decades. The virus has exposed the incompetence
that pervades the nation.

Articles like this are only surprising because some two generations of
propaganda has convinced young Americans that everyone deserves a trophy and
we can all be Einsteins and Armstrongs if we just set our minds to it.

But this is moreso a structural, institutional issue. This mindset has
resulted in the conflation of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity
as we take for granted that everyone is equally capable in the west. So now
instead we throw money and man hours and bad policy at our lowest achievers in
a sort of crabs in a bucket mentality, I stead of prioritizing resources for
those who are more likely to benefit society in broad strokes - scientists who
cure disease, for example - and as a result our native students are being
thoroughly outcompeted by other nations.

This has resulted in a net reduction of the standard of living for all
Americans. And is probably one reason for inequality and general unhappiness.

~~~
kick
_Articles like this are only surprising because some two generations of
propaganda has convinced young Americans that everyone deserves a trophy and
we can all be Einsteins and Armstrongs if we just set our minds to it._

The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents
everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical
literacy. I think you're missing the point by a mile or so.

~~~
allovernow
>The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents
everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical
literacy

No. That's exactly what I'm arguing is wrong. We're putting the cart before
the horse. The internet is ubiquitous, even if you're poor at this point -
it's in your schools, it's in free libraries, and entry level smartphones are
cheap enough that all but the poorest can afford them if it's a priority.

The problem is none of that. It's that not everyone is technically competent -
and no amount of education or money will fix that. Intelligence is a high
dimensional spectrum and technical details regarding computers are out of
reach for a sizable proportion of the population. This is exacerbated by
poverty and/or poor education, but those are at most half of the problem.

~~~
crooked-v
> We're putting the cart before the horse.

If you want to accurately act on 'inherent intelligence' you need to correct
for external factors first, or else you'll just get a slice of the bell curve
based on how rich/poor people are.

~~~
allovernow
I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is that we have been drastically
overcorrecting for too long because we refuse to collectively acknowledge the
reality of intelligence as a distribution and allocate resources that
maximally benefit _society_.

~~~
crooked-v
> drastically overcorrecting

If anything, we've been undercorrecting. A simple example would be the many
studies that show that IQ in children measureably increases in the years
following a move from a poor area to a rich area, even if the child's family's
income doesn't change.

