Modern children (and a lot of adults) are digital natives. They are immersed in technology, feel comfortable with it, reach for it before anything else when working/relaxing/etc.
Immersion, however, is not the same as mastery. Fish live in water but that doesn't mean they understand what that means, or how to respond to problems within that water [1].
Modern mainstream computers are hostile to user understanding in the name of UX. You get happy paths and rigid defaults and hidden complexity, all in pursuit of smoother, frictionless computing. That's all fantastic, until something breaks and you're suddenly lost, outside the well-lit paths.
If there ever was a generation of 'digital natives' in the way that people tend to mean that phrase - in touch with technology, in control and aware of their devices' capabilities - then it's not modern children. It's a generation back, when trying to get a computer to listen to you involved hacking your way through awkward commands and workarounds, learning as you went.
People are also "car-native" these days. They know how to drive (actually many don't anymore).. But people have no idea how a car works, and can't do anything.
People have always been "human natives"
We are all human, but none of us understand how humans work (mainly speaking to psychology on a biochemical mechanistic level here)
I noticed this as well during my time as a teacher. I'd occasionally bring my kids (ages 15-18) to the lab to research things, and I'd have to handhold them through stuff as basic as Googling; a lot of them thought they had to download Chrome before they could begin searching, thanks to the "switch to Chrome" ads on the front page. The war on general purpose computing has basically been won already. I expect demographic trends (aided by a bit of glow in the dark fuckery) to make owning a PC unfeasible within a generation or so.
Anecdotally, I'd place the high water mark of public computing knowledge around 2009. Even frat bros were installing Linux and torrenting stuff off of private trackers back then.
Some things are still accessible. For example you can really own a Raspberry PI or an Arduino (modulo some firmware).
But there has been a social change. I bet youngsters that do this kind of thing these days have mentors/patents who went out of their way to provide them with "ownable" platforms. The intersection of children who get that and have the curiosity to explore is a meager percentage of the population.
As someone who grew up with computers (and has owned many over the last 36 years), the key is ownership.
Right from my first computer I had free reign to do what I wanted with it. When my 1541 disk drive stopped ejecting disks I pulled it apart and fixed it myself. If I did something dumb and blew the fuse in the power supply, then it was something else I needed to fix.
The second thing which I think is tied to ownership is not being fearful of trying something. It may be that beginning your computing experience on the command line gives you confidence, but I see so many people hesitate about clicking on obvious things like it's going to blow up the computer if they get it wrong. Yes, there are times for care, like whether or not to click on a link in an email - but even here's there's a weird inverse where they're fearful of the consequences of not clicking on it!
I used to make myself annoyed when hearing "the internet isn't working" as well, but I've thankfully realized that that's a stupid response. Obviously they don't mean the entire internet, they mean "the internet connection".
People shorten phrases to make things easier to say, don't be a pedantic jerk about it for no reason when you obviously know what they meant.
Wow, those are awful. I tend to take a porn approach for things like this in that you know it when you see it. If it's unambiguous I think it's fine, in the case of internet connection, but I can see all of those as being confusing (except maybe "giga" in context like that, but regardless that one is just too much and I hate it).
Obviously, what's "obvious" is completely dependent on context, background, and environment, so it's a pretty poor place to draw a line, but I'm still sticking to it and relying on humans to make appropriate judgment.
Edit: Actually, I've rethought the "giga" one and don't really think it's too bad if context is clear. In the states people say "gigs" similarly to mean both data transfer and storage in different contexts and it's usually clear. "Giga" only sounds strange to me because I'm not used to that word, but it's effectively the same, just a shortening of a phrase.
I suppose "USB" is just a shortening as well, but without extreme context it's just too unclear because it refers to the bus, or more commonly the connector. If they're holding the drive in their hand and gesturing that's probably fine, but otherwise "drive" or "storage" is needed.
I just showed a bunch of prospects around a rental house. Every single one asked how is the WiFi speeds. Not a single one asked about broadband speeds to the telephone exchange. Taking them literally just confused things more.
The correct approach would probably be:
- with my router I got $(benchmarked speed in WiFi to external server) if you get a different internet provider or a different WiFi router that might differ. With $(my provider) my wired speed was $(broadband speeds to the telephone exchange).
I work as tech support at a technical university.
One student emailed in to us and complained that one of our website links didn't work, which the student had received in some documentation from the teacher.
I asked the student to send in the docs to us so I could check it out, it turned out to be a project where the student had to install lamp on a windows machine and the browse to the localhost, which didn't work for the student because the student had not followed the instructions in the documentation.
This article has been on the front page how many times now?
Well, it is still relevant.
What's more interesting is how to fix this. I've no idea, but I'd like to read articles about how to do it.
Start making computers that are actually personal again. Personal computing used to be all about the computer as a tool to enhance your life, they aimed to be discoverable, understandable, and as simple as they could manage. They sought to allow users to create their own workflows for their own needs, and attempted to on-ramp beginners into increasing levels of programming to suit their needs.
But today, personal computing is dead. The computer is owned by Microsoft, Apple, or Google, and the user is cattle to be farmed for ad revenue and saleable data. Discoverability is non-existent, and increasingly we're told that there is a wide gulf between "normal user" (almost universally framed as only slightly more intelligent than a chimp), "power user" (who are expected to put up with hoop jumping, bad abstractions, and overcomplicated nonsense), and "developers" (who's time is so sacrosanct that 1 second saved for them is worth 10B seconds of wasting user time).
People don't understand computers because software these days works very hard to keep them from understanding them. It isn't profitable for a user to actually use their computer for their own needs when it is much easier to addict them to social media and show them ads.
I happened to be going through some boxes in the garage tonight and found an old manual for a Commodore floppy drive.
It kind-of explains a lot about how different a personal computer was back then. The back of the manual has the schematic for the drive!
My Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide also came with a fold-out schematic and I remember the first time I built my own Pentium the motherboard came with instructions for all the pin sets.
More important than this is being at the mercy of your computer if you use windows. Let's say you need to fill up some form by a deadline, transmit plans of a kyber crystal driven device or whatever the heck you want but need to wait until Windows gives you back control of the PC while it finishes setting up an update?
Is no one else put off by the tone of this article? The author comes off like some kind of bitter incel who has already decided that all women are bitter, miserable hags that snicker at "nerds". Extremely cringe and a very poor way to try to get your point across.
>Is no one else put off by the tone of this article?
Not really, it's just a more personal retelling of something anyone in a skilled domain knows exists.
If I were to tell a more professional version of the same phenomenon, I'd make it a story about cross functional collaboration at the office. There are two major categories to those interactions, the first where the differently-skilled people respect and understand the complexities of each-others' domains, and understand the point is to bridge that gap. Then there are those who are annoyed that a problem has strayed into a skillset they don't have, and make it quite visible that they're annoyed it's not already a solved problem (without the context to know if it's something reasonable to expect to already be solved and/or care to learn if it's actually something quite easy they could do on their own).
And it's not about software skill. The first time people interact with our legal department, it's usually because they were asked to send documents over for feedback, and just shoot them over cold. The first phone call with one of the lawyers is the "freebie" where they're forgiven for not reading the documents to the best of their ability first. The lawyer teaches our team members enough about what they're looking for and how to annotate documents with what is/isn't relevant to the business context of the documents and whatever technical background they need before sending them over.
On the other hand, we have people who are deep into one technical field and have day-to-day dependencies on something only slightly outside their wheelhouse. When they hit a wall and ask for help they'll often get if from someone who loves the thing, will talk your ear off about it if you let them, and really like teaching people about the thing. But the person asking for help has already mentally shutdown and are too exasperated to learn anything as they go.
Helping laypeople with technical issues is often interacting with someone who's (at best) coming from a helpless and defeated position. It's not their fault, it's just the way society teaches people to think about tech. But it does breed resentment towards the people they have to rely on, and on top of that it's already uncool to know about the stuff. You sorta have to be blind not to see the "just give me the answer and then fuck off forever" attitude from many people that hate the fact they're seeking your help. It's why I feign ignorance on many technical matters outside work ("no, my job involves different kinds of computers and I have to go our IT department for this stuff too").
Immersion, however, is not the same as mastery. Fish live in water but that doesn't mean they understand what that means, or how to respond to problems within that water [1].
Modern mainstream computers are hostile to user understanding in the name of UX. You get happy paths and rigid defaults and hidden complexity, all in pursuit of smoother, frictionless computing. That's all fantastic, until something breaks and you're suddenly lost, outside the well-lit paths.
If there ever was a generation of 'digital natives' in the way that people tend to mean that phrase - in touch with technology, in control and aware of their devices' capabilities - then it's not modern children. It's a generation back, when trying to get a computer to listen to you involved hacking your way through awkward commands and workarounds, learning as you went.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/97082-there-are-these-two-y...