Who is anon? I know who zoomers are. I hate those people generally. I as a zillennial am uncomfortable being part of a common microgeneration with some of them.
I’m just saying, what’s the point of bragging about tech savviness if you can’t represent yourself in a way you control in the immediate? It’s either utility related or it’s more of an aesthetic appreciation. If it’s an aesthetic question then some degree of identification matters. Maybe after all these decades anon has ironically developed a degree of identity. In any case big data knows who peoples are so I don’t know what the point is in the nomenclature anymore as if it still has utility for actual social reform. I am Fisherman75. You can find my trail of related usernames and related histories and stories throughout the internet. I’m also a musician still trying to make it. Part of how I cope with big data - it’s branding. It becomes necessary, and anon even begins to develop a brand of its own that it finds itself curating ever so carefully. Since you’re not bragging about yourself as an individual it just becomes like a form of technonationalism verging on technostatism.
Jesus Fuck, am I having a stroke?!
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these “Young people don’t understand technology” memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I’ve got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I’ve got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I’m downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can’t code? FFS, it’s GenX that’s forcing AI down all our throats.
Don’t give me that “young people can’t use computers” shit.
Us millenials are going to become the next boomers. The other generations around us like genX, zoomers and genA are comparatively smaller than the millenial generation, substantially so in the UK where I live.
Can’t wait until my peers and I capture the legislators and start redirecting all of society’s resources into our interests.
Edit: Already drafting comments to leave on the comments section of major newspaper articles about how genA need to pull themselves up by their bootraps, stop enjoying avocados, and cultivate some “stick-tuitiveness” (sub in other made-up phrase here).
I mean, most people don’t know how to fix a car these days other than boomers. Sure there are the few which made it their career to do so but I would the majority of millenials and boomers would not know how to fix their car. Let alone a newer car with all the electronics. No one knows how to fix that shit it’s built to be disposable now.
Boomers don’t know how to fix cars these days either. In Ye Olde days, cars were designed to be fixed. These days they are riddled with unnecessary electronics, and those electronics are riddled with just enough DRM that reverse engineering anything in your car is a crime.
A Boomer can fix a “classic” car, but nobody other than a mechanic can fix a modern car because of all the DRM-riddled electronics.
I mean, most people don’t know how to fix a car these days other than boomers.
Oh yeah, famously.
Sure there are the few which made it their career
North of 750k, sure. We professionalized the job of car repair and people who specialized in the field continued to develop their skills in an increasingly complex field. We didn’t just lose the skill of automotive repair.
We also introduced a number of module components to the chassis and the electronics, effectively making body work, car electronics, and mechanical repairs into three separate fields. So the process of auto repair got more complicated. Boomers did not keep up with the trade. If anything, they got phased out.
The divide is that zoomers don’t NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.
Modern kids aren’t required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer “mechanics” that are perfectly good at driving, but didn’t really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.
It creates a binomial split. Many don’t notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.
Actually, that has always been true.
Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.
- They didn’t need to know how file system worked, they just put all their files on their desktop.
- Most never used a command line and never will. They would just shrug and do something else if it required it.
- If a button is even slightly moved, to them it is a travesty that fucks over their whole workflow.
The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.
But if you ever worked in IT support, you’d know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.
Yep. All of this is just your typical “I don’t actually socialize with anyone my own age or else I would understand how bad they are with technology.”"
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
Navigating software is a hell of a lot different from troubleshooting, as OP/ The image was saying.
No rat in this race just pointing it out. (But everyone i know who’s my age couldn’t tell you shit about computers, why they work, how they work, and how to fix even the simplest of problems)
I work with new hires all day and they’re doing great.
I’m not sure why you find it controversial to observe that older people, who grew up without computers, and younger people, who’re also not using computers, are two groups that tend to suck at using computers. This is not surprising.
This kind of generalization matters. For instance, when designing education policy.
why you find it controversial
It’s not controversial, just inaccurate.
Again, like doggedly insisting nobody born after 1980 knows how to fix a car.
You’ve bought into a dogmatic piece of online propaganda. You’re not living in the real world.
Perhaps you’re right and the widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy. My impression as someone who works in education is that it’s interfering with computer literacy.
I also want to point out that my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars (understandably).
widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy.
I see that hypothesis, but it glazes over the more glaring transition - widespread adoption of cheap electronics, generally speaking.
The iPhone premiered in 2007 at something like $300-500. Most people couldn’t afford that. It was another five years before you started seeing rudimentary budget brand smartphones.
We’ve got far more tech literates today thanks to the abundance of cheap hardware. The expectation for tech literacy has risen with this proliferation.
my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars
And that’s why auto shops no longer exist or are run exclusively by geriatrics? :-p
Quite a few millennial age auto mechanics exist today. Quite a few GenZ/Alpha aspiring mechanics exist.
You just don’t find them in the upper class suburbs or state university campuses.
I have multiple people at my job who claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard and constantly have tech issues when the rest of us don’t. …they’re older than the rest of us though. They just lied on their resumes so it’s okay.
The youngest workers at my org have no issues.
claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard
Okay, sure dude. And I know people who claim to be race car drivers but they don’t know how to turn the steering wheel.
I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it
And on top of that I have enough millennial colleagues who don’t know shit about anything in regards to tech.
Maybe people just reinforce their cliques in their 40s and just think everyone in their age group is like them.
And especially nerdy autists like to gravitate towards technology and ignore all the other people around them.
They really are terrible. They grew up in the age of apps and don’t know how to actually use or maintain tech.
It’s crazy how GenX/Millennials developed the app culture to make computers and phones easier to sell to boomers, but then it was when GenZ was coming up, so they didn’t learn the ways of yore.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can’t wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
I mean… entirely seriously:
A large percentage of them are also functionally illiterate.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-parents-children-reading-literacy-crisis-2081875
The % of kids that ‘read for fun everyday’ has dropped from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023.
Functionally illiterate reading levels of the whole US population?
19% in 2017.
28% in 2023.
Again, for emphasis: 28% of all Americans are functionally illiterate.
They can’t read beyond a ‘Hop on Pop’ level.
Nearly a third of the US population is at a 2nd grade reading level.
And that near 10% increase in 6 years… thats 6 years of Zoomers graduating high school and becoming adults.
… Only gonna be worse for Gen Alpha.
And on Nero fiddled while Rome burned… (aaand now I feel like I need to start appending eli5-esque, super simplistic breakdowns of what I’m saying at the end of my comments…)
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Do you have to read for fun for it to be functional literacy?
It seems to me that kids are perfectly literate. They start texting, instant messaging, commenting on things, etc. from a very young age. That’s all reading and writing, which is all literacy. Do you have a source for this 2nd grade reading level? Because, although the slang used by the youngs is annoying, it certainly doesn’t seem 2nd grade level to me.
Read the link I provided.
That is the source, that is why I provided it.
Kind of amazing that I have to tell you that in a discussion about literacy.
The ‘reads for fun’ and ‘lowest category of reading/writing ability’ are seperate statistics, they are not dependent on or derived from each other, they were measured separately… they are just the two the article focused on, out of a larger report, which is linked in the article, which you can read in its entirety if you want to.
I am astounded that, in a discussion about literacy, I provided the source, and you somehow did not read it or investigate it at all, and am now asking me for the source.
Fact-checking and basic research skills are part of intermediate literacy levels, which you apparently do not possess, so I suppose that is why everything seems fine to you.
To be fair, it’s not an obvious concept.
If I pick up a notebook and scribble something in it, the next time I pick up the notebook whatever I scribbled will still be there. It’s very unusual that when a computer shuts down the RAM is cleared. Making it worse for intuitive understanding, a lot of apps are constantly saving and restoring state without any user intervention, making it seem like a notebook that just keeps state whenever you use it.
The implementation detail that RAM is very fast but doesn’t store state but flash is slightly slower but does store state is something that you have to learn. To actually understand why RAM doesn’t store state you need to understand how it’s built, and how capacitors can store charge for a short time but need to be refreshed. Why flash / electrically erasable memory works the way it does is yet another university-level class.
Add to that that the concept of a “file” and a “filesystem” are not obvious at all. The concept got its name from actual paper documents being strung together with wire. The name was used in early computer work as a skeuomorph to make understanding computer storage easier. This data on disk is grouped together in a “file” just like you’d group together pages of text into a “file”.
If we were designing things from scratch today, the concept of a “file” or “filesystem” would probably not exist. We’d probably just go with a key-value store on top of some kind of B-tree stuff directly on the flash memory.
The only reason older people learned these things is that they dealt with computers that were not as user friendly. If someone is young enough, they probably experienced turning off a computer and losing all their stuff because they hadn’t saved. And, saving was cumbersome for a long time. You had to actually decide what filename to use and where on the filesystem to store something. One of the biggest pushes in computing in the last couple of decades is to make all that easier, to make it so that files are saved automatically and you never have to see a file browser or a filename. Sure, the underlying system is still all files, directories, etc. But, that’s just not something that people encounter anymore.
How does he know? Because he’s that 35 yo pedophile NEET that lives in his mom’s basement
How about instead of ragging on kids these days we see that there is a very serious problem brewing, regarding how we’re expecting to maintain this high tech society we’ve built going forwards. I would posit that it was the planning done by generations prior that has left society in a state where youth are not gaining skills that will be needed simply to maintain the status quo, let alone improve anything.
Nah, fuck em. The world is shit let it collapse and maybe we’ll make something better after
You certainly won’t be making anything.
I already have with my own two hands, a place to wait out this coming crisis and the tools to thrive after
Up until 3 years ago it was just a few miles on a creek my grandad had, now it’s a log cabin for most of the family. Cheaper than you expect even in this economy.
What have you been doing?
They told me I’m at an age where people have to ask their kids how to rotate a PDF.
I told them if none of the tools I would use for that were available, I could just write my own. In a number of different programming languages.
This is me now, except the clouds are aws, azure, and gcloud.
My generation uses and understands tech. This gen just uses it. Or should I say, is used by it.
Wanna see how tech-savvy this gen is? Go up to one randomly and ask them how to “find” text on web page page.
the same way you find text in nearly every fucking document, browsers aren’t special
You’re missing my point. They won’t know that and they won’t know how.
Yup, using an actual keyboard is going to become a niche skill
Or how to rotate a pdf page
From what I’ve seen. They have zero patience to actually learn anything. They can’t even watch a ten minute YouTube video without skipping parts and missing key information
Bro, I can’t be assed to watch a 10 minute video where a third of the content is intro/outro/ad read/filler, even at 2x speed. The information density of a ten minute video by a typical growth hacking youtuber is like aerogel. Why would you want to watch a shitty video, SEO’d to the top of the search results, that will take so long to get you the information you need? That’s the behavior I see from the zoomers. They will actually choose to watch these shitty infotainment videos instead of doing real fucking research.
Every serious psych journal has had at least one published review on the damage that short attention span media causes
But it’s always ignored in favor of corporate profit streams and complacence.
I see you understand what’s going on. Thank you
I do, and probably share your frustration as to how there’s almost nothing to be done about it
TL/DR?
