Being able to use TikTok on your phone doesn’t make you tach savvy. They don’t know anything about how it all works. It’s a false dichotomy.
Yeah. I’ve noticed the new generation coming into the workplace can’t do shit on a computer.
They’ve grown up on apps that have simple interfaces and limited options. Give them the freedom and power of a workstation and you’ll find they never learned to learn real software.
People believe just because someone interacts with some sort of digital device, it makes you an expert on computers. The thing is, it depends on the type of operating system you are interacting with.
For example when I was young, my father would buy those big old gray computers from yard sales. I would mix and match the pieces inside to build my own PC. I broke a lot of shit but learned a lot.
The operating system was one where you more or less had total control over the computer. By 12~13 I was using CD-Roms to load different Linux distros and play around with all sorts of different things.
This experience basically taught me how operating systems work at a fundamental level. How it needs a kernel, how it loads and maintains services, packages, etc. How file systems work and learning how terminals are useful. Scripting languages, and eventually coding applications.
Compare and contrast that to the young kids of today. What do they get? A phone and a tablet. You can’t open it up. You can’t tinker with it. The OS is closed off and is deliberately made as difficult as possible to modify. No mouse, no keyboard. Streamlined UIs with guard rails.
You get what you get and you don’t get upset. That doesn’t leave nearly as much room for exploration and curiosity. It’s a symptom of our computers becoming more and more railroaded. More and more control by large companies.
It’s really sad, I think. Fairly soon I believe every device will be a “thin device” or essentially a chrome book. Very little local processing power and instead it’ll essentially stream from a server.
Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn’t develop tech skills because there’s barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.
Even as an IT administrator, there’s hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren’t going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so…cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages “Android” in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It’s impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there’s so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.
I just want to echo your sentiment with something I’ve been saying here for a while now:
Do not confuse information technology use for computer literacy.
I will continue to argue that GenX is the only true technology literate generation because we grew up with the technology as it evolved. Future generations are more consumers not partners in the technology they own.
Yea it’s a vast generalization but Apple is a good analogy of this. Most people now just want “a technology that works” without any understanding or control over how it works. That’s a recipe for technological serfdom under the new generation of technocratic companies designed to own us.
Am I ever going to own a free phone? Probably not, but that doesn’t excuse me from at least understanding from a high level all the players involved in my phone and where they’re generating value from me.
I will continue to argue that GenX is the only true technology literate generation because we grew up with the technology as it evolved.
This is a terrible argument. Technology is always evolving. There have been like 10 different versions of Windows that I’ve used growing up as a millennial, across 3 different architectures, with huge advances in storage, memory, CPU speeds, and graphics processing - it’s pretty ignorant to dismiss all that and claim Gen X “grew up with the technology”. Like duh, every generation “grows up with the technology” of their generation.
I think the point I’ve seen elsewhere on this post is more accurate - every generation has some technologically literate people and some technologically illiterate people. Congrats, you happen to be literate, but I guarantee for every one of you, there’s also a Gen X’er that can barely function a computer enough to check their email. Just like the boomer generation, and the millennials, and even Gen Z and Alpha. This whole “XYZ generation is the most ABC” bullshit is just another way to create divides, and make people forget we’re all way more alike than we are different.
How did any generation not grow up with the technology as it evolved? Gen X did not invent computers, nor did the Boomers, but every generation made valuable contributions, just as Gen Z will. Again, it is the actions and ideas of gifted individuals that count.
Older Millennial here. I also grew up as technology did. Thank you for reading my T.E.D. talk today.
Z is not savvy. They’re basically boomers when it comes to tech. It always worked so it should work. None of our z staff can fix a printer and in fact none are allowed to
Z is not savvy. They’re basically boomers when it comes to tech. It always worked so it should work. None of our z staff can fix a printer and in fact none are allowed to
they can be savvy, it just depends on how based and tech pilled they are. If they’ve only ever used a phone for example, they aren’t. If they use linux as a daily driver, they definitely are.
Statistically, on average, gen z is less likely to be tech savvy though.
although in defense of gen z, fuck printers.
Fair enough
fuck printers.
Agreed :(
single worst human invention ngl
Not a very enlightened take. As @nednobbins@lemm.ee correctly put it, tech savviness is the property of an individual and not of a generation. There are non-savvy Zoomers, just as there are non-savvy people from your generation.
For Boomers, cars was the latest tech that everyone was fiddling with. This caused even the boomer that wasn’t very interested , to know quite a lot. For later generations, car became more of a means of transportation, and the knowledge of cars was only for specialists. For gen X, computers were the high tech thing, everyone was fiddling with. Most gen x can setup if they have to. For later generations, computers are just tools, and the knowledge is only for specialists.
Video games and getting them to run on computers taught me most of what I know about them via “fiddling,” so this checks out for this Xer.
installing minecraft mods are what got me to where I am today, I approach tech stuff with a “I’ll learn how to do this” (fiddling) rather than a “oh i’ll just call the PC guy” that my mom would do.
80s millennial here and same. Getting games to run was so much work back in the 90s that I learned about computers. I think I got my first IT job because I was able to install and setup Word.
Of course, but the percentage of capable zoomers who are actually tech savvy is much smaller than millenials, for the reasons already stated.
Just the other day I witnessed a zoomer grad student who didn’t know how to use a file explorer on his new windows laptop because he had grown up with an iPad and iPhone.
People are saying it’s an individual issue but I will say that kids who grew up on iPads and iPhones definitely are less tech literate when it comes to using PCs. Utilizing file explorer or even a command line (gasp) is completely out of their comfort zone.
If something doesn’t work like it should, they generally call tech support to figure it out rather than Google and solve it themselves.
This is generally. I taught fifth grade math and science for five years and the lack of a true computer resource class has really hurt kids. I had to spend 4-5 weeks each year teaching 10-11 year olds how to use computers. What copy and paste is, how to sign on to programs, how to attach a document, how to navigate a web portal, how to type on a keyboard, how to navigate Google slides/powerpoint or Google docs/word, etc because before fifth grade they had iPads instead of Chromebooks. Out of the 40-50 students I’d have each year, maybe 2 would know how to do even three of these things.
Most didn’t even know how to sign on because they were able to use faceid or use a QR code to sign in before fifth grade.
As @nednobbins@lemm.ee correctly put it, tech savviness is the property of an individual and not of a generation. There are non-savvy Zoomers, just as there are non-savvy people from your generation.
You’re making the argument that the exception proves the rule, which is a misleading way to think about it. Most people in this thread are generalising the generations because that is a more accurate way to think about common behaviours or abilities across a very large group of people.
Keyboard typing is a manual skill distinct from tech savvy and has to be taught as such. You’re not going to learn it by dealing with a touchscreen swipe “keyboard”. I’ve known a fair number of programmers who were two-finger typists because they were too busy taking CS courses to learn to type.
On the gripping hand, my early-Boomer mother, who learned on typewriters, can type fast and accurately but is quite technophobic.
Not being fast at typing does not mean you are not tech savvy. There is more to tech than typing. Like an architect doesn’t need to be good at brick-laying to be a good architect.
Funny that you chose an architect. Since they are basically document producers (also software architects), they tend to be able to type pretty proficiently.
But that is not the comparison they drew, and you know that.
Gen X graphic designer here. I did not properly learn how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, but have been exposed to it for many years so I know how to type on it. Hasn’t ever been a problem not typing fast.
There’s a common misconception among boomers and gen x that “digital natives” like gen z have a god-given tech proficiency. However, there’s nothing about being born with a smartphone in your hand that teaches you anything about tech.
It’s not like people are getting better at changing oil as car ownership becomes more common, right?
Yeah, fair point. My first computer was a Tandy TRS80, followed by a ZX81. You pretty much had to learn BASIC to get them to do anything at all.
Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.
Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.
By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.
The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.
That’s like 80% autocorrect anyway (I didn’t write a single word correctly in this sentence).
I think “digital naive” is a better phrase than “digital native”. They are born with computers all around them. But most adults forget to / are not able to educate them about technology and their implications.
I call them digital savages. You wouldn’t ask a jungle tribe about the Krebs cycle either.
I believe it’s a little more sinister than that. There is less education around these issues because many services have adopted a highly polished, “Walled-Garden” approach to their presentation. This keeps people who’ve grown up with the concepts in their walled garden loyal to that specific service, and makes it difficult for people to dig under the hood and work out how things really function without the sugar coating. They get irritated quickly because they’re used to everything “Just working” and don’t have experience on more open systems.
Therefore, they would like there to be no need for tech education unless you plan on a professional career as a tech.
As long as ownserhip don’t get carried away with enshittification chasing next quarter’s finance call and drive users away by annoying them into putting the extra effort in to learning about alternatives, they could keep it that way forever.
Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.
Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.
I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.
Gen Z is app savvy, not tech savvy. Very very different.
They use apps.
On phones.
They aren’t tech savvy.
I’d also argue that your WPM typed on a keyboard doesn’t make you tech-savvy either. 1950s secretaries could type fast on a typewriter and that didn’t make them tech savvy either.
It’s a pretty good indicator. If you spend all day working with computers chances are you’ll be able to type quickly
I don’t even know how fast I can type on a phone.
Even with word completion I find myself hesitating between the choice of word or typing it out.
I know it’s not near as fast as on a physical keyboard where is used to be around 90-120 wpm if I remember correctly. (Been a while since I had to do that at an employment agency)
Anyway, it’d be fun to see a thumbs only tiktok/Snapchat typer vs a mechanical typewriter type off.
And, tbf, most people are far from tech savvy.
Most are consumers. Some are really good consumers. Some are power users. Some know how to do things.
Very few actually understand it.
But, there was a time where there was indeed a necessity if you used the tech, you had to understand it.
There are a wide range of computer skills. Being able to interact with a word processor extremely efficiently is a highly valuable tech skill. Someone who knows about processor architecture but can’t touch type is arguably more tech-savvy but also less useful in most office jobs. So I’d say that the secretaries were indeed tech-savvy in a way that was useful for their positions.
Don’t you love throwing a whole bunch of people with different backgrounds into one bucket? 🙄
I blame the attempt to make devices user-friendly. Convenience kills skill.
back when i was still a teenager, ww did battle ourselfes who typed faster even without a keyboard lol. We just typed on a table or something just based on our finger memory of where which key is normally on a keyboard. This days i often type on my smartphone, but you can’t rly type a lot or fast on phones so i still prefer normal computer typing for most things. But people who just chat and don’t code or similar…yeah, they probably are mostly only using their phone. my sister as an example hasn’t used her laptop for nore than 4 years, probably more… and just does everything on her phone.
Swype typing can get pretty fast tbh. But that greatly depends upon the software.
Despite the hate it got, Windows Phone’s default keyboard had a far superior swype experience as compared to Android and iOS.Microsoft actually ported their keyboard to android, called “Microsoft SwiftKey” or similar. It’s a great keyboard, but apparently now has copilot ಠ_ಠ
I have 7 typewriters. My son will know how to touch type :)
I’ve literally never heard Gen Z described as tech savvy.
The boomers says that to them but that’s really not true, this day this generation is less and less “tech savvy”, they’re just good at using the basic way social media
Yes.
Calling GenZ tech savvy for always using a cell phone is like calling grandma a mathematician because she spends all day at the slot machine.
Boomers go confused when gen y switch to gen z and forget to get updated script from cable teeeveee
We’re not even teaching them cursive anymore and they still can’t type? What are they doing in schools?
As a Gen Z - cursive is very much still taught in first grade, and not like you can forget it either because most school assignments are required in paper form, same for lecture notes. You’re not writing this much and this fast without cursive.
Gen alpha is learning cursive. Gen z is all highschool and college now.
-worked in a k-8 tutoring program for 2 years.
I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.
Idk what to tell you. This is also a public school, and not a private school.
My gen alpha kids got it in 3rd grade. Or rather one did and one is about to.
Good to know because the gen zer at work said she never learned it. So it may be up to each school district.
I’m also gen z and I learned it. I’m also 24.
