I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour…and they’re in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦♂️
I don’t think the exercise was even successful.
Yeah, smartphones don’t teach kids file structure at all.
Computer natives are millennials. In due time, millennials will be what cobol programmers are in the coding world.
“On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you.”GenX. We started with nothing and went from there.
I still know my way around autoexec.bat and config.sys
Finally some gen X representation!
I had my hard earned ZX81 thankyouverymuch.
Well, now that I think about it you’re right, before that there was absolutely utterly nothing at all.
They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)
You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…
There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.
I’m a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.
I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.
I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren’t amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.
I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can’t comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.
At a recent gaming expo one of the tables was showing a new game for pc. 50% of the kids that approached the table didn’t know how to use mouse and keyboard. The next day they added Xbox controller support and more than half of the people that didn’t know before then were able to figure out how to play.
I think this boils down to not education but poverty. Entry level computers cost way more than an entry level console. Sure you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING. A $250 Xbox does everything you need and more. Most games today are not made to be played on $250 computers.
Me who grew up with old thinkpad from my dad’s work’s ewaste box:
They’re about as well prepared to deal with computers as people who had a teddy bear when they were children are prepared to be a veterinary.
I completely blame schools adopting ChromeOS for this generational failure.
At least give them a functional OS god damn. People out here not knowing you can do more than access like 5 websites and apps with literally anything that has a microprocessor in it.
As if the average schoolteacher knows how to properly teach how to use a full OS to kids. Many millennials lack basic IT skills as well.
There exists a generation of people today that do not know that the save icon shows a floppy disk. They have no idea what a floppy disk even was.
I feel old now and will go back into my cave and weep quietly.
Amiga user: “Everyone knows the floppy save, but how do you save to the hard drive?”
Save to folder:
I tell younglings this fact all the time
Gen Z: Where is my file and what is a directory?
I would say that this is not just to blame on the Generation, but to large extents of how stuff is designed these days. It has been becoming harder and harder to control where stuff is stored, and to find it outside of the intended app, and this, IMHO is by design, to wrestle the control of your own device from your hands. Just look at how aggressively Microsoft is pushing one drive in its office suite, they want control over those documents so they can lock you into a subscription model.
Of course it’s not the fault of the generation. It’s the school system who still doesn’t teach proper basic IT skills. Schools should have never touched Chromebooks or even MS products. A Windows like Linux distro and Libreoffice would teach kids the basic IT skills that are transferable across different OSs. Would have been cheaper as well. Bet if you follow the money that somebody in the school system with executive decision on IT matters gets massive kickbacks from Google or MS
I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.
My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.
But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…
Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.
It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.
It’s funny. You’re telling us that the technology was too complicated for some people to use, then you say we got to the point that it just works and you end with this being bad. Why do you think that?
In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.
The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.
Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.
The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.
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QUICK INDOCTRINATE THEM INTO THE LINUX MASTERRACE!!
Anyone who dismisses an entire generation as lazy or stupid is, ironically, revealing their own ignorance. Even Socrates complained about the youth of his time, yet civilization kept moving forward. If every new generation were truly worse than the last, we’d have collapsed long ago. So no, you can’t generalize an entire generation as foolish—doing so only highlights your own lack of perspective.
Maybe the world runs on averages. It might take a handful of really bright people to move the world forward whilst everyone else languishes in blissful ignorance.
Me today with a co-worker, discussing Kingdom Come 1. They were impressed with the game’s attention to detail but one thing stood out, the save-game potion label/icon “doesn’t look quite right”…
Well, it’s a floppy disk!
“Huh?”
You’re right, my bad, it’s Total Commander smh
I introduced my kids to video games (the “good ones” 😁) and they have always had a PC+old consoles, so now they know at least the basics, and mods gta5 and minecraft, etc and are generally at ease with things.
Still prefers mobile apps to photoshop though 😔 you can only bring the horse to the water, you can’t make him drink.
