Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.
The natural result of getting rid of computer literacy classes.
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I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn’t figure out what a “file” was or how to “email” it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It’s hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.
Gen X here. Honestly, I was a shit typer until I got a keyboard for my sega dreamcast and bought “Typing of the dead”.
I went from hunt and peck to well over 100wpm.
Duh. They use phones mostly. A lot of the gen z people I know are just as bad as boomers with tech. Millennials and gen x had that sweet spot of “actually having to learn how shit works not just iphone go brrr.”
People who know nothing more than how to operate a smartphone are not tech savvy. They can’t even do that properly. Never seen anyone from that generation use an ad blocker or revanced or anything else that combats enshittification.
I’m a programmer. I write hundreds of lines of code a day (of varying levels of quality ofc). I also fix technology (phones, laptops, desktops. tablets, etc). I’m probably one of the most “tech-savvy” people I know. I very rarely type faster than 70 wpm. it’s just not necessary for what most of us are doing.
But think about arguing online! It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm, but usually stay in the 100 wpm range.
Programming? Idk, I spend more time thinking than typing personally. Good code requires you to consider all the corner cases and such.
It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm
I’m limited by the rate at which I can think of bullshit.
I agree the ‘tech-savvy’ phrase has outdone its use. We should use a better phrase, like ‘tech-indoctrinated’ or ‘tablet-fed’ to give a better perspective into these younger kids’ digital lifestyles.
I can see the alphas railing against the term “tablet-fed”. They are NOT gonna like that.
That’s gonna be what us cranky old millennials call them later while we would be yelling at them to get off our lawn. But we won’t yell that, because none of us will own any yards.
The number of people i’m seeing use caps lock instead of shift to do capital letters have been increasing. “Oh you can do that?”
It seems like a kind of horseshoe thing where Boomers are computer illiterate because they weren’t around when they were growing up, while Zoomers are computer illiterate because they grew up primarily interfacing with technology via the simplified, corporate-approved mobile phone platforms. Gen X and Milliennials came of age when computers were still more of a Wild West.
Gen X that think Gen Zs are tech savvy are probably the people that the actual Gen X nerds shake their head at when we have to teach them how to put an URL in the address bar instead of searching for Gmail and clicking on the link every. goddamn. time.
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.
that’s because they’re not using computers or doing work
Gen Z is app savvy, not tech savvy. Very very different.
There’s a science fiction book series which name I cannot remember for the life of me but in there is a generation ship traveling from Earth to some other star system and it’s been going for centuries.
No one really understands anymore how to operate any of the systems on the ship. They just know which buttons to press, but they have no real understanding of what it’s actually doing.
A lot of app users seem to be like that. They can get the app to do what they want but they don’t really understand why that’s working or what other things the app could do.
WALL-E
Not Foundation, but sounds a bit like it. Galactic empire collapses because no one knows how the technology that powers it works anymore.
No it wasn’t Foundation. I don’t think it was from a very well-known author all I can remember about it is that and they had genetically engineered cats that glowed blue to detect radiation leakages.
The whole ship was designed so that people could forget how to operate it, and it wouldn’t really matter. Can’t really remember the justification for just not writing things down and keeping knowledge.
W40K has the same premise, except the “app-savvy” people are cyborg tech-priests praying to machine spirits, and which button to press is codified into rites.
Do public schools not teach keyboarding anymore? I ask because I had a keyboarding classe two-hrs 1day per week in grade school plus a full class one year in 7th grade and then again for a full year in high school, and they were always taught by some of the oldest teachers in the school. -My high-school teacher started his career teaching typewriter typing something like three or four decades prior to teaching me in 2004. It seems strange that new young people aren’t getting that same basic education.
I don’t know if they do but if they do I doubt they’ve improved. The technique taught by many touch typing courses is a recipe for a wrist injury. It blows my mind that regulatory bodies aren’t calling for keyboard layout reform. The “normal” row stagger keyboard as well as the qwerty layout should be in museums, not on billions of “modern” computers around the world.
As someone who uses colemak only on my phone because I was curious, what kind of layouts and configurateon would you recommend as a new default?
Funny enough I use Colemak with my ergonomic (split, columnar stagger) keyboards only, and qwerty on mobile (and on my laptop since it has qwerty keyboard labels).
I recommend, in order of increasing effort:
- briefly learn touch typing but then develop your own style with a more relaxed wrist position that de-emphasizes excessive hand movement, uncomfortable movements and crazy pinky stretches
- get a columnar stagger, split keyboard
- learn colemak (I like Colemak DH)
What made you pick Colemak over Dvorak? I am not criticizing your choice, just curious. I chose Dvorak because I found the vowels on the home row cut my hand movement a lot. I fully agree with you on the pinky stretches, that’s my worst movement, which I triage by turning on KDE’s “Caps Lock is another backspace” option.
Dvorak was designed a long time ago for typewriters, i.e. it tries to alternate hand movements, which some people like but many find it makes them slower.
Colemak is meant to be closer to qwerty and was designed for computer keyboards.
Then again I’m sure Dvorak is already miles better than qwerty and the differencesneith Colemak are minor. I think the reason I chose it originally was because of some youtube video but I don’t remember what it was called.
Also I really like the Colemal DH mod.
