4 ms·

Not even our current youth is fluent in technology. Clicking on a webbrowser and connecting to WiFi is not hard. Still have to help people younger and older t

by sigi45 8y ago

Not even our current youth is fluent in technology. Clicking on a webbrowser and connecting to WiFi is not hard. Still have to help people younger and older than me. There are non user, user and user who actually know what they use.

kungtotte 8y ago
Anecdotally I prefer helping my grandma's generation (she's 80) than my peers and younger (35). My grandma knows she doesn't know anything. She won't do anything she's unsure of, won't click any link or button without getting my advice first, won't install stupid shit because she doesn't know how and even if she did she's not confident enough to do it on her own. The worst that she could ever do is fatfinger something with her crummy arthritis fingers and I have to take a 15 minute drive to her place and spend another 15 minutes fixing it. People that are my age or younger though? They'll click anything on Facebook and share their information everywhere, will download anything and install it without second thoughts. Their devices are the digital equivalent to Typhoid Mary. Since they think they know stuff, they'll click through dozens of links and dialog popups so even getting them to answer the question "So what did you do?" is a monumental ask, much less fixing the issues they've caused.
- 51lver 8y ago
  "I didn't do anything! I just XYZ" I think they just want to disclaim responsibility so you'll be the one to blame. Mechanics deal with that a lot too.
- dTal 8y ago
  I'm just going to nitpick a little here - I don't think Typhoid Mary is a good analogy. She had a single communicable disease and was asymptomatic. This does not describe the computers of people who blindly click stuff. Incidentally, are there any common computer viruses these days that are spread by "contact"? Perhaps it's my biased perspective as a Linux user, but I was under the impression that despite people's tendency to blame "a virus" as a way to avoid responsibility, modern malware typically requires one to download and run something. Stuxnet is the only "virulent" example I can think of, and that wasn't exactly typical software.
- dkersten 8y ago
  > My grandma knows she doesn't know anything. She won't do anything she's unsure of, won't click any link or button without getting my advice first This is a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the reasons you mention, but a curse because people like that won't figure things out for themselves, since they're afraid to click on things. But if her asking for advice isn't a burden (and it shouldn't be unless it happens all the time), then this is definitely preferable to the people who screw things up and then you have to clean up after them :) > Their devices are the digital equivalent to Typhoid Mary. Someone asked me for some help with something once and I needed to use the browser, Internet Explorer of course. I'm not at all joking or exaggerating when I say that half of the vertical screen space was taken up with toolbars. How someone can have half the screen taken up and not realise something is wrong, I will never know, especially since it wasn't always like that.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    If you browse the web on a mobile device it seems "normal" for web pages to devote 1/3 of the space to telling you to switch to a mobile app which you know is worse than the web site, or to a mobile web site which either looks exactly the same or looks worse on a mobile device. Also there are the cookie popups, the GDPR popups, the advertising popups, the popups to pop up the pop ups, etc. So it is a clear "normalization of deviance" situation.
    - dkersten 8y ago
      This wasn't on a mobile device and it was some years ago before mobile web was quite as prevalent. I take your point though, I guess nowadays it may not seem so odd. I also learned that people seem to put up with these things (instead of just closing them). I was watching someone play a game on youtube, where every time they picked up an item it would show a popup at the bottom of the screen showing what it was. You had to press a button on they gamepad to close the popup and the person playing rarely did, causing them to stack up taking up a lot of the screen. My OCD would have made me close them immediately, but clearly some people seem to barely even see them. I guess its similar with toolbars/cookie popups...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- peterlk 8y ago
  > People that are my age or younger though? They'll click anything on Facebook and share their information everywhere, will download anything and install it without second thoughts I gotta say, though, this was excellent experiential learning for me as a kid. Having to fix my parents' computer because I downloaded and ran tons of viruses called "myfavoritesong.mp3.exe" or "theSimsPiratedEdition.exe". Tugging out the internals of Windows XP and learning that I could fix my mistakes with enough patience was an enormously useful lesson. Giving away my real identity online was basically unthinkable, though. Not sure how that would play out today.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >getting them to answer the question "So what did you do?" is a monumental ask, much less fixing the issues they've caused. Protip: remote desktop. Trying to do support over the phone is infuriating for both parties. It's almost always quicker and less frustrating to talk them through opening a remote desktop session so you can fix the issue yourself. TeamViewer is free for personal use, it's quick and easy to install, it's cross-platform and it works well even over crummy connections. There's a reason why all the tech support scammers use it.

by sigi45 8y ago

kungtotte 8y ago

Anecdotally I prefer helping my grandma's generation (she's 80) than my peers and younger (35). My grandma knows she doesn't know anything. She won't do anything she's unsure of, won't click any link or button without getting my advice first, won't install stupid shit because she doesn't know how and even if she did she's not confident enough to do it on her own. The worst that she could ever do is fatfinger something with her crummy arthritis fingers and I have to take a 15 minute drive to her place and spend another 15 minutes fixing it. People that are my age or younger though? They'll click anything on Facebook and share their information everywhere, will download anything and install it without second thoughts. Their devices are the digital equivalent to Typhoid Mary. Since they think they know stuff, they'll click through dozens of links and dialog popups so even getting them to answer the question "So what did you do?" is a monumental ask, much less fixing the issues they've caused.

51lver 8y ago
"I didn't do anything! I just XYZ" I think they just want to disclaim responsibility so you'll be the one to blame. Mechanics deal with that a lot too.
dTal 8y ago
I'm just going to nitpick a little here - I don't think Typhoid Mary is a good analogy. She had a single communicable disease and was asymptomatic. This does not describe the computers of people who blindly click stuff. Incidentally, are there any common computer viruses these days that are spread by "contact"? Perhaps it's my biased perspective as a Linux user, but I was under the impression that despite people's tendency to blame "a virus" as a way to avoid responsibility, modern malware typically requires one to download and run something. Stuxnet is the only "virulent" example I can think of, and that wasn't exactly typical software.
dkersten 8y ago
> My grandma knows she doesn't know anything. She won't do anything she's unsure of, won't click any link or button without getting my advice first This is a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the reasons you mention, but a curse because people like that won't figure things out for themselves, since they're afraid to click on things. But if her asking for advice isn't a burden (and it shouldn't be unless it happens all the time), then this is definitely preferable to the people who screw things up and then you have to clean up after them :) > Their devices are the digital equivalent to Typhoid Mary. Someone asked me for some help with something once and I needed to use the browser, Internet Explorer of course. I'm not at all joking or exaggerating when I say that half of the vertical screen space was taken up with toolbars. How someone can have half the screen taken up and not realise something is wrong, I will never know, especially since it wasn't always like that.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  If you browse the web on a mobile device it seems "normal" for web pages to devote 1/3 of the space to telling you to switch to a mobile app which you know is worse than the web site, or to a mobile web site which either looks exactly the same or looks worse on a mobile device. Also there are the cookie popups, the GDPR popups, the advertising popups, the popups to pop up the pop ups, etc. So it is a clear "normalization of deviance" situation.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    This wasn't on a mobile device and it was some years ago before mobile web was quite as prevalent. I take your point though, I guess nowadays it may not seem so odd. I also learned that people seem to put up with these things (instead of just closing them). I was watching someone play a game on youtube, where every time they picked up an item it would show a popup at the bottom of the screen showing what it was. You had to press a button on they gamepad to close the popup and the person playing rarely did, causing them to stack up taking up a lot of the screen. My OCD would have made me close them immediately, but clearly some people seem to barely even see them. I guess its similar with toolbars/cookie popups...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
peterlk 8y ago
> People that are my age or younger though? They'll click anything on Facebook and share their information everywhere, will download anything and install it without second thoughts I gotta say, though, this was excellent experiential learning for me as a kid. Having to fix my parents' computer because I downloaded and ran tons of viruses called "myfavoritesong.mp3.exe" or "theSimsPiratedEdition.exe". Tugging out the internals of Windows XP and learning that I could fix my mistakes with enough patience was an enormously useful lesson. Giving away my real identity online was basically unthinkable, though. Not sure how that would play out today.
jdietrich 8y ago
>getting them to answer the question "So what did you do?" is a monumental ask, much less fixing the issues they've caused. Protip: remote desktop. Trying to do support over the phone is infuriating for both parties. It's almost always quicker and less frustrating to talk them through opening a remote desktop session so you can fix the issue yourself. TeamViewer is free for personal use, it's quick and easy to install, it's cross-platform and it works well even over crummy connections. There's a reason why all the tech support scammers use it.