6 ms·

I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of ho

I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. That didn't happen. It's still people interested in tech actually learning the tech and your average high schooler doesn't graduate able to write drivers, create software or hand-code websites and web servers. It was a belief in the coming of a tech-utopia where every young person would know those things. But it doesn't just come automatically. There has been a huge surge in usage, driven by increased accessibility, standardization and user interfaces that don't require prior knowledge. A lot of the older generation (probably mostly the less tech savvy ones) still believe we are getting there and have at least somewhat gotten there. We really haven't.

rc-5 7y ago
Right - of course, I don't really know the cultural background, having not been around when those expectations were developing.
- reificator 7y ago
  I was around when those expectations were developing, and my frustration with trying to get any kind of computer education from school taught me early on that it was up to me to dig in. None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested. And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The only cs experience even available to me growing up was a summer camp in town at a local college, where we spent three weeks making a four function calculator in java. I didn't write another line of code for years after that experience, which was pretty unfortunate.
derefr 7y ago
On the other hand, a lot of things that seemed hard really did just turn out to be unfamiliar. Word processing, for example: if you expect a five-year-old to learn it as a matter of course on the way to do other things, they can and will. There's probably a bunch of things like that. Little things. Kids know how to set reminders/create calendar events. Teens can intuit the usage of ACLs in multi-channel group chats like Discord servers. Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc.
- pagutierrezn 7y ago
  >Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc. But many kids have difficulties adquiring a new skill that requires reading because videos are not enough
  - asdff 7y ago
    Stack overflow questions should be flagged for deletion if the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page
    - donkeyd 7y ago
      Or the answer could be exactly that the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page. In stead refusing the man a fish, teach the man how to fish.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      I'm only looking inside the man page if searching online fails me. I'm surprised how often I find answers inside a man page, but not on the internet. It doesn't feel right.
- donkeyd 7y ago
  > Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. I'm not sure what kids you're referring to, but when I look at my 14 yo sister and her friends, nearly all they know how to do is start Snapchat. If they'd get a cryptical error they'd call a family member to fix it for them. I feel like millenials have broader knowledge of computers than the newer generations, because these days most things just work. And when iPhones don't work, you don't really get error messages or debugging tools, they just don't work. When I was young, stuff didn't just work. I could tell by the sound of my dial up modem whether it would succesfully connect. I could modify the registry to fix problems, I could put more RAM in my PC if it became too slow and it would take hours to reinstall Windows. This is not true anymore. Kids these days use more computers that no longer allow this type of tinkering (Apple devices, Consoles, etc.). A small group though, still builds gaming PCs and buys a Raspberry Pi to tinker with. It's no longer a necessity to be able to get on the internet though, it's a choice. The issue with your statement is that it generalizes. In the end, there are still lots of kids without a clue how things work and a bunch of them who do. It's kind of like car ownership. Most people will drive one, but most won't have a clue how to change a spark plug. You can't make a statement about this that applies to a whole generation, however.
jcranmer 7y ago
Probably any millennial will recognize this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ -- it's Microsoft Word of the late 90s, with every single toolbar enabled. I'm sure all of us, at one point or another, will have discovered how to enable every toolbar and then do so for pure entertainment value. In my experience (admittedly, that's a pretty narrow experience), kids are insatiably curious. They will do things and try things just to see what happens. And I suspect older people are more reluctant to try out options if they are uncertain about their effects. So, in general, I think you end up in a situation where children generally know how to use modern technology better than their parents, and that this is pretty timeless. What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. Programmable VCRs gave you remotes with a dozen extra buttons with cryptic notes on them like "Counter/Remain", and people had no idea how to make the clock stop blinking "12:00". You had text editors with a hundred buttons labelled with seemingly esoteric iconography (quick, which button in the Microsoft Word image ran the spellchecker?). Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better than adults, when it was merely that we actually understood only the tools we used.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Word is not a text editor. Neither is Excel a list editor or a database. The inscrutable features of these tools have an actual purpose for the minority of users that need them.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    There are lots of people who use Excel spreadsheets as databases. Just as there are lots of people who use Word for nothing more than editing (sometimes rich) text.
    - csdreamer7 7y ago
BubRoss 7y ago
> there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integrate computers into their lives from the start, which is also true. I never heard anyone say that kids born in the late 90s would somehow in general understand the inner working of computers.
- tapland 7y ago
  I'd say kids born in the late 90s missed that discussion by a bit. When you hit the teenage years we were already smartphone era which pretty much was the end of it.
- michaelt 7y ago
  I was born in the mid 80s; in my youth many families didn't have a home computer, and computer education in schools was... less developed than it is now. So if you met a kid who was good with computers in 1996, in all probability they sat down at their family computer and figured things out for themselves. There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same. With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer. You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design
- fmajid 7y ago
  Books like "Growing Up Digital" by Don Tapscott (that introduced the term "Digital Natives" IIRC) were very influential. Disclaimer: I own a copy from the office, but I never more than skimmed it. Like most business books, it's a couple pages' worth of insights diluted with anecdotes into a 300+ plus doorstop.
- 7y ago
rkagerer 7y ago
I lament any generation of computer users who grow up without learning the mechanics underlying their hardware and software platform. But to some degree, this is what happens when a technology becomes commoditized. e.g. Once upon a time automobile ownership involved knowing a thing or two about how to make repairs. Today, I bet a significant number of drivers would get lost trying to change a tire. Your tech gets straightforward enough to use that humans adopt it as simply another tool to get done something they need. If I didn't know how offensive some of the nuts and bolts under the hood are these days (ads, tracking, the patchwork of ugly bugs and hacks in some of the software and drivers, etc), I'd call it a sign of success of the industry.
ljf 7y ago
I never remember anyone thinking we'd all understand how it worked under the hood, but that we'd all learn how to make it part of our lives and make use of the tools that plenty of older people had no interest in learning or using. My dad refused to learn to use a pc for years (until he wanted to research some architecture and suddenly he got the point of it all). But he still hasn't made computers or the Internet part of his life in the way most 18 year olds have.

rc-5 7y ago

Right - of course, I don't really know the cultural background, having not been around when those expectations were developing.

reificator 7y ago
I was around when those expectations were developing, and my frustration with trying to get any kind of computer education from school taught me early on that it was up to me to dig in. None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested. And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.
- asdff 7y ago
  The only cs experience even available to me growing up was a summer camp in town at a local college, where we spent three weeks making a four function calculator in java. I didn't write another line of code for years after that experience, which was pretty unfortunate.

derefr 7y ago

On the other hand, a lot of things that seemed hard really did just turn out to be unfamiliar. Word processing, for example: if you expect a five-year-old to learn it as a matter of course on the way to do other things, they can and will. There's probably a bunch of things like that. Little things. Kids know how to set reminders/create calendar events. Teens can intuit the usage of ACLs in multi-channel group chats like Discord servers. Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc.

pagutierrezn 7y ago
>Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc. But many kids have difficulties adquiring a new skill that requires reading because videos are not enough
- asdff 7y ago
  Stack overflow questions should be flagged for deletion if the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page
  - donkeyd 7y ago
    Or the answer could be exactly that the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page. In stead refusing the man a fish, teach the man how to fish.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    I'm only looking inside the man page if searching online fails me. I'm surprised how often I find answers inside a man page, but not on the internet. It doesn't feel right.
donkeyd 7y ago
> Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. I'm not sure what kids you're referring to, but when I look at my 14 yo sister and her friends, nearly all they know how to do is start Snapchat. If they'd get a cryptical error they'd call a family member to fix it for them. I feel like millenials have broader knowledge of computers than the newer generations, because these days most things just work. And when iPhones don't work, you don't really get error messages or debugging tools, they just don't work. When I was young, stuff didn't just work. I could tell by the sound of my dial up modem whether it would succesfully connect. I could modify the registry to fix problems, I could put more RAM in my PC if it became too slow and it would take hours to reinstall Windows. This is not true anymore. Kids these days use more computers that no longer allow this type of tinkering (Apple devices, Consoles, etc.). A small group though, still builds gaming PCs and buys a Raspberry Pi to tinker with. It's no longer a necessity to be able to get on the internet though, it's a choice. The issue with your statement is that it generalizes. In the end, there are still lots of kids without a clue how things work and a bunch of them who do. It's kind of like car ownership. Most people will drive one, but most won't have a clue how to change a spark plug. You can't make a statement about this that applies to a whole generation, however.

jcranmer 7y ago

Probably any millennial will recognize this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ -- it's Microsoft Word of the late 90s, with every single toolbar enabled. I'm sure all of us, at one point or another, will have discovered how to enable every toolbar and then do so for pure entertainment value. In my experience (admittedly, that's a pretty narrow experience), kids are insatiably curious. They will do things and try things just to see what happens. And I suspect older people are more reluctant to try out options if they are uncertain about their effects. So, in general, I think you end up in a situation where children generally know how to use modern technology better than their parents, and that this is pretty timeless. What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. Programmable VCRs gave you remotes with a dozen extra buttons with cryptic notes on them like "Counter/Remain", and people had no idea how to make the clock stop blinking "12:00". You had text editors with a hundred buttons labelled with seemingly esoteric iconography (quick, which button in the Microsoft Word image ran the spellchecker?). Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better than adults, when it was merely that we actually understood only the tools we used.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Word is not a text editor. Neither is Excel a list editor or a database. The inscrutable features of these tools have an actual purpose for the minority of users that need them.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  There are lots of people who use Excel spreadsheets as databases. Just as there are lots of people who use Word for nothing more than editing (sometimes rich) text.
  - csdreamer7 7y ago

BubRoss 7y ago

> there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integrate computers into their lives from the start, which is also true. I never heard anyone say that kids born in the late 90s would somehow in general understand the inner working of computers.

tapland 7y ago
I'd say kids born in the late 90s missed that discussion by a bit. When you hit the teenage years we were already smartphone era which pretty much was the end of it.
michaelt 7y ago
I was born in the mid 80s; in my youth many families didn't have a home computer, and computer education in schools was... less developed than it is now. So if you met a kid who was good with computers in 1996, in all probability they sat down at their family computer and figured things out for themselves. There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same. With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer. You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design
fmajid 7y ago
Books like "Growing Up Digital" by Don Tapscott (that introduced the term "Digital Natives" IIRC) were very influential. Disclaimer: I own a copy from the office, but I never more than skimmed it. Like most business books, it's a couple pages' worth of insights diluted with anecdotes into a 300+ plus doorstop.
7y ago

rkagerer 7y ago

I lament any generation of computer users who grow up without learning the mechanics underlying their hardware and software platform. But to some degree, this is what happens when a technology becomes commoditized. e.g. Once upon a time automobile ownership involved knowing a thing or two about how to make repairs. Today, I bet a significant number of drivers would get lost trying to change a tire. Your tech gets straightforward enough to use that humans adopt it as simply another tool to get done something they need. If I didn't know how offensive some of the nuts and bolts under the hood are these days (ads, tracking, the patchwork of ugly bugs and hacks in some of the software and drivers, etc), I'd call it a sign of success of the industry.

ljf 7y ago

I never remember anyone thinking we'd all understand how it worked under the hood, but that we'd all learn how to make it part of our lives and make use of the tools that plenty of older people had no interest in learning or using. My dad refused to learn to use a pc for years (until he wanted to research some architecture and suddenly he got the point of it all). But he still hasn't made computers or the Internet part of his life in the way most 18 year olds have.