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Not all young people are ‘digital natives’
- keiferski 7y agoThis link is about inequality in the U.K., but what's even more interesting to me is the massive number of people that don't use the Internet at all. Only about half of the world population is online and there are dozens of countries where only 20-30% of the population has "accessed the Internet in the last 12 months from any device, including mobile phones." - DRC (8.62% of 81,339,988 people are online) - Nigeria (27.68% of 190,886,311) - Indonesia (32.29% of 263,991,379) - Pakistan (36.18% of 220,892,340) We truly are only at the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
- Kaiyou 7y agoWhat's the point of looking at third world countries? They don't even have running water everywhere, of course not everyone there has Internet access.
- keiferski 7y agoThe point is that designing interfaces and technology in general should not assume that everyone is a "digital native." It's only a matter of time until the entire world goes online and with that comes a lot of startup opportunity.
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- luckylion 7y agoSure, but you're not designing interfaces and technology for those that aren't online, are you? Like, you're not making an app for rural Pakistanis that can't read and don't have smartphones. The whole world might be online at some point, but you'll still not design your apps for Pakistan, because the difference in adoption speed of technologies, trends, cultures etc will not go away just because they are technically online now. That's not to say that Pakistan itself won't be a strong market to target. But It's a niche market, you'll likely not target the US, Pakistan, and France in one app, just like you don't today.
- smabie 7y agoYou'd be surprised how many people in third world countries have internet and cell phones but no running water or electricity.
- Kaiyou 7y agoNo, I'm not. Having internet and cellphones enables advertising and location tracking. Running water and electricity doesn't.
- reaperducer 7y agoThe United States has a shocking number of people who are not on the internet, as well. The company I work for deals primarily in healthcare for the poor, and even though we have a fleet of web sites, social media accounts, and a text messaging program, we have to also send everything out on paper in order to make sure we reach as many people as possible. And since we're in healthcare, we don't get to be all SV Bubble about it and say, "Well, they should just go buy some money and get a smartphone." My company requires that all departments have some amount of hands-on with our customers, including us button pushers, often in their homes and neighborhoods. It's amazing the number of people I've met who have no computer, no internet connection, not even a cell phone of their own. Often a single flip phone will be shared by all the members of a family. Sometimes, a single flip phone will be shared by four or five families living next to one another.
- tomrod 7y agoSimilar space here. Don't discount SMS as a delivery channel, it hits a surprising number of folks, including those without a fixed address.
- reaperducer 7y agoYou're right. Last I heard, we had about 90,000 people in our text messaging program.
- microcolonel 7y agoI mean, I'm a professional software developer (among other things), and when I'm commuting in highly populated areas on regional trains, the quality of Canada's telecommunications networks, the most expensive in the world to subscribers, is so extremely poor that SMS is the most reliable way to reach me during that time. It is pure luck that my workplace isn't in a deadzone for LTE or even 3G strong enough even to refresh Hacker News. SMS is absolutely necessary for me, I still have a basic GSM phone for phone calls and SMS because it is more reliable than current stuff and has a month of standby time.
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- qwerty123457 7y agoSomething like 99.9% of the people from 3rd world countries who currently don't use the internet would end up being lurkers even if they did get connected. So no, nothing would really change apart from ad revenue and view counts perhaps.
- Hokusai 7y ago> But our social and media users are a group marked by narrow and limited digital media use and a lack of data literacy. They are likely to come from some of the poorest households in the country. I see this when I open Youtube in a private Window. My feed is full of videos about movies, software engineering, history, ... I just do not get what the most popular videos are about. With TV there was a similar drift toward low quality content. But, there was a limit how low it could go and at prime time they needed to cater to everybody, including the middle class. With Youtube and social media, you can live in your own bubble of low quality content. Facebook is just the same but much worse. Many young people are as close to be digital natives as I am of being an airplane pilot for flying frequently.
- wuunderbar 7y agoBy what measure are you determining what YouTube content low quality and what is not? I just opened it up in incognito mode (IP located in California) and I see the first 5 as: - Eminem music video - Gordon Ramsey - Jimmy Kimmel - 4 levels of onion rings - A couple building a shipping container home Nothing about these seems low-quality at all. Is it just because it's not that educational like software engineering and history?
- martin_a 7y agoWell, for Germany it's normally some rap songs (where views seem to be bought to push unknown artists), turkish soap operas and low quality circle-jerk clickbait where some Youtubers comment on what other Youtubers did. It's really a shame. These days there's some Covid 19 coverage in there, but that only slightly makes it better.
- harikb 7y agoI am not sure if incognito will help you avoid Geo and other non-cookie based personalization
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- Awelton 7y agoThe thing I've noticed about the younger generation is that they are better at consuming tech intuitively, but mostly have no idea what makes it work. They seem to be able to use technology almost instinctively, but if they have to troubleshoot or create anything they don't know where to start. You have to design UI for 'digital natives' to be just as user friendly as you would for baby boomers that didn't see their first computer until after they were grown. Both of them would be equally lost if you plopped them down at a terminal with nothing but a blinking cursor. This is generalizing, of course, there are exceptions. Anecdotally the only thing that separates a 9 year old and a 60 year old is that the 60 year old won't want to touch a computer because they are afraid they will break something and the 9 year old will mash away until they get where they want to go. Neither knows or cares how or why it works.
- irrational 7y agoThis has been my experience. I have kids from 6 to 23. They all come running to me anytime they have a technical issue. I’ve tried to teach them troubleshooting steps or how to search for help, but they aren’t interested. As far as they are concerned it should just work and if it doesn’t it’s someone else’s job to figure out why. Their friends all appear to be the same. I know of only one teenager who has a glimmer of interest in understanding what is happening behind the screen.
- Spooky23 7y agoTV and radio was the same way. My grandfather knew how to replace tubes and test circuits. I knew about adjusting antennas. My son’s technical knowledge of TV is charging the remote, rebooting the router and reseating connectors.
- WJW 7y agoWell clearly. Almost everyone alive today is an "electricity native", but it's only a very small minority that can safely install wiring and the like. Everyone else just interacts with the consumerized version of it where everything interesting but potentially dangerous has been abstracted away. There is no reason to believe that younger people are more savvy about the workings of digital technology just because they grew up with consumerized versions of it.
- microcolonel 7y agoIf anything, there's kinda a middle ground age right now where you can expect greater general understanding of computing concepts, with both people young and older than that being more ignorant.
- rjbwork 7y agoYep. When I was 2 my parents got an old computer from my uncle's business that he was replacing and set it up in their living room for me. I was learning the command line as a toddler. I'm certainly no guru, but that kind of formative experience was certainly a big part of my choosing this career path. Kids of today grow up with ipads and iphones and have no cause to go poking around and experimenting with the basic functionality of their computers.
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- jccalhoun 7y agoI teach at a community college in the USA. Maybe 10 percent of them are what I would consider computer literate. 80% can get by but the other 10% are very computer illiterate. On reddit I will sometimes see memes about tech illiterate professors but they only think that because they don't see the rest of their classmates try to use tech in front of them. I had typed up a list of things that I see students struggle with when they try to use computers but I don't want to make it seem like I am sitting around "look at these kids these days!" because in reality in a class or say 20 there will only be 1-2 that really struggle with computers. -- Of course this will make it a real shit show with all the schools at all levels going to "elearning" to deal with the Coronovirus.
- Avamander 7y agoI teach cybersecurity for middle school kids and organize events, I'd say the same, approximately 1% is actually competent. Though, I think one of the biggest obstacles for a regular student is their utter lack of knowledge how to actually use a keyboard, teaching that the shift key exists is new knowledge for so many. Thankfully it can be rapidly improved with very little teaching, and things like coding actually become much easier when they make fewer typos and waste less time typing. Telling middle school teachers that instead of Word, spend four lessons at the beginning actually teaching the tools they're using, is usually received with a lot of negativity, it's somehow considered outdated to learn how to type.
- jccalhoun 7y agototally agree with the lack of experience with keyboards. The shift thing reminded me of a student last semester who I saw working and put the caps lock on to type a short acronym like APCA or something.
- jeroenhd 7y agoI'm far from experienced with keyboards but I do that sometimes. I use shift for starting words or sentences with capitals but every now and then will use caps lock for upper case acronyms. The two extra key strokes to toggle caps lock are easier than keeping the shift key(s) down when typing, especially when typing acronyms I'm unfamiliar with. It's just a force of habit. People toggling caps for every capital letter will make me shudder though. I've seen them even in (introductory) programming classes. I suppose in an age where most typing is done on smart phones, it makes sense that people use the software-keyboard-style toggle instead of the "old-fashioned" shift keys. Then again, every day programmers learn about stuff like control+delete/backspace, shift+arrow keys and other keyboard navigation tricks common in almost any program these days. It's a set of tricks and tips that you need to happen to stumble across to learn about, and if the teacher doesn't know how to type properly an entire class of school children will suffer the same faith. You can easily spend your entire high school time using caps lock for capitalization without anyone even noticing or correcting you.
- Ghjklov 7y agohttp://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283 Just posting because I was reminded of this
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI don’t understand how this is surprising. We have reached a point where devices and software are working well enough to not worry about how they work. The same happened with cars and probably a lot of appliances. Some decades ago you needed to know how they work so you could repair them. Nowadays not many people have even the foggiest idea how a car works. They just use it.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoI've seen HNers assert that everyone should learn to code or know how a computer works which I think is just a level of hubris because they themselves happen to care about those things. Or confuse it with something particularly positive about themselves. Meanwhile, there are plenty of things those same people don't care about knowing, like how an engine might work, how their girlfriend of five years puts on makeup despite her doing it daily, how electrical/water/gas works in their house, the history of civilization, how their government works, etc. Life is a crap sandwich in so many ways that I don't think these expectations are fair until we're immortal with infinite leisure time.
- nicoburns 7y agoDisagree with this. As a 26 year software developer, it's been fascinating to see just how many of my peers in non-software industries are now interested in learning to code because it's useful for their jobs. Coding allows you to talk to machines, and machines are everywhere in modern society. Here in the UK, basic coding is now taught in schools (from primary school!). And I think this makes sense. Not everybody's going to be an expert. But the basics are incredibly useful, just as with math, science, history, etc. Note: most of the other things you list as things that people don't care about knowing are also taught to a basic level in schools.
- Izkata 7y ago> it's been fascinating to see just how many of my peers in non-software industries are now interested in learning to code because it's useful for their jobs. Agreed here. One of my co-workers started a coding club at lunch, for people in other departments who don't know how to code. For several of them it's changed from black magic to an amazing productivity enhancer.
- k__ 7y agoI saw a report one day, where they interviewed many young people (<25) about their tech usage. Most only used a smartphone and many of them only knew about well known apps like FB, IG, SC and WA, etc. They were "natives" in their apps, but most of them didn't know much besides that. Which is probably what you would expect and its probably still better than the mindless TV junkies from before.
- dsalzman 7y agoClassic blog post from 2013 on this subject. http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
- sorenjan 7y agoI saw a teacher somewhere say that he had noticed that kids increasingly have trouble understanding how file paths work in computers. It's something I think is very intuitive and key to use a computer, but I guess when you're only used to smartphones you rarely if ever have to think about files and folders. This is exactly why the Raspberry Pi was created, to enable kids to get computer experience in a world full of locked down phones and tablets.
- Adaptive 7y agoI spent a WEEK out of my computational basics curriculum teaching middle school students just about paths. Just about FILES and paths. Did this with a VPS and chromebooks SSHd in. Also, later, Raspberry Pi units. They simply don't understand computers when they walk in my classroom door. They understand mobile app user interfaces.
- luckylion 7y agoI blame Apple for people not knowing about paths. An acquaintance always used windows and then switched to Mac. She usually had her stuff neatly organized, but a year later, there was zero organization any more, she was just using the finder. If search is good enough, you don't need organization. Folders and files are hierarchical categorization, you don't need that if you can access everything by search.
- vikramkr 7y agoFor security purposes and everything it's probably better to abstract away the idea of files and wall off apps like on mobile, and usability wise this is probably making tech more accessible to users to have super efficient search. They might not know how to use a file manager, but they still know how to use their computer
- luckylion 7y agoYeah, it's absolutely fine for casual consumers, but similarly to cars, you're going to be really lost if something on one of those multiple layers of abstractions malfunctions. People will have to accept paying for computer repairs like they do for car repairs. Moving everything into the cloud won't help; Google will be weird and generally has no support, so you'll need somebody to figure out why those docs aren't visible in drive.
- PopeRigby 7y agoThis is mostly my experience. I'm 18 and a lot of the people that go to my school only know how to use social media, and come to me when they need tech help. My closer friends are more tech literate, but they still come running to me when they need help with something more complicated. I supposed I should be happy that they even have interest in getting help. Most would just give up.
- ineedasername 7y agoAnd not all slightly older people meet the expectations of tech use for that slightly older generation. I think it's not uncommon for HN, but I have a minimal social media presence, and am rarely an early adopter-- more like a stage-2 adopter once something is proven, and very much not on board with social media adding anything positive to my life. So-called digital natives are, I think, becoming increasingly skeptical as well, in a grass-roots phase of limiting contact to closer, well-known friends/acquaintances. Not yet a majority, no, but the beginning of what has the potential to be a trend.
- heyflyguy 7y agoI changed my business recently to a situation where I deal with alot of millenial aged college graduates. For all the talk of this generation "growing up with the internet", I am consistently surprised by how poor their non social media skills are. Things like copying files from a thumbdrive to a computer, filling out a spreadsheet, adding a header or footer to a document - sometimes it is quite shocking. I graduated from High School in 1994 and had some computer classes leading up to that. I learned how to type a letter in wordperfect. I learned how to save it to my floppy disk. I learned how to use a spreadsheet to make a budget. What has happened that we don't teach these basic things any more? Social media is important as a medium but basic job skills are really being left to the employer to teach. Of course, it could be the kind of young person I am contracting. But they are finance majors, political majors, and so on.
- EamonnMR 7y agoGrowing up with the social implications of the internet isn't the same as growing up with PCs. Smartphones are now what people know how to use and you don't interact with them the same way you interact with a desktop PC. Files? What are files. There was a time before technical literacy and now we're in a time after it. It was fun while it lasted.
- shoo 7y agoSmartphones offer a much more user friendly, accessible way of doing common tasks, but there is a much higher barrier of entry to go from "software user" to a hobbyist "software creator". Compare to microcomputers that might be sitting in primary school classrooms 25-30 years ago, where you turn the machine on and seconds later you're staring at a command line that directly interprets BASIC.
- conjectures 7y agoI worry this will have an effect on equality of opportunity in the not-too-distant future. There will be some parents who understand this, and some who don't - or can't afford to do anything about it. It's a big swath of options those people will miss out on.
- neuralzen 7y agoMy siblings are 10+ years younger than me, and have very little technical savvy, despite holding advanced hard science degrees, whereas such things are of my profession. I think part of the difference was growing up in an era where I could break things easily, and would have to understand and investigate them in order to fix them. More modernly, this sort of understanding isn't needed, so unless you have a burning curiosity, there isn't an ambient technical nourishment that is required to imbibe. No eLan Vital, as it were.
- decasteve 7y agoAs someone who grew up tinkering with computers I can relate but then I remember the perception of my elders towards my generation. I remember all the things I couldn’t do or didn’t pick up on that my family (and extended relatives on the homestead) could do. They could so easily fix and build everything and anything around the house and farm. Everyone was just so incredibly handy.
- dpeck 7y agoWhether someone is a “digital native” or not has everything to do with whether they’re 1) interested in creating something, and 2) what they’re interested in creating. I may think they’re really missing out on everything that a computer/the internet can do, but there are plenty of people really into cars that feel the same way about me driving a 23 year old vehicle.
- sings 7y ago“Data thinking”, “data doing” and “data participation” struck me as an unintuitive way to categorise digital literacy, especially as the example for “doing” seems to fit more squarely under critical thinking: “being able to identify and highlight the source of information others share”.
- steve_adams_86 7y agoMy kids were unfortunately indoctrinated by chromebooks and iPads in our public school system. Using real computers to do things is way too complicated and frustrating for them. Most kids are just like them - they're great using very limited technology for very specific things. The rest of computing is a mystery to them. They type on keyboards at less than 30WPM. At their age, I was doing 50 or so - a requirement for the typing class to 'meet expectations'.
- code_duck 7y agoI was friends with someone who had a couple of kids who were obsessed with video games. For me as a kid, that naturally led to some sort of hacking. If something didn't work, I would try to investigate or fix it. For them, it was playing games while constantly talking to their friends, and if not that, watching videos on YouTube of other kids playing games. One of them, a 13-year old boy, was upset that his laptop screen didn't work. He had been complaining to his mother for months about it. I pointed out to him that his laptop had an external monitor port and that he could plug it in to something else and it worked fine. He had never investigated this possibility. I also took the laptop and cleaned it out viruses and spyware... Something like 42 different packages were removed. Basically if something didn't work, they would just give up and say that it was "broken".
- rndmize 7y agoIn recent days I've been starting to feel this idea of "digital natives" is a silly one. There's no such thing as a "reading native" or "math native" – these are skills and concepts we learn in school because society at large has decided they are important enough to warrant the investment. On the other hand, there's no standard curriculum or expectation around computers and software (afaik). We have this expectation that people will learn how to use things by osmosis or will be taught by the thing itself, perhaps because some kinds of software are extremely good at this (primarily games) and some types are easy enough to get started and have a motivation (eg. social) that they can "pull" users through their difficulties (or they can ask friends). People jump to conclusions - "if the kids can do that, they can do everything" - which is clearly not the case. My knowledge of Excel won't help me with Snapchat which won't help me with Blender - and the difficulty difference between commonly used consumer apps and work apps can be significant. The issue is that outside of the easy spaces, learning about computers is boring, difficult, doesn't have obvious usefulness, provides largely useless feedback, is often wildly unintuitive compared to how things work in the real world, and tends to require a baseline of knowledge most people won't have the interest to develop. This isn't surprising - the same applies to many subjects we learn in school. Most people will have no more interest learning common computer abstractions and mechanisms than memorizing their times tables or writing essays with an opening, body, and conclusion or looking up words they don't know in a dictionary. In short, computing is something that should be actively taught in schools. Typing is a basic skill that should probably be taught in elementary, when children are learning to write (or shortly after). UI abstractions like files, folders, windows, searching should probably follow. Word processing should be covered before middle school, other productivity software during, along with more complex abstractions (clipboard, storage, paths, permissions, networks, accounts/passwords/security, scams, where to get help). Introductory programming should be taught as well. None of this is to say that the average student should be a capable programmer after completing K-12. But I think that almost everyone should know enough to draw reasonable conclusions about systems and problems they encounter without outside help, if for no other reason than to avoid being exploited by scams, ransomware, ads, and whatever new attack vectors show up in the coming years.
- allovernow 7y agoThe sooner we dispell the notion that all people are equally capable at everything, the sooner we can get back to prioritizing merit and see it return to the country. It will take decades. The virus has exposed the incompetence that pervades the nation. Articles like this are only surprising because some two generations of propaganda has convinced young Americans that everyone deserves a trophy and we can all be Einsteins and Armstrongs if we just set our minds to it. But this is moreso a structural, institutional issue. This mindset has resulted in the conflation of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity as we take for granted that everyone is equally capable in the west. So now instead we throw money and man hours and bad policy at our lowest achievers in a sort of crabs in a bucket mentality, I stead of prioritizing resources for those who are more likely to benefit society in broad strokes - scientists who cure disease, for example - and as a result our native students are being thoroughly outcompeted by other nations. This has resulted in a net reduction of the standard of living for all Americans. And is probably one reason for inequality and general unhappiness.
- kick 7y agoArticles like this are only surprising because some two generations of propaganda has convinced young Americans that everyone deserves a trophy and we can all be Einsteins and Armstrongs if we just set our minds to it. The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical literacy. I think you're missing the point by a mile or so.
- allovernow 7y ago>The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical literacy No. That's exactly what I'm arguing is wrong. We're putting the cart before the horse. The internet is ubiquitous, even if you're poor at this point - it's in your schools, it's in free libraries, and entry level smartphones are cheap enough that all but the poorest can afford them if it's a priority. The problem is none of that. It's that not everyone is technically competent - and no amount of education or money will fix that. Intelligence is a high dimensional spectrum and technical details regarding computers are out of reach for a sizable proportion of the population. This is exacerbated by poverty and/or poor education, but those are at most half of the problem.
- buboard 7y agothe tech community (i.e. us) celebrated the mobile "revolution" and simple (i.e. dumbed down) UIs for more than a decade. You reap what you sow though, you have kids growing up not knowing what a file is. This is no testament to the success of the mobile and dumb-down revolution either: people use their phones more, but the only action they know is scroll and like, so it s not like the UX empowered people, it just steered all their energy to consuming. There is less and less features everywhere, and we are now celebrating new emojis. We are essentially creating a new inequality with the "dumbit down" revolution which pushes people to walled gardens and single-function apps to avoid the pain of learning elementary configuration. In more concrete terms, Apple is probably the first preacher of hiding complexity behind a mask, and then almost everyone followed, even those that shouldnt (e.g. linux, windows). Gone are the logical, consistent , hierarchical UIs like windows 95, now windows doesnt even have a start menu and you need a search bar to navigate the control panel. Of course people will never learn about a directory tree if they never see one, but those concepts are key and undestanding them simplifies the understanding of just about anything.