>kids’ ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and trans

>kids’ ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and transform it in ways critical for the 21st Century workplaces This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis? Looking back to my childhood I grew up with both parents working in software. I learned to type on a typewriter and later a computer, played video games, and fixed or reinstalled Windows and it's drivers hundreds of times. My parents even taught me a little basic. I was always amazed about the huge amount of abstraction that was there, I learned how a few things worked, but when my dad explained something, I'd often think "wow there are so many layers to this, if I'd grown up earlier I'd maybe have a chance to learn all this." I did learn a lot about some of these layers in the meantime, but the number of layers has only grown. We barely even use native applications nowadays, everything is a tower of babel of abstraction layers. The second aspect to this is the UX revolution. We expect every app to be self-explanatory nowadays. Nobody reads the manuals. Everything just works. If you learned how to use an iPhone you haven't learned much. This is because the user experience is packaged so naturally that most people barely need to think about it. Maybe you've learned about the design language used, what a burger menu usually represents. What the home button does. After all single-button mice seemed like a constraint to Windows users, single button phones have become the norm. The app stores have made it hard to screw up your system. Drivers nowadays just work. Many families don't have a device with a keyboard at home, so you don't learn to type. I think the digital natives might have a good intuition of UX, but we failed to give them a chance to fall and learn about the technology stack because the user experience is easy nowadays. We've created perfect digital consumers. As producers they may be near illiterate though.