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.
Not Foundation, but sounds a bit like it. Galactic empire collapses because no one knows how the technology that powers it works anymore.
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.
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.
WALL-E
The problem is non-savvy people classifying connecting a Bluetooth or wifi as complicated.
Connecting Bluetooth is complicated. Mostly because it doesn’t work.
This article only covers typing, but younger gen z and gen alpha are (not at all to their blame) woefully bad at understanding technology. Even using their own devices, like the iphone, outside of a few dozen common apps can be challenging. Let alone desktop OSs, servers and things like printing.
I stress that I absolutely do not say this to call them dumb or ignorant. They have not been given other resources and were not raised on other kinds of tech. And as the article points out, older generations in administration and management positions falsely equate this “app savy” intelligence to tech ability. That is where the blame lies mostly not with the young teenagers and kids.
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.
There was just some assumption that the knowledge was somehow inherent, like the RF from cellphones entered the womb and taught them how to troubleshoot their PC.
like the RF from cellphones entered the womb and taught them how to troubleshoot their PC
Wait, it doesn’t work that way? But that’s what all the super trustworthy conspiracy theorists have been saying all the time! RF is dangerous and manipulates your brain /s
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.”
Yeah I don’t know why the article mentions Gen Z’s “tech-savvy reputation”. Being able to operate a cell phone doesn’t make you tech savvy.
Gen X and Millennials grew up using command line and troubleshooting computer problems before the Internet. Their tech skills are way higher than Gen Z.
I never needed to use command line, but I did hone my typing skills on MIRC and ICQ.
Yep. And phone typing is the ‘hunt and peck’ method of keyboard typing. Which is unfortunate because it’s ingraining the slowest way to type onto a whole generation.
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.
i could type insanely fast when i was younger
developed RSI at work
not worth it
Agreed. I write slow and incomprehensible. I read slow with shit comprehension. Passed engineering school with very high GPA and am successful in my engineering career. These metrics are bullshit boomer click bait.
Almost as bad as “Gen z/a can’t read analog clocks!”
I think the panic around analog clocks comes from the scenario where you have to explain what clockwise and counterclockwise is. I have personally seen someone eventually removed from a workgroup because they couldn’t understand it.
Not that analog clocks matter, but that was an easy way to teach direction in cylindrical coordinates. What can we use now for that?
I hope someone said “watch your 6” and they slammed the door on their ass.
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.
Well there’s your problem. Don’t think. Just bullshit.
80wpm is pretty common for a typical average typing speed for anybody who can touch type, 100wpm is more common among programmers, and people who do a lot of typing. Anything faster than that and you have had hand injuries and use a fancy keyboard now, or you will soon have hand injuries.
typing speed is rather funny.
I type 120. How fucked am I, doctor?
if you do it for sustained periods for long periods of time, you should probably think about investing in one of those fancy ortholinear keyboards, or whatever works best for you. Maybe switch to dvorak or azerty for funsies or something.
if you don’t type very regularly, it’s probably not as big of a deal.
It is so much better I switched to a 36 key split ortho keyboard(draculad) with colemak and layers to reach keys farther then 1 key away normally it feels amazing
yeah, once you’re using a keyboard designed for actual hand positioning, it’s much more manageable and generally, a lot less taxing on the individual.
Copy and paste is the fastest type
I just lean on tab and let copilot fill the screen with garbage
Honestly, and the occasional shrine and came back from my house Day and was curious about the Shinto and I think I see it’s a rainy weekend but it is particularly religious and I don’t struggle to find it’s a rainy thing but it is a heaven to see you and you wouldn’t have been fun with you in line.
I mean, yeah same.
Their parents don’t even give them PCs, only phones, how would they even learn?
Gonna defend gen z a bit here. Unlike older generations, gen z was raised in a large part only on locked down, touch screen interface devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices are designed to not be tampered with, designed and streamlined to “just work” for certain tasks without any hassle.
If you only have a smartphone or tablet, how are you supposed to learn how to use a desktop os? How are you supposed to learn how to use a file system? How are you supposed to learn how to install programs outside of a central app store? How are you supposed to learn to type on a physical keyboard if you do not own one?
I worked as a public school technician for a while and we used Chromebooks at my school system. Chromebooks are just as locked down if not more locked down than a smartphone due to school restrictions imposed via Google’s management interface. Sure they have a physical keyboard and “files” but many interfaces nowadays are point and click rather than typing. The filesystem (at least on the ones I worked with) were locked down to just the Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. directories with everything else locked down and inaccessible.
Schools (at least the ones I went to and worked at) don’t teach typing classes anymore. They don’t teach cursive classes. They don’t teach any classes on how to use technology outside of a few Microsoft certification programs that students have to chose to be in (and are awfully dull and will put you to sleep).
Gen Z does not have these technology skills because they largely do not have access to anything that they can use to learn these skills and they aren’t taught them by anyone. Gen Z is just expected to know these skills from being exposed to technology but that’s not how it works in the real world.
These people aren’t dumb as rocks either like so many older people say they are. It’s a bell curve, you’ll have the people dumb as rocks, the average person, and the Albert Einsteins. Most people here on lemmy fall closer to the “Albert Einstein” end of the tech savvy curve so there’s a lot of bias here. But I’ve had so many cases where I’ve met Boomers, Gen X, and Millennial who just can’t grasp technology at all.
Also, before someone says “they can just look it up on the internet”, they have no reason to. What’s the point of looking up these skills if they cannot practice them anywhere? Sure, you’ll have a few that are curious and interested in it but a vast majority of people have interests that lie outside of tech skills.
Tl;dr Gen Z is just expected to know technology and thus aren’t taught how to use it or even have access to non-locked down devices.
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.
That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren’t exposed to that paradigm so much.
The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that’s the ecosystem you work within.
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams
Generally speaking, you learn more about how something works when the core functionality is exposed to the user, and just janky enough to require fiddling with it and fixing things.
This is true of lots of things like cars, drones, 3D printers, and computers. If you get a really nice one, it just works and you don’t have to figure anything out. A cheap one, or something you have to build yourself, makes you have to learn how it actually works to get it to run right.
Now that things are so comodified and simplified, they just work and really discourage tinkering, so people learn less about core functionality and how things actually work. Not always true, but a trend I’ve experienced.
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?”
Gen Z doesn’t use uppercase anyway lol
they all type like this smh
First time I saw a Zoomer do that it hurt my soul.
What goes around…apparently. My 57 year old co-worker does the same thing and it drives me batty.
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.
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I suppose its easy to find tech savvy gen-z people on Lemmy ;)
Obviously what I was referring to is anecdotal and stems from my social bubble. But there is something to it, that growing up with dumbed down devices makes you less prone to dive deep into the details of tech. If I were born 2 decades later, I don’t think I would have gathered as much tech know-how as I did. I essentially had to go through all of it (started in the 286 era with PC-DOS, broke my dad’s PC countless times trying to make shareware games work, dabbled around on bulletin boards, grew up with the early stages of internet and saw how it turned to shit, etc.). If I didn’t have that, I might just have ended up knowing nothing more than smartphones.
I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).
It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.
Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.
If I had to guess, it’s because they don’t know what it was like before the ads and enshittification.
Can’t long to return to something you never had.
The highest usage of ad blockers happens within the age range of 18-24, which categorically includes Gen Z.
The second highest age range is 25-34, and the third highest is 12-17, which is also included in Gen Z.
That said, I would argue that, while knowing how to use a smartphone doesn’t make you tech savvy, knowing how to use an ad blocker doesn’t either. It’s as easy as installing an extension.
What tech savvy reputation? They doesn’t even know what a system file structure is. Neither the article writer, social media =/= tech-savvy.
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.
I was the electronics guy at walmart and just…holy shit the kids buying laptops. A lot didn’t even know how to work the keyboard. They would touch a non touchscreen laptop then ask me ‘if it isn’t touch screen then how do you work it’. Thats just one of a million amazing questions I got.
I know a bit of it is…iono…location bias? Most kids who know computers are probably shopping online or microcenter or something but still.
They doesn’t even know what a system file structure is.
I had to talk to somebody about a file that they needed me to look at and they kept saying It’s the one in the P drive, and they just could not understand that they needed to give me the absolute file path. This was someone who’s an engineer working in a power station, yet they don’t understand about drive mappings
P for power?
I can’t remember that justification for all the drive letters. They had Q for quick at one point, because that drive was an SSD and not an HDD so I guess it was quick.
I think P was the public, as in not an internal drive, and something external contractors could see. But still I needed the actual file path.
Mavis Beacon would cry if she were around to see this
I taught myself to touch-type when I was a schoolkid using something similar to Mavis Beacon. All the while, I had a voice in my head saying, “This is pointless, everyone will be talking to their computers like in Star Trek in a couple of years”. Well, that was the 90s and it turned out to be one of the most useful skills I taught myself - but surely the age of the keyboard must soon be coming to an end now??
I’m part of Gen Z, and no, we as a generation AREN’T tech savvy. just because we grew up with smart phones does not make us tech savvy. in fact, i actually think it made us dumber with tech. i’m the only one in my school who knows how to use a command line and code (i also use linux as my daily driver). meanwhile everyone else doesn’t even know what a freaking file manager is
Hi, I’m a programmer. Most of my classmates didn’t know how to use Linux.
Now, I’ve realized that newer products are being developed via Visual Studio so……
Linux and command line knowledge aren’t the same as being tech savvy
linux can be used through mostly GUI now so i partly agree with you, but installing linux can be quite a hard task for those who aren’t tech savvy. i’m pretty sure being able to do the following can be considered tech savvy:
- change boot settings
- flash an ISO to a USB drive
- shrink windows partition into a new one for linux
- boot from USB
- actually install linux
- get used to linux
Edit: the thing is… everyone is so used to things being pre-installed (ie windows/macOS/iOS), being able to download apps easily from the apple App Store. anything even slightly more complicated than that is too hard for them. i’ve had a graphic design class with some people a few years ago and some of them had to ask me for help for how to open a file, save, and export. if something isn’t completely, 100% automated for them, they can’t do it.
Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.
Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.
As far as actual tech competency goes?
Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.
Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.
I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.
The most common explanation I’ve seen, and imo it makes sense, is that things mostly just work now. Even XP required a helluva lot more troubleshooting and messing with stuff to make it work than today. So you not only have a bunch of people that have no troubleshooting experience, a large portion don’t even know how to properly search for things.
On the flip side, you have a lot more people doing insanely impressive stuff at a lot younger ages because if you have the drive to do it, there’s more material to learn than ever out there.
I’m a millennial but I grew up with Macs which mostly just worked, I don’t remember having to do much troubleshooting as a kid.
But for me it was more that there was nothing else to do. You got bored, and messed around with and explored the computer, figuring out what you could make it do. Even once we got internet, it was dialup, so you got online for a bit, checked some things, downloaded some shareware, then disconnected and were stuck with whatever was on the computer again to mess with.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
And yet the evidence seems to suggest that social media has actually increased their boredom. They take fewer risks and try fewer things because the comfort of their doomscrolling feed is always there as a digital pacifier whenever they feel emotionally challenged. In turn, this is contributing to increasing rates of anxiety because these young people are not challenging themselves and learning what they are capable of. Their bodies and brains are being programmed to retreat from problems instead of facing and overcoming them. All of that leads to a life where you’re just not getting out and doing stuff, meeting people or creating memories. That’s a life of boredom.
The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.
So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?
I blame the attempt to make devices user-friendly. Convenience kills skill.
not userfriendlyness but dumbing everything down
The difference between clearly documenting features, and hiding or removing them.
By the time the generation after them get to working age, somebody will have invented the Swype keyboard for office use.
It will always be in uppercase unless you press the “no cap” button.
