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Gen-z here - I know how to torrent lol. It’s insane how tech illiterate a lot of my friends are, even in my IT classes don’t know what HTTPS is or what an ethernet cable is so… yeah
Feels weird being known as “the guy who’s an expert at computers” despite being a noob
bro you’re on lemmy, you’re already outside of the curve for most gen-z
I’m probably the only person in my entire school who knows what lemmy is lol
I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.
My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.
It’s absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:
This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They’ve been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this “hacker culture” which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn’t afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.
Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.
And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it’ll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.
Computer literacy is weird because it feels like millennials were born into it and had to learn how to use the tools available… Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them, and Gen Z was born into apps and saas and did not have the chance to properly learn
We generally only taught a single generation to master our tech, I think it’s scary, but also I trust the Zoomers to figure it out, they’re creative
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To be fair, the overwhelming majority of people regardless of age don’t know what LaTeX or markdown are. Not the best examples. I’m a millennial with a 4 year STEM degree and I maybe used LaTeX once because it was required, and before Discord became a thing, I’d never heard of markdown. Most people who use Discord probably don’t even know it supports markdown.
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I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).
I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.
Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.
I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.
(to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days)
The problem is if you don’t know basic concepts of computers you cannot transfer your knowledge from one program to the next. Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people and if they see one in program A, then they won’t understand that in program B it works the same way.
I have never had any issues learning any new software from scratch, but I see people my age not figuring out where to click next or where something they are looking for might be hidden in the options. Then an update comes that changes things and they are back to square 1 and helpless.
I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.
He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.
So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.
I just had a baby and I’m already planning how to get her to help me run my home lab as a way to get her to figure all this stuff out, maybe run some game servers or do a little local blog. Then I think about how I can teach her to solder a hand wired keyboard or maybe build a little fpv drone with me and then I start to remember that kids sometimes just don’t like what you do so you never know what you could get them interested in or not or if you will each have the time when they’re older
Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people
When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents
It’s really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.
The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don’t care about tech.
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I was born after 2000 I have to teach my parent how to torrent its not a generational thing lol
Anonymous torrents on I2P FTW 🏴☠️ Best way to safely find stuff unavailable on streaming sites.
I heard that some employers are having to teach new ‘gen z’ employees how to download email attachments…
Gen Z struggles with file systems in general, because the vast majority of their technical experience is on mobile OS’s. However, Gen Z compsci students are somehow far beyond the skill set that millennials had at their age. Or at least that has been my experience with interns over the past 12 years.
I guess because the Gen Z comp sci students are the people who are truly fluent in computers. We were immersed in the internet and digital technology from a young age, but also had the curiosity to go beneath the surface of them, and get a real understanding of how things work. Most people just use the technology superficially, even if they have grown up with the internet and computers.
I was born in 2001. I didn’t use a smartphone until I was like 16. We grew up with regular computers too. I also grew up with Windows XP and 7, as well as playing Doom using DosBox. Then again I am a computer science graduate, so maybe not the best example.
