My SO worked in admin at a school for a few years, primarily young people of less fortunate backgrounds, immigrants, etc.
To her great surprise, almost everyone aged 16-22 knew how to use a phone, but an equality small percentage were comfortable with PCs, macbooks or other desktop systems.
That surprised the hell of me. Like you, I grew up using brick phones, then command line systems, then gui computers. I grew up being better at computers than my parents generation, a digital native who was expected to fix the older generations computers, fully expecting to be one day out-done by the younger generation who would grasp the newer more advanced tech faster than me simply by virtue of having been around it longer.
Somehow that seems to both not be the case and very much be the case. Mobile devices are the native device now, but it seems like being native to mobile does not translate backwards to knowing how to build a computer or what a file system is.
My best bet is that it’s a matter of UX and accessibility. You don’t learn how to troubleshoot installer errors when everything runs through an app store, the same way I didn’t learn how to fix a car like my dad did. I didn’t need to.
If I’m not mistaken, there’s a weird trend here.
My SO worked in admin at a school for a few years, primarily young people of less fortunate backgrounds, immigrants, etc.
To her great surprise, almost everyone aged 16-22 knew how to use a phone, but an equality small percentage were comfortable with PCs, macbooks or other desktop systems.
That surprised the hell of me. Like you, I grew up using brick phones, then command line systems, then gui computers. I grew up being better at computers than my parents generation, a digital native who was expected to fix the older generations computers, fully expecting to be one day out-done by the younger generation who would grasp the newer more advanced tech faster than me simply by virtue of having been around it longer.
Somehow that seems to both not be the case and very much be the case. Mobile devices are the native device now, but it seems like being native to mobile does not translate backwards to knowing how to build a computer or what a file system is.
My best bet is that it’s a matter of UX and accessibility. You don’t learn how to troubleshoot installer errors when everything runs through an app store, the same way I didn’t learn how to fix a car like my dad did. I didn’t need to.