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Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills

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 interfacing with technology via the simplified, corporate-approved mobile phone platforms.

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doc_dish@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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
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- punkaccountant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Hmmm…truly new tech that came out after I was 35…
  
  VR …yeah pretty cool, my partner has one but I’m not a gamer and don’t generally go for anything gaming anyways. Use it more widely for non gaming uses tho and I’m on board. Self driving cars …cool, don’t have one, never been in one, but I’m all over learning/using that shit if it becomes mainstream AI… personally not a fan, mostly cuz I think it could be like nukes where it’s used for more bad than good, but I’ve messed my way around ChatGPT and it’s whatevs. Probably eventually very useful if we don’t murder ourselves first.
  
  Personally, having gotten our first school PCs when I was in 7th grade (92’ -ish), I find that I tend to at least be curious and want to learn about new tech. So I wonder if the late genX, early millennials might break rule #3 just cuz we were forced to know more about computers to run them and thus don’t view tech as inherently scary. Then again, I’m always fucking around with stuff and my siblings (2 yrs older and younger) are always like “woah how u do dat?!?”…maybe im just a lazy oddball always looking for a way to shortcut my life with technology.
  
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- samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Technically I’m the the first category, since personal computers have been around since before I was born and started going semi-mainstream before I was 15, but they didn’t really take off in popularity until I was in the second age category, so that one fits me the best.
  
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ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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sailingbythelee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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Ilandar@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Your horseshoe analogy is a helpful and simple way to think about it, thanks.

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