Submitted 1 month ago by Fleur_@aussie.zone to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
It seems like a lot of people almost delight in their tech illiteracy. And the big corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.
Caught my teenage cousins bragging about how they can “make a video game without any coding”. It was this shitty iPad app I’d never heard of.
I mean, technically competent people do too. “Every technology I don’t use is obsolete and insecure” is a badge for some people.
I am not tech literate like most programmers or coders, but I can look up things and read. Usually covers most of my needs overall, so it’s better than nothing. Where I work I am seen as on par with any IT person but I just literally read instructions and follow them. Tried to explain it, but they treat it like I was blessed by the tech gods or something.
I’m almost offended for my profession. Most of the programmers I know are quite tech literate, to thr point it floors me when I find a coworker who is tech illiterate. Like, brother, its literally our job.
If you can do this you are better than, must tech supports i have worked with.
from my interactions with people after i told them i switched from chrome, the average person doesn’t know the difference between a web browser and a search engine…
Are you saying you don’t use The Google anymore? But how do you find all of your baking recipes?
The average person doesn’t seem to know the difference between a file explorer and a browser at my work. Nevermind trying to explain the difference between a webapp and a desktop app (god I hate teams).
like the early internet the tech gap was a natural filter and i see that as a good thing for the quality of the conversation.
Well, unless quality of conversation includes broad range of ideas and opinions. Personally I’m pretty happy with my little echo chambers lol.
Tech literacy is following step by step instructions & having an IQ above room temperature? OK.
It’s more than that.
The average person is legitimately afraid of knowledge.
Fahrenheit or Celsius? 😅
Correct, unironically
That’s mostly all it’s ever been.
That’s all it can ever be, mathematically speaking
I think they call it “lowest common denominator”
That’s still a high bar to clear.
This used to be what people said about digg and then about reddit
early days Reddit and the whole Digg vs Reddit thing was wild. I remember someone made like a stupid long comic about digg vs reddit. and yeah Early reddit was much like what Lemmy is now.
I use Linux because I’m too tech illiterate for Windows, I needed something that just worked out of the box
Unbelievably based take
Techies are shaking and crying right now
The way I look at it is, the more echo chambers you are in and out of, the more complete of a picture you can get as a whole.
Yes, Lemmy is a certain kind of echo chamber. But you can’t really be part of an online community these days that doesn’t tend toward becoming one.
You just have to diversify to keep the thread. And Lemmy is a very important part of that diversification for me.
Better than the generally illiterate echo chambers in other parts of my daily life.
It totally is. That’s why I’m here. Depending on the server, you also get a side of non-authoritarianism and strong privacy beliefs.
About the time they get a list of services to pick for sign up, they lose interest or freeze, exhibiting decision paralysis. That one time they installed ImagineDragns.exe and the computer had to be taken to be cleaned, set them down a path of I don’t know what this is, I won’t touch it that keep us employed.
Exactly; that’s why I’m here. That said, I would like to see other communities grow. !games@lemmy.world and !squaredcircle@lemmy.world, for instance.
I discovered the USB boot by accident and thought my laptop bricked for no reason!
Pressing random keys as an 8yr old while booting till the computer makes the funny beep noise and the screen turns into a .txt document
since the front page consists of linux and survillance hate
I find that very attractive. It also keeps certain people away.
in a simplified phrase, fediverse is the linux of social media
or at least navigate a directory through the command line
Why, obviously. I mean who hasn’t read through the ls(1) man page at least once?
You’re telling me the average person doesn’t read through obscure tech manuals in their free time? Are you sure?
of course not, the average person is lazy and uses tldr
The store I work at mostly hires immigrants. While I would say that the language barrier is squing things a little, my coworkers generally have never handled technology before, even if they were previously in a role that had a high level of education.
Take one of my coworkers for example. When she asked me what I was reading, my fumbled attempt to explain fanfiction might as well have been pure gibrish. She didn’t even have a concept of a book that isn’t educational, never mind not knowing the translation of “fiction”. After explaining the concept, she said “Oh, like the Bible?”
I think I might have done a mental bluescreen at that one.
Even just this last week, she seemed to be genuenly confuzed when I explained that I was writing a book. She kept asking “oh, are you in school then?” as if the only reason to ever write stuff was for school.
Anyways, my point is; the average everyday person has likely never so much as owned a smartphone, never mind knows how to boot off a usb drive. It’s not just an immigrant thing either, my familly is almost utterly unable to have conversations with me because they don’t even recognize 3/4ths of the words I need to use to describe the concept I need to explain to explain why I was laughing at a meme.
ha! Calling the bible fan fiction sounds pretty accurate to me…
meme tax!
Post memes or story is invalid
Here’s one, it certainly got a laugh out of me
Squing
Well, how would you spell it? I don’t have time to look up every word I don’t remember the spelling of when I’m typing from a phone.
We use arch btw.
This is where everyone from the old internet retreated to.
Eh, I have seen enough of what happens to places that favour so called “freedom of speech” or no moderation over valuing comfort of vulnerable users. There’s plenty of places that exist that have “freedom of speech”. Rather than making this place just like those places why not just go to a pre-existing one or start your own?
What lemmy instances allow freedom of speech?
Probably true but the amount of tech posts fade into insignificance compared to the 60 - 70% Trump/Musk did/says this stupid thing posts.
I know, and it’s been going on for years.
Not everyone is american or wants to read about them 20 times per day.
not everyone who IS American wants to read it all the tome either.
The amount of tech content that isn’t just a list of affiliate links has also reduced substantially.
Nah, I’m an idiot XD
“don’t even know how to boot from USB” Are you serious with this post?
How has nobody posted the geology XKCD yet?
Definitely very echoey in here.
you are 100% correct, however, the longer im here, the more tech literate i become, the easier it becomes for me to explain it to others, and thus, the fediverse grows. word of mouth to those willing to take the plunge.
you cant force people to learn something, but being able to sell it convincingly helps, especially if you know what you are talking about, and arent abbrasive or judgemental.
linux community / privacy communities rock here.
also general conversation feels more honest and constructive. instead of the whole “WeLl AcTuAlLy!” type of shit you get on reddit. it happens, but nowhere nearly as much.
also, way less censorship. comparing feeds from lemmy to reddit, is like apples to oranges.
this feels like a much more human space to me.
The comment section here is proof of the echo chamber part…
I’m currently trying to usb boot an old Motherboard from 2011 that has a very early version of UEFI. Modern disk imagers do fancy partitions that aren’t recognized by this ancient artifact. Just saying it can be challenging.
Nah, I’m only partially tech literate. I don’t know how in the fuck to use a terminal or command line stuff.
But I know what HTTPS is and how to check the header of an email to know if its phishing. I know how to use and manage PGP keys (although I have zero people to communicate with so I end up never using it, in practice).
Boot from USB is just spamming one of the F1 F2 F11 F12 button repeatedly then select the USB, very easy, learned that in 2 minutes using a web search.
But don’t ask me to set up a Lemmy Instance, I aint got the brain power for it, I’m likely to mess up setting up the security aspect of it then a hacker is gonna deface it like lemmy.world that time when they got hacked. I actually have zero clue on how to set up self-host stuff. I don’t bother with a NAS, I just copy my photos, videos, movies, wikipedia .zim files via a USB cable directly to a portable SSD (I keep multiple copies of the same files). If I need my files on the go, I just take one of the SSDs and put it in my pocket. No NAS needed.
(Also NAS are kinda expensive, and you have to buy the drives separately, so the NAS thing is kinda just expensive stuff on top of the storage you already have to pay for, so I don’t bother, I love my portable SSDs)
When I first read this I thought the title was “tech illiterate” which I thought was a bit rude, but anecdotally true.
Sure we’ve got healthy linux and programmers communities, but I think most people are just regular degular folx.
On the topic of echo chambers - At what point did we decide that a bunch of people over a wide geographical area with similar interests and a common code of standards/preferences of civility… Is a bad thing?
It’s kind of how social clubs exist irl.
They are as tech literate as they aren’t sport literate in my experience.
The fact that the community superbowl exists here to continue perpetuating a meme is peak irony. There are so few people interested in american football here that the intention has flipped, meaning a picture of an American football match would be funny.
koyu@discuss.koyu.space 1 month ago
Well that sometimes keeps the conversation clean though. Most computer people seem to be a little more intelligent than the average person.
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Maybe they might be slightly above the norm in the past, regarding intelligence, but that bell curve flattened out in the early 2000’s. Shit, you rarely need to manage memory anymore.
koyu@discuss.koyu.space 1 month ago
Shit, I forgot no one’s writing raw assembly anymore
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Dont worry, they make up for it with awful social skills.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“they”
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lack of diversity can create stagnation problems and biases that go unchallenged, which is why you see communities with barriers of entry always seem to have very specific kinds of cultures or attitudes.
For better or worse.
Fleur_@aussie.zone 1 month ago
Intelligence isnt a linear scale. There are so many skills out there, so many things to learn. You might consider tech people more intelligent because the skills they have are the ones you recognise as intelligent.