this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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I actually teach teenagers programming and 3D modelling. The past 5 years has been the first decline in tech literacy I've ever experienced between generations. My personal theory is that only the gamers actually have computers at home now. Everyone else only use their smartphones, and that only gives a negligible increase in tech literacy compared to using a computer.
Yes, computers in their various forms are now so user friendly (and often locked down, because fuck you) that you don't learn much using them. The golden age for learning tech on the fly seems to have been 1990-2010 or so, because computers were both accessible and still had exposed inner logic.
I think the dawning of the Chromebooks was really a huge sign. Sure you could install Linux on some of the early models. But then Google just caught on to this and decided to take even that away. So now you had all of these Chromebooks that can only ever run ChromeOS and whatever Google approved that could run on them. You just can't do jackshit with them because they were also online-only.
And those were pushed onto everyone, particularly schools.
I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn't know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.
Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends
Yeah but this also has to deal with how many pc gamers there are per generation. So what you're saying is gen z and alpha has less pc gsmers.
In my experience it has more to do with how much less frequently issues happen and/or how often you need to go manually move files/folders around. Just not nearly as much need imo.
Similar situation with mobile devices, I remember rooting/roming/jailbreaking being much more common in the past.
Yeah devices are really easy so they just work out of the box. Unless you seek out challenges and issues, you'll probably be computer illiterate.