Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bergstromm466 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bergstromm466

> Tech literacy is way up, too.

I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see?

I'd say I see the opposite as being true.

View on HN

My guess at the phenomena going on:

The visibility of of technologically illiterate people is higher than ever. The number of people who are technologically literate is also higher than ever. The proportion of people in digital spaces who are technologically illiterate is higher than it was in the past. More people in the digitally connected world has decreased the average literacy level of that digitally connected world. But the absolute number of technologically literate people as well as the proportion of the overall population who are technologically literate has certainly increased.

Is that consistent with your observations & experience?

To use an analogy to get at the point I think he is making, a bunch of medieval peasants reading the bible and nothing else isn't what we would call literacy.

And I know the immediate response is that, in fact, those things are what lead to actual literacy, etc, etc. But the point I'm trying to make is that using prepacked apps, on a locked down device, in exactly the way the developer intends you to, to create content that you irrevocably license to the corporation that created the app isn't "tech literacy" any more than memorizing the bible and never reading anything else is what we would "written literacy".

Most people use tech in an entirely consumptive manner, and again, we wouldn't call someone who can only read but not write, literate. A person who can't use tech to empower themselves outside of the predefined forms set by the companies that made their devices is not tech literate, even though they may navigate those forms with great speed and fluidity.

I think the point GP is trying to make, is that tech literate people where even smaller before, not that all the people with consumer devices has reached tech literacy, but also now ironically thanks to tech, we're more exposed to the tech illiterate individuals who are using this devices.

Sadly, I'm not as confident as he is. I remember acting as tech support for my family who was of course tech illiterate. A common theme was to receive a complain of "something not working on the system" without further explanation, which was perfectly understandable even if frustrating. Nowdays, I receive the same kind of complains from developers at work.

We have gone from a deep understanding by nesessity to shallow opportunistic horizontal exploration in less than 3 decades. Until the 90's getting into CS/IT meant knowing your way up from the hardware through assembly and memory layout into higher languages and fundamental data structures finally into an application layer. As computers became more powerful and knowledge started to be packaged into virtual runtime and massive linraries and SDK's. the grounding was lost. and certainly post '00 the exponential rise of the internet changed tech towards stringing together poorly understood googled bits of code that might just work until we pass a test.

Now there are undeniably advantages to both paradigms. But the average developer in industry being in the dark about anything beyond the surface layer, and who's expertise is more about quirks with api X rather than how X would be coded at all is a logical consequence.

Yes this describes exactly what I meant, and is the reason I am a free software activist.

Today’s tech doesn’t allow humans to ask questions, and I’m sad to see that many aren’t even aware that there are a lot of awesome things outside of the dominant corporate systems/tools which is exciting and interesting.

I don’t consider the using of black box corporate apps to be tech literacy. Not even close.

Modifying your analogy...

But if rather than biblically literate medieval peasants, we had biblically literate medieval scholars founding universities to study not only the Bible but also the classics, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, we would have the early foundations of the modern world. Consider that the oldest universities (Bolonga in 1088, Oxford in 1096, Salamanca in 1134, Paris in 1150, Cambridge in 1209, and Padua in 1222, and Toulouse in 1229) were primarily founded by Christian scholars who sought administrative and academic freedom (e.g. Padua's founding) because of their convictions based on the Bible that free inquiry is essential to finding truth.

My analogy, implied for tech, would be that free access to source code and technology is necessary to build strong foundations for technological freedom, as the biblical source code was necessary for building strong foundations for free academic inquiry. Jesus himself connects his word with knowing the truth and says the result is freedom - see John chapter 8.

The Bible as a source of religious power is a great analogy. John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Johannes Gutenberg, and others in some cases risked and lost their lives and their freedom (Wycliffe was confined in Black Hall and his body was exhumed to be burned, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake) to make it widely printed and available to the common people in their vernacular.

Eg. “The Anti-Wycliffite Statute of 1401 extended persecution to Wycliffe's remaining followers. The "Constitutions of Oxford" of 1408 aimed to reclaim authority in all ecclesiastical matters, and specifically named John Wycliffe as it banned certain writings, and noted that translation of Scripture into English by unlicensed laity was a crime punishable by charges of heresy.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe#Last_days

If my parents are a yardstick of Western retirees, they havent improved their understanding of windows or email in the last 20 years let alone the new web platforms sigh

Are you serious? There are far more hardware and software engineers than ever before. How could tech literacy not be up?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877557

I can see both perspectives being possible, but I think what's under contention is less “proportion of computational literacy across the entire populace” and more something like “relative weight of control inputs to the social systems that build dominant technology coming from people who have computational literacy”. Thought experiments with much more obvious unequal channels, for instance: we wouldn't necessarily be in this situation if the major tech makers had a mysterious-wizard-enforced pact to design primarily based on the feedback of computationally literate academics; conversely, if we had a very computationally literate population, but an authoritarian government whom all the major tech makers had to answer to who wanted to keep the genie in the bottle, that could just as well be the situation in the OP. (This is not to pass judgment on other possible outcomes of those situations. I'm also using “computational literacy” here because “tech literacy” feels a bit too wide, even if “tech” has come to commonly be a metonym for “computer tech”.)

The geek/MOP/sociopath triangle wouldn't be a terrible description of the “subculture takeover” that seems to have occurred.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com