Kids Can’t Use Computers
coding2learn.org
coding2learn.org
Immersion, however, is not the same as mastery. Fish live in water but that doesn't mean they understand what that means, or how to respond to problems within that water [1].
Modern mainstream computers are hostile to user understanding in the name of UX. You get happy paths and rigid defaults and hidden complexity, all in pursuit of smoother, frictionless computing. That's all fantastic, until something breaks and you're suddenly lost, outside the well-lit paths.
If there ever was a generation of 'digital natives' in the way that people tend to mean that phrase - in touch with technology, in control and aware of their devices' capabilities - then it's not modern children. It's a generation back, when trying to get a computer to listen to you involved hacking your way through awkward commands and workarounds, learning as you went.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/97082-there-are-these-two-y...
Anecdotally, I'd place the high water mark of public computing knowledge around 2009. Even frat bros were installing Linux and torrenting stuff off of private trackers back then.
But there has been a social change. I bet youngsters that do this kind of thing these days have mentors/patents who went out of their way to provide them with "ownable" platforms. The intersection of children who get that and have the curiosity to explore is a meager percentage of the population.
Right from my first computer I had free reign to do what I wanted with it. When my 1541 disk drive stopped ejecting disks I pulled it apart and fixed it myself. If I did something dumb and blew the fuse in the power supply, then it was something else I needed to fix.
The second thing which I think is tied to ownership is not being fearful of trying something. It may be that beginning your computing experience on the command line gives you confidence, but I see so many people hesitate about clicking on obvious things like it's going to blow up the computer if they get it wrong. Yes, there are times for care, like whether or not to click on a link in an email - but even here's there's a weird inverse where they're fearful of the consequences of not clicking on it!
People shorten phrases to make things easier to say, don't be a pedantic jerk about it for no reason when you obviously know what they meant.
USB means USB storage.
Giga means monthly transfer quota: usage "I don't have enough giga this month", "it decrease(waste) my giga"
And the latest, worst of all...
Wi-Fi means ISP.
Obviously, what's "obvious" is completely dependent on context, background, and environment, so it's a pretty poor place to draw a line, but I'm still sticking to it and relying on humans to make appropriate judgment.
Edit: Actually, I've rethought the "giga" one and don't really think it's too bad if context is clear. In the states people say "gigs" similarly to mean both data transfer and storage in different contexts and it's usually clear. "Giga" only sounds strange to me because I'm not used to that word, but it's effectively the same, just a shortening of a phrase.
I suppose "USB" is just a shortening as well, but without extreme context it's just too unclear because it refers to the bus, or more commonly the connector. If they're holding the drive in their hand and gesturing that's probably fine, but otherwise "drive" or "storage" is needed.
Wi-fi is just blatantly wrong though.
But today, personal computing is dead. The computer is owned by Microsoft, Apple, or Google, and the user is cattle to be farmed for ad revenue and saleable data. Discoverability is non-existent, and increasingly we're told that there is a wide gulf between "normal user" (almost universally framed as only slightly more intelligent than a chimp), "power user" (who are expected to put up with hoop jumping, bad abstractions, and overcomplicated nonsense), and "developers" (who's time is so sacrosanct that 1 second saved for them is worth 10B seconds of wasting user time).
People don't understand computers because software these days works very hard to keep them from understanding them. It isn't profitable for a user to actually use their computer for their own needs when it is much easier to addict them to social media and show them ads.
It kind-of explains a lot about how different a personal computer was back then. The back of the manual has the schematic for the drive!
My Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide also came with a fold-out schematic and I remember the first time I built my own Pentium the motherboard came with instructions for all the pin sets.
But we've lost that access to our devices.
Not really, it's just a more personal retelling of something anyone in a skilled domain knows exists.
If I were to tell a more professional version of the same phenomenon, I'd make it a story about cross functional collaboration at the office. There are two major categories to those interactions, the first where the differently-skilled people respect and understand the complexities of each-others' domains, and understand the point is to bridge that gap. Then there are those who are annoyed that a problem has strayed into a skillset they don't have, and make it quite visible that they're annoyed it's not already a solved problem (without the context to know if it's something reasonable to expect to already be solved and/or care to learn if it's actually something quite easy they could do on their own).
And it's not about software skill. The first time people interact with our legal department, it's usually because they were asked to send documents over for feedback, and just shoot them over cold. The first phone call with one of the lawyers is the "freebie" where they're forgiven for not reading the documents to the best of their ability first. The lawyer teaches our team members enough about what they're looking for and how to annotate documents with what is/isn't relevant to the business context of the documents and whatever technical background they need before sending them over.
On the other hand, we have people who are deep into one technical field and have day-to-day dependencies on something only slightly outside their wheelhouse. When they hit a wall and ask for help they'll often get if from someone who loves the thing, will talk your ear off about it if you let them, and really like teaching people about the thing. But the person asking for help has already mentally shutdown and are too exasperated to learn anything as they go.
Helping laypeople with technical issues is often interacting with someone who's (at best) coming from a helpless and defeated position. It's not their fault, it's just the way society teaches people to think about tech. But it does breed resentment towards the people they have to rely on, and on top of that it's already uncool to know about the stuff. You sorta have to be blind not to see the "just give me the answer and then fuck off forever" attitude from many people that hate the fact they're seeking your help. It's why I feign ignorance on many technical matters outside work ("no, my job involves different kinds of computers and I have to go our IT department for this stuff too").