this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Oh no! A statement which applies to the vast majority has some exceptions! Better break out the um-actually and technically-incorrect stamps.
As someone who has worked in IT, age has a strong negative correlation with tech literacy. Is every boomer tech illiterate? Of course not. Some boomers built the tech we use today. But most boomers are worse with tech than most ten year olds.
My generation will have tech illiteracy problems worse than the boomers. Yours will be even worse than mine. It's because most people reach a point where they stop trying to keep up with everything and fall behind.
You'll start to see it after you pass 40 or so. Then when you're in your 60s it'll be your generation's turn to be mocked as the bumbling idiots who ruined the world.
So have fun with that.
Uhhh… no. Gen z has had to deal with and understand changing technology since birth. I have faith in them.
The only thing boomers have proved is they’re able to do is ruin the economy and fuck over their children.
Gen z doesn't have to understand shit about tech. They've been given apps that work flawlessly since birth. The only people "forced" to understand tech were the late Xers/early millenials where you got some cool new program or hardware and it almost never worked out of the box so you'd have to troubleshoot the shit out of everything before you could even google for answers.
After that plug and play started to work better and after that we got apps.
Exactly this, our first computer came with msdos, if you didn't wanted to type commands in a terminal, you couldn't play games. If you didn't wanted to learn how to setup your soundcard for every game, the game had no (or super crappy) sound.
It's not about understanding tech at all. I work in a software development team and have a pretty deep understanding of how a lot of tech works. But I never owned an Apple device, so I can't tell you basic shit about a how use iOS.
Gen X had to learn learn how a computer works at a pretty basic level just to be able to use one. I took basic computer skills and programming for the TI 994a in elementary school. Then another hardware/software class around 5th grade. It was pretty easy to troubleshoot anything hardware or software until the mid 2000s.
Somewhat agree but hopefully we do a good job passing on the torch to help the next generation
Gen z is notoriously tech illiterate for anything but the bare minimum. The amount that have never touched a PC or anything other than an iPhone is incredibly disturbing.
Worked in a library. Many of the kids were smarter than the adults!
....But I still had to step-by-step walk them through printing their homework... :(
Hah! Old age will have surprises for you.
This is the equivalent of "don't worry you'll get more conservative when you get older."
People do tend to become more (small c) conservative as they grow older for a multitude of reasons. It makes sense - you've spent years accomplishing various goals and establishing a place for yourself. You've got more to lose, so you resist change.
But what I'm talking about is the loss of novelty. You stop caring about every new fad, every new piece of tech, every new movement. Life loses the magical quality it holds for the young. You focus more on the things you think are important, while the rest becomes background noise.
You don't really notice at first. Then one day you look up and everything is different. Young people are talking about stuff you've never heard of and doing things that seem silly and inconsequential. New ways of doing things become common, and you feel stupid because you haven't learned them. Instead of being more knowledgeable over time, you find yourself having to relearn new ways of doing things you mastered years ago.
Some people try their hardest to keep up, even though it's harder every year. Some people shrug and accept it, content to let the young find their own way. Some complain endlessly and try to fight against change, insisting that the way of life they've led is the only proper way to live.
This happens to almost everyone. There are a few who manage to hold on to that spark of curiosity and wonder into old age, but they're few and far between. You probably aren't one of them. I know I'm not.
So what kind of person will you become?
Yeah nah, I'm sure every generation will cop flack for something, it's just that since WW2, and the cold war, problems like plastic, lead paint etc let alone the environment weren't really on the agenda. People just didn't have a list of big bad world problems besides war.
On one hand I agree that technology is changing at a rapid pace, and ageism is a thing, especially more so now with climate change, but I think the issue is how quickly can the "wall of education" be broken down so that a critical mass of the human population can be enabled to learn how to calculate complex integrals, produce a computer software and program, to make a pipe bomb lol, or fix their car etc, you get my point.
Information freedom is becoming a big deal for people these days but at the same time individuals are no longer expected to be so rigidly self reliant. First it was paper, then books in libraries, nowadays we have the internet. YouTube, torrents and search engines definitely help a lot, but I haven't seen a top ten problems for humanity video on YouTube yet lol. We're almost coming full circle, however, I still think we should pay homage to the idea that being self reliant and learning how to do something for yourself is essentially a good thing, not necessarily only valuable to prevent loss of information but for further collaboration opportunities. It's not necessarily Nazism to argue that if every person's mind was a library, idiocracy and risk of displacement would become less likely to occur on every level. Think of Hal from A Space Odyssey
Your mechanic can fix his own car the same way your locksmith can unlock his own van, and your tech support guy will probably learn to fix his own computer. If you can do all of those things, even if you don't become a valuable person in society, at least you'll be better at taking care of yourself and less likely to be a burden to your group.
In saying that, if I was an old 60-70yr old man, I would consider re-educating myself in a field not so hot for the younglings, you know, the usual work like the trades, engineering, computing, and big data are big money for many young people these days, so it makes sense, if you're older to get into something less physical like painting, gardening, landscaping, digger operator, software UI development, accounting, systems engineering, matchmaking, etc, something that is either boring or niche enough that many avoid it while simultaneously needing it. Remember boredom is the weakness of the younglings lol