Joking aside I do actually worry about how superficial technical knowledge is becoming.
It’s always been that way. Even most people who used the internet “way back when” have no clue how it actually functions. Terms like DNS and IPv4 are vaguely familiar concepts at best outside of professional or hobbyist circles.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that either. There’s too much stuff for any one person to know. You learn the stuff that interests you and ignore the rest, which hopefully means somebody is interested in all of it. That’s why it’s good that there’s all different kinds of people out there.
Yup. It’s the old “you don’t need to be a baker to enjoy eating bread” thing. The tricky part is that technology has been shoehorned into basically every aspect of life, so there are comparatively a lot of people who don’t know how to “bake” it. If someone doesn’t like bread, they simply won’t eat it. But that’s not really possible with modern technology, outside of near complete rejection of modernity like the Amish.
We just need to integrate conversational AI into everything, so people never have to understand tech or learn to use it
Tap for spoiler
/s
People these days couldnt even manually resolve an IRQ conflict!
Oh it’s well fucked already.
Millennials have technical skills, Gen Z has basic trades skills, big part of Boomers built their own houses. Every generation has its base skill that eventually becomes obsolete.
In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch argues that there are three waves of “internet people”. The first was “before it was cool”, the second when it became mainstream (give or take the turn of the millennium) and the third when internet was already a thing. The third are young people, too young to remember the 1900s and therefore the time before internet, and old people who go online because it’s unavoidable and also more intuitive and easy than ever before.
Despite the generation gap, they have things in common and in contrast to the first and second wave (which she also subdivides but that’s beside the point). For example they never used mail as primary communication and they have smartphones as first device and most often second hand from a family member.
Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk and sorry if I took your shitpost too serious but there’s truth and science behind it and I couldn’t not share it.
I wish we’d refer to early internet era as something other than the 1900s. WWW ostensibly started in 95. Maybe we just call it “The 90s” and be good with it?
When we start referring to the “turn of the century” as the early 2000s, I may just outright die.
I wish we’d refer to early internet era as something other than the 1900s.
Oh feel you. Saying 1900s for the whole century feels wrong but why tho? We do it for other centuries as well so maybe it’s time to get used to it.
WWW ostensibly started in 95.
That’s already part of becoming mainstream. I use “internet” in the broader sense that includes other technology I’m not really familiar with. But some precursors of the internet were around in the 70s and maybe even earlier? Donno, I’m second wave myself. Sorry if my terminology is confusion and not correct.
When we start referring to the “turn of the century” as the early 2000s, I may just outright die.
I used the phrase “turn of the millennium”. Sorry if old people thought I meant 1000 CE.
We didnt vote for Æthelred the Unready! Were an autononous collective.
Eh, WWW started in '91. What milestone happened in '95? Only thing I can think of is Windows 95, but that was a general computer thing, not an Internet thing.
As for early Internet era…to me that’s the mid to late 70s up through '91. TCP/IP dates back to '74, so that’s a workable starting point (or maybe ARPANET, ha).
Eh, I got my dates wrong from memory. My point is still the same.
Fair enough! I’m also Old Enough that hearing about my childhood as “the 1900s” kinda hurts. Just feels wrong somehow, y’know?
I mean, that was the point of the comment you initially responded to.
I know, I thought I’d expand on it
On a side note, I would regularly get my silent generation grandmother to fix something on my smartphone when they first started getting popular. I miss her.
I watched a gen alpha iPad kid play a Nintendo DS recently. He held it on his lap and only mashed his thumbs on all the controls, fingers splayed wide. Raged like hell at it. A piece of me died.
Zoomers too
Dude, I’m an electrical engineer born in 02.
That’s not possible, you’d only be …
Oh.
Yep, the future is now, huh?
Get off my lawn.
No… I thnk your brain might be wrong.
Oh well, I dont respect Time, its an odeious concept.
*Oedipus
I’m an electrical engineer born in 02.
One one had, nice job dude.
On the other:
The oldest zoomers are 29 rn
Wow, they’re almost people
Hm
Life begins at 30
…and ends at 35. It’s hardly fair.
See I don’t entirely blame young people here. I downloaded a linux distro from their torrent mirror last year and my ISP started emailing me literal threats about piracy laws. It’s the corporations.
(Tho I am pretty young myself for lemmy standards tbf)
There’s a push by younger boomers to change the name to “Jones” apparently.
Everyone just thought the same thing in response to that too.
Change the name of what to Jones?
Boomer. It’s a dumb as it sounds.
Honestly, I read about it a bit. I’m not entirely against it. My mom was born 61, and there was a pretty clear difference in her and her age peers than her older sisters, all 10+ years older than her. For instance, she was an avid progressive, as with most of the people her age she associated with, the older siblings (except her gay brother) are all trump supporters. I don’t know per se that that’s generational, exactly. But I could see wanting to distance yourself from certain aspects of boomers
I would think their best move would be to advocate for a split then.
Whelp, looks like PCs will become a thing of the past at this rate, no use denying it
Already there. Ask any major website what their user agent stats are. Amazon is something like 90% mobile. I can’t even fathom doing any serious shopping via app.
They’re already trying to price consumers out of the computer/parts market so that we have to rent them. It’s not helping that so much tech is going to data centers instead of the consumer market
Hey, if only we could blame the generation in charge of raising Alpha and making sure they knew how to tech?
Fuck. Us? Really?
my mom made sure that we learned how to type effectively, and goddamn was she ever right about that. it amazes me how many people cannot type quickly on a keyboard.
So I was on the internet in 1995 and was visiting BBS’s for about 10 years before that so I’m good with computers. I feel for my parents and the young ones because I’m a basic when it comes to phones and tablets, if shit goes beyond touching what I want to do I’m full on lost
Gen alpha grew up using tablets/smartphones pretty early, while they may not have had access to a PC. Seems like a failure of the educational system. Boomers just refuse to learn new shit.
My kid has “tech class”, where I (wrongly) assumed they would learn about computers and the internet, how they work and how to use them. Nope, they just learned how to use Microsoft Teams.
Learning new shit gets genuinely harder as you age. With how fast technology changes, I don’t think you can really blame them for it.
I’d like to think I’d keep up with technology in my old age, but who knows. I’m not even old and I’m already so damn jaded.
Trends are cyclical
this is just an accurate fact
Millennials helped tech destroy the personal computer and computer literacy because they insisted on flocking to these stupid iphones and shiny apps instead of doing anything real and with their own ability.
They are like 4 tbf no?
Most definitions use 2011-2013 as starting range for Gen Alpha, so the older Gen Alpha kids are 13-15
hell, even zoomers cant tell the difference between windows and chromeos
