I’m in IT. There was a time when I was sure that the younger generations would be eclipsing my technical skills. I knew where I came from, and what I was exposed to and assumed that the younger generations would have everything I had, and even MORE technical exposure because of the continuing falling cost of technology. For about a decade that was true, and then it plateaued and then, as you experienced, I saw the younger generations regressing in technology skills.
There was a time when I was actually worried about job security due to an overabundance of young people wanting to enter the field. Nowadays, not so much.
On the other hand, I’m instead now worrying that younger generations might become even less able to understand the importance of digital rights if they don’t even understand the basics of the technology.
Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn’t necessarily used much? There were people that were “computer people”, who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn’t need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.
Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.
The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There’s always a gap. It just takes different shapes.
Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They’re critical to life, enthusiast or no. That’s the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.
Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.
After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.
Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
We learned the technology to accomplish specific mundane goals, and along the way learned the inner workings of the technology which became applicable to the working world. Now, to accomplish those same rather mundane tasks there is very little to learn, and very little ancillary learning benefit derived from doing those mundane things.
Yes, when you were learning those, you had a viewpoint from the outside. That you know there are things like discrete math, electricity, magnetism, transistors, ones and zeroes, etc, and level above level from these things a machine has been built. You wouldn’t know how exactly, but you would understand how complex it is and how important it is to approach it with logic.
Now these people don’t think. At all. Ads yell with music, pictures and colors at them, computers they use are about poking screens with fingers, and it takes a lot of courage to abandon that context.
Like in that experiment with a white ball being called black and a group of humans where some have been warned to call it black and some start doing it because others do.
