jadagul:

youzicha:

xenosagaepisodeone:

it’s interesting how many op-eds were written about how children born in the late 90s-onward were digital natives that would go on to become extremely versatile in tech when the reality is that tech becoming more consumer oriented nipped the incentive for a lot of kids to explore beyond the services offered to them. not knowing how to torrent things is only the tip of the iceberg and tech illiteracy is only going to continue to climb as the cultural shift from computers to phones becomes more pronounced in coming years. I used to joke that people in the late aughts saw laptops as like, $700 facebook machines but the modern comparison is that people see laptops as $1200 subscription service for media they don’t own machines.

Or a bit earlier, in the 1970s and early 80s there was a lot of talk about how how computers would empower individuals in school and society, because everyone would learn how to program, so they could learn by experiment and have completely understanding and control of their tools.

For example this video where Alan Kay talks about letting school children play with Smalltalk and write their own programs: “my aim here was not just to get people be able to access things by means of the windows but also to be able to do the equivalent of writing short essays and having them have great effect.” A few minutes later he talks about why being able to read and modify programs is important: “we don’t think a person is literate if all they are able to do is read, we think they should also be able to write”.

Also did not really come true.

I sometimes feel like I grew up at nearly the optimal time for this. I was born in 1986, which is late enough that having access to computers growing up wasn’t a special or unusual thing; they were starting to be everywhere.

But it’s early enough that I still had to understand how they worked in order to use them. My fist computer was a Dos computer; I have very clear memories of navigating directory hierarchies at the command line to find my favorite computer games. There weren’t a lot of ease-of-use features yet, so a lot of basic things exposed the bare metal of everything going on. And stuff broke all the time and you needed to understand things well enough to fix it.

My sisters are much less computer-savvy in a lot of ways. This is partly just a difference of interests, but I’m pretty sure it’s also just that they had to deal with a lot less exposed metal when they started using them.

(not exactly responding to anyone in particular)

When reading through the notes on this post, I noticed that most of the responses talking about the tech-illiterate folks in their lives are talking about…parents, younger siblings, clients. People whose company they *didn’t actively seek out*.

If it were true that people born in the 80’s have better tech-literacy, as a group, than people born in the 00’s, how we would *tell*? How would we distinguish this from “most people in *every* generation are tech-illiterate, people tend to run in social circles with similar levels of computer competence to themselves, and this filter works less well in intergenerational contexts”?

(To be fair there *is* one comment that the student body at their school as of a decade ago was more tech-literate than the current student body, though it’s only one and also some of that could be rose-tinting.)

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I was born in the early 90’s, and my tech-literacy doesn’t *feel* generational: it feels *cultural*.

My father isn’t great at handling noobs gently, but he did his best to teach me right. He taught me the power in flexibility: he encouraged me to buy a laptop with my Christmas money rather than a Game Boy Advance, so that I could play games *and* do a lot of other stuff (I later got a GBA for the more console-specific games, but I got the laptop first and he was right to consider it a higher priority), and to buy a Sansa rather than buy an iPod and be trapped in Apple’s walled garden. (And yes–statute of limitations–he then taught me how to torrent music to fill it with. This was back in 2007, when YouTube had very little music and youtube-dl was correspondingly not very useful for this.) He taught me to dual-boot so I could use Linux as much as possible and Windows only when needed (and I have needed it less and less often). He even managed to teach me a lesson he has never been able to teach Mom: to google my own problems instead of always running to him. I rarely need his help anymore.

(He’s still much better than I am at coding and command-line usage, but there are areas in which I have surpassed him. He taught me to avoid DRM primarily as a matter of principle, whereas I actually *use* my hard-won right to make backups. I shrugged off an abrupt laptop failure when I was fifteen: everything I cared about was also stored on the Sansa (and vice versa), and I simply repopulated my next laptop with files from there. A few years later *Dad* had a sudden failure, and he ended up having to go buy an adapter so he could plug his old hard drive into his new computer’s USB port and pull the data over that way. I shudder to think what would have happened if the hard drive *itself* had failed.)

When I grew up I hung out in social spheres where I was often among the *least* techy people there, and they kept it going: they taught me about tracker-blockers and encryption and password managers, about web scrapers and spreadsheets.

But I think if I hadn’t had my father around growing up, I’d have a much more shallow understanding of computers and a much greater willingness to stay within the bounds of what the megacorps deign to allow me.

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I continue [link] to be horrified by people paying a thousand-plus dollars for a computer unless they have very ambitious plans for it. A streaming-and-maybe-occasionally-typing-in-Word-documents computer costs, like, one to two hundred. My general-purpose computer cost three hundred *after* international shipping and tariffs: an American resident would have paid 250.

(And you say it’s going *up* over time, instead of holding steady or dropping in non-inflation-adjusted dollars? For a *netbook*?!)

Please, folks, buy used business laptops: there are plenty of refurbisher stores on eBay. Depending on how old the laptops are and how high-end they were when they were new, you can get specs to suit a wide variety of needs; they’ve usually been upgraded to Windows 10 if they’re too old to have come with it originally; because companies often overestimate how many laptops they need to outfit their workforce, quite a few business laptops are “used” in only the most technical of senses (Dad, querying a newly-purchased laptop: “what is the cumulative amount of time you’ve spent turned on, throughout your entire life?” laptop: “about six hours”).

If you are not tech-literate enough to pick out a laptop on eBay, use that intergenerational mixing to your advantage and find a relative or something who can fill the role of the Best Buy employee (but without the incentive to convince you to spend as much as possible). If you can’t find anyone, ask *me* and I will see what I can do. Even if you are a complete stranger: everyone deserves a reasonably priced computer.

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