Technical illiteracy in children

[Mæstro]

While reading teachers talk about changes they have seen over the years, somebody had posted this ten-year-old article, Kids Can’t Use Computers. Both the older article and the thread are full with horror stories. I do not encounter children in daily life, but my friend (*2004) has told me of his mates in secondary not knowing what a file is or why a computer has a WLAN switch. The few times I have tried to work with files on a mobile phone have shown me they hide the file system as best they can. As somebody who cannot stand touchscreens or any interface from the last dozen years, it strikes me dumb and makes me worry for the future. I am too young for that. Have you got any tales of woe or personal observations in computer-illiterate youth?

[Pentium4User]

I was born ion 2001 and I know people who do not have a normal computer - they only have a smartphone.
They don't know certain things about computers.

Some of the parents also don't have a PC anymore.

I only know Android as a smartphone OS, but for me it looks like it makes using it as easy as possible and hiding certain things in the system.
This is the intention of Google.

[Blacklab]

Hmm, sadly would have to agree. Touch screen smartphone technology has moulded most Gen Z's I've met whilst volunteering with a youth charity... they are all dab hands at swiping websites, poking apps, and addicted to social media... but frankly lost if you ask them to do anything 'under the hood' or 'behind the screen' on some desktop OS... if there isn't an app or a website that does it for them they are stumped. God forbid you ask them to setup a link to an office printer/copier.

Must be some smart young things into programming, the future dev population, out there somewhere... but your average teen/twenty-something 'user' of tech definitely has no interested in fiddling with an OS or tweaking a programme an app or a browser.

No wonder Google and their dastardly FAANG chums have such an easy time building profiles and selling Ads by sucking all the data off the general mass of the online population... and no surprises most browser users never change a single setting... Chrome nirvana!

Likewise, no wonder there's the current 'panic' about TikTok as a potential security threat for all governments and their employees. I seem to recall a 'hostile power' had built a very good model of the Pentagon's organisation and operations just from employees' FB posts some years back. Must be a complete nightmare in the modern military and more secret parts of any state government keeping your personnels' online data-spraying habits in check... maybe not a problem in submarines... but only once dived!

[vannilla]

I haven't read all the replies, but people don't know about WLAN or whatever because they don't have to.
They don't habe to fiddle with settings or hardware buttons because "it just works", so there's no reason to learn obscure jargon you will ever only use when talking to nerds — people they might voluntarily not associate with.
Personally I think it is perfectly fine if people are ignorant, as humans have physical limits and delegating knowledge and skills is how a society is built; if anything the problem is when this inevitable ignorance is used for evil purpose, something that big corpos are unfortunately masters of.
However, just because evil people are evil that is not a reason to be old farts and say "kids these days".

[Eduardo Lucas]

I was born ion 2001 and I know people who do not have a normal computer - they only have a smartphone.
They don't know certain things about computers.

Some of the parents also don't have a PC anymore.

I only know Android as a smartphone OS, but for me it looks like it makes using it as easy as possible and hiding certain things in the system.
This is the intention of Google.

Android is only decent when you have full control of the phone i.e custom ROMs and rooting and if you really need a smartphone, as in some countries where people overwhelmingly use whatsapp. Great way to flee from spending hundreds of dollars every three years, as you can just get any custom ROM developed-for old removable battery smartphone, snap a third party battery with higher capacity/thickness than the older OEM one, and keep rolling until the capacitors/eMMC dies. iPhones are absolutely horrible, locked-up and when the battery dies and the phone stops running you're in an expensive mobile coffin.

[Mæstro]

However, just because evil people are evil that is not a reason to be old farts and say "kids these days".

Agreed, and this is why I, still aged under 25, had said ‘I am too young for this’, namely, being an old fart. My lament in the sentence before is not at the youth, but thoughts about design trends decades hence. Will there still be place for us who are neither programmers nor users seeking the smartphone experience on desktop in the minds of DE developers? There should be, but hearing things like this attacks my confidence.

I have on file some broad statistics, divided by country but not age, by the OECD in the 2019 publication Skills Matter. It had found that about 30% of the general population (varying by country, but never more than 45%) are capable of the following tasks in ‘technology-rich environments’:

…tasks typically require the use of both generic and more specific technology applications. For instance, the respondent may have to make use of a novel online form. Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) can facilitate the resolution of the problem. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, although the criteria to be met are explicit. There are higher monitoring demands. Some unexpected outcomes or impasses may appear. The task may require evaluating the relevance of a set of items to discard distractors. Some integration and inferential reasoning may be needed.

Perhaps in future, there will be more detailed data broken by age and we can see whether these anecdotes belong to a trend.

[Moonchild]

Just my $0.02 on the matter

Currently, children are brought up with tech from a very young age, but only with a very specific kind of tech. Does a 5-year-old understand colourful images and what they mean? yes. Does that same child understand text? You'd be hard-pressed to find any. A few years later they will be hand-held into using text and learning reading and writing, which also leaves little room for discovery.
This creates a problem for tech education later on: they already know how to use tech, but don't know how it works, so if you try to teach them about tech they "already know" and are not interested in learning more. Because of the amount of tech children are already exposed to, it creates a barrier for them to learn more about it beyond mere usage. of course there will be bright souls who are adamant wanting to know how it works, but the vast majority? They don't know and have no interest in learning because they just want to use it. They understand why it works, the reason for it to work, and probably its necessity for it to exist and does what it does, but not how it works. And that is a long-term issue a lot of people overlook.
Now, you can take that thought and reason onwards from it, i.e. how it impacts the market and how many people are being pushed to just use and consume without knowing; you can find that evil but I think it's an inevitability if the majority of consumers like it that way. I personally understand why things work and how things work, but even I don't feel the need to always dive deep when I just want to use something as a tool for a purpose. My understanding of how the tool works in that case can be useful but more often than not it isn't when it's doing its job. The problem becomes when things break down and I think that will be the mid term problem with tech: people use it, but since they are never taught how it works, they cannot fix it if things go wrong, no matter how trivial. We already see that disconnect in many places, and I think that will only get worse before it gets better.

[Falna]

...I think that will be the mid term problem with tech: people use it, but since they are never taught how it works, they cannot fix it if things go wrong, no matter how trivial.

I think that's inevitable when technologies become widely adopted - many / most people probably don't have much knowledge about how their car / washing machine / central heating / works either, and would be equally unable to fix much beyond the obvious blown bulb.

[Moonchild]

I think that's inevitable when technologies become widely adopted - many / most people probably don't have much knowledge about how their car / washing machine / central heating / works either, and would be equally unable to fix much beyond the obvious blown bulb.

Of course, but if you can't even fix a blown bulb, and the people who can fix it are all older generation that can and want to do only so much... there's a problem
But ultimately this thread was about tech illiteracy, not the logistics of having enough fixers. There's a resistance to learn, which is the problem, here. There's more and more "flying by the seat of your pants" going on, which I think is a dangerous development. In tech you often can't "guess" you actually have to "know".

[Mæstro]

I think that's inevitable when technologies become widely adopted - many / most people probably don't have much knowledge about how their car / washing machine / central heating / works either, and would be equally unable to fix much beyond the obvious blown bulb.

I had not thought of it this way. I am utterly incompetent to mend any appliance, even if I know abstractly (mostly from children’s books and sites) how they work. I do not mind this: my sympathies have always been to the pure, not applied sciences.
Handling files and otherwise using a desktop as normal, that is, as more than a Facebook-Word machine, is so embedded in my daily life that it is hard to think of how somebody would live on a mobile only. I have a friend, ten years my elder, who, until he had got into Genshin Impact, would only use a mobile. I know other, still older adults who keep to a smartphone, but can use a desktop. How can they do it?

[jobbautista9]

I think that's inevitable when technologies become widely adopted - many / most people probably don't have much knowledge about how their car / washing machine / central heating / works either,

I think personal computers are a bit different. Cars, washing machines... They have more complex, mechanical parts than a computer. You don't see anyone selling the chassis and parts of a car or washing machine and letting you build it yourself, unlike desktops (and now laptops too, thanks to startups like Framework)... And if your car or washing machine has firmware inside of it, you can't change it easily.

Of course it's a different story with smartphones and tablets, but I don't and can't really consider them as PCs... Actually even though I use my laptop every day these days, I still prefer to visualize PCs as those desktops with a CRT monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and a tower besides it. They just look cooler that way (and a lot of my university's books still show the PC that way, despite LCDs being like the norm of monitors nowadays).

[Sob__]

Difference between washing machines, cars and computers is elsewhere. Washing machines are not interesting, there's probably no viable market for customization. Mass-produced, simple, working, cheap, that's what pretty much everyone wants. DIY cars could attract some people, because that could be fun. But that's mostly killed by tons of regulations. I could build a car (= I'm allowed to), but to get it on the road, legally, it would take so much time and money that hardly anyone does it.

Computers today are open to anyone interested, nothing special is required, education, certification, none of that. If you like, just buy the parts and build one. Kid can do it. Fortunately it's still fun for many, so there is wide selection of components. But give it another twenty years and some do-gooders that add barriers in the name of safety, because someone got his finger chewed off by floppy drive or something, and self-building will go down too. And that's not the only thing.

I've been playing with computers for over thirty years, poking in both hardware and software. From the first moment it was massive fun, and still is. Networks and internet came a bit later and made it even better. But that was me. Other same-aged people had computers too and "knew" how to use them, but only because they "had to". What they actually wanted was games/porn/internet, they didn't like computers at all. So no surprise, now they often have just mobile phone and they're happy, because for them it's more convenient to access those things (I don't understand it, for me it's not convenient at all).

I wouldn't worry about future. There may be fewer people who "know" computers, but there's already more people who actually know computers than ever before. And it still pays well, so it attracts enough new ones. It's not like it has to be everybody. In our country there are some ideas about mandatory programming lessons in elementary school, like from the very beginning, first grade. What a silly nonsense.

[Eduardo Lucas]

Of course, but if you can't even fix a blown bulb, and the people who can fix it are all older generation that can and want to do only so much... there's a problem
But ultimately this thread was about tech illiteracy, not the logistics of having enough fixers. There's a resistance to learn, which is the problem, here. There's more and more "flying by the seat of your pants" going on, which I think is a dangerous development. In tech you often can't "guess" you actually have to "know".

What i hate is that it's even above the problem of people not wanting to learn. Its already in the level of the case they will not try new things and will not even listen to advices to rationally consider if they are remotely useful or not, because they are stubborn and think "i know everything and this old guy not" in a far more generalistic way than people did in the past when young.

If you say to an average guy who isn't even 20 years old "here is a notepad better than this mobile-like UI thing you use but with better functions and features as well", while showing him how to write simple things on it, he will look at it when you show him how to do it, or even deny to see it and just see an screenshot of the app running, ignore everything or say "no, thanks, i'm used to mine" and follow like you've never given him an advice. If you show him an alternative way of doing a task, he will pretend he's paying attention, wait for you to teach and show its benefits, and continue his day like it never happened but yet days later complain he's having the same issues he have due to doing the things he do in his clearly wrong and innefective way.

This late gen z and early gen a or whatever they call it, in average,is absolutely uninterested in profiting from advantages, tips, tricks, hacks or innovativeness, too full of themselves, and absolutely sure they know what they need to know. This kind of attitude almost always leads to delusion and grave mistakes.