Are kids today really that much tech savvy than in the past? I would wager that a kid born in the 2000s-2010s will grow up to be more tech illiterate than anyone born in the 1980s-1990s.
I was born in the late 1980s, and had to spend countless hours in my childhood and early adolescence figuring out various problems with our home network, getting my PC games to run, upgrading our PC hardware, editing complex MS Office documents, etc. How many .INI files did I edit? How many “README.txt” documents did I read? How many times did I upgrade RAM and install new video cards?
Nowadays, it seems to me that kids are mainly using ultra-simple gadgets which even the lowest dullard could use. iPhones and iPads are all based around bright, shiny icons where you are never allowed to access the file system or do anything particularly complex. You can’t even have two windows open at once. In addition, you can’t crack these devices open and replace their parts on your own like you could with PCs.
Won’t these kids grow up with little to no knowledge of how computers actually work?
It’s true that the people who were tech savvy during the nascent stage of a new technology had to learn more about that technology than the people who came later, because after the pioneering stage, you refine/simplify the the technology for mass adoption. So the average power user who grew up in the 90s is certainly more tech savvy than the average person today.
However, you’re comparing a small percentage of the population - tech savvy people before technology was widespread - to a more general group. A lot of people who grew up in the 90s simply weren’t very tech savvy at all, and didn’t use technology nearly as much as people do today. So it may be that the average tech savvy of the population as a whole is higher now, even though the proficiency of power users, or whatever you want to call them, is less.
That said, I think your general sentiment is true. The tech savvy of kids these days is overstated, since it doesn’t require any special knowledge to use common levels of technology. Certainly the average tech-using person has less fundamental understanding of the technology they’re using than a tech using person from 20 years ago.
You had to/chose to do that stuff. But back then people as a whole were much less savvy. So the mean has gone up, but the population is much less right-skewed with 8 year olds who can write BASIC programs.
Many mobile browsers support multiple windows in the form of tabs; what you mean is multiple applications. And there is still customization/tinkering in Android and I assume iOS.
Kids absolutely still tinker, and in at least as great a number as they did 20 years ago. Now there are more outlets than ever: the internet lets you find out how to do all sorts of things, there are robotics clubs in high schools, there are so many different platforms you can work on. And while yes, most of them basically just think of technology as a matter of what buttons to mash, I think most of them have some basic sense of computer logic in a way that people did not 20 years ago, with if-then type thinking, or Boolean logic. Given a device that can do X, they are pretty good at inferring what else it might or might not be able to do, and how to get it to do so.
The OP makes an interesting point. Smartphones and tablets are a lot more ubiquitous these days, but they are largely dummy-proofed for the masses. Prior to the early 90s, you had to know DOS commands just to run a game on a PC.
OTOH, kids can download all the tools they need to make a full-blown web site in their door room. Programming in the 80s was a lot more of an esoteric pursuit for future engineers and academics.
Many people confuse kids’ ability to use technology fast with an understanding of that technology.
But it’s hard to compare groups. The general population was very technology illiterate decades ago. Maybe they know a little more today, because so many more people use computer-powered devices. On the other hand, the inner workings of these devices is much more hidden today, so today’s power users probably know less than the power users of the past, the same way that a car enthusiast in the 1970s could probably fix many problems with their car while a car enthusiast today wouldn’t be able to.
Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to express.
And you all have a good point about how uncommon tech literacy was in the 1980s and 1990s. Many people barely EVER used computers. But those of us who did often had some pretty advanced knowledge and troubleshooting abilities.
A short time ago I realized how completely hopeless my 15 year old daughter is with anything computer related. I was shocked. Things like creating folders, click hold and drag, not trying to download free movies and filling the computer I bought with viruses. Things like that.
And I’m sure people used to say the same thing about developers using high-level languages instead of assembler or software engineers that don’t know anything about electronics.
Abstraction is a good thing and means we can do more with computers.
When I did my undergraduate thesis, about 90% of my time was spent just getting my GUI working…creating a solid Win32 app back in the day was quite an undertaking. I’m glad students now get to skip all that, and I’m sure the projects they create have much more actual functionality than I was able to implement in the time available.
OTOH, if you’re talking about the general public not knowing how their computers work, well knowledge of how computers work has always been something only a small minority knew anything about.
So sure, “computer users” used to be more savvy than “computer users” today. But the difference is the set of computer users has grown to encompass the entire populace, and computers becoming appliances is a big part of that.
I was born in 1980, so I grew up the same way you did, and there was a clear divide then between people who understood computers and people who didn’t…but that stuff has all become general consumer electronics now.
A large number of young people today will just use consumer electronics the way kids used a TV or radio in the 80s…no tinkering or deeper understanding of it, just using the technology.
But there are kids today building custom gaming computers, torrenting files, building apps, all that stuff…probably about the same percentage of people who were deep into computers in our day. So things have changed: not everyone who uses a computer today is a computer whiz…but there is still a subculture that is truly tech-saavy, and there always will be.
There’s a difference between being able to do GUI programming in machine language (what’s that newfangled “assembler” you speak of?) and having some understanding of how computers work. It’s hard to say what level of knowledge is useful and/or reasonable to expect from the general public, though.
And my 9yo nephew tweaks my mother’s tablet, both at her request and against her will (not that she’s complained very forecefully - if she had, he’d stop). The only reason he hasn’t been able to reactivate its data usage is that I actually took out the SIM card
I am posting this from my Altair 8800 which is the pinnacle of DIY All-American computing. As soon as you could own a personal computer without even firing up the old soldering iron, things went downhill fast. The TRS-80 and Apple II were some of the main offenders at attracting people that couldn’t wire up a circuit board from scratch if their life depended on it.
There’s tech and there’s tech. As an old fart, I assume kids now are literally BORN with the ability to deal with smart phones and computers. Not true I realize, but I see my 2 1/2 year old grand daughter pick up Mrs. Gap’s smart phone and use it like it was old news, she seems so at home with it.
On the other hand, there are young’uns now who are completely into older forms of technology. Twenty somethings who can tell you anything you’d ever want to know about steam engines, both locomotive and stationary, and work on them to boot. I’ve come to realize that just like I was when I was growing up, many of the younger folks are just curious. About anything and everything. The internet has aided this curiousity greatly. So much information is available that once a seed has been planted in the inquisitive mind there’s much more potential for growth.
I’d venture to say that kids have no fear of technology, unlike their grandparents who are literally afraid to do stuff with computers, phones, tablets, DVD players, SmartTVs, etc, lest they mess something up.
Their parents (people my age, between Boomers and “kids today”) are sort of half-and-half. Half of us have no fear and we go around fixing thing/settings things up for the other half of our generation and our parents.
While my parents might get on the phone and insist someone at Samsung walk them through every step of plugging in their SmartTV and getting it connected to Netflix, my nieces (if they were of age) would probably be ok with turning it on, reading the screens and mashing some buttons until it works. And if it doesn’t, eh, we’ll reboot and try again.
I agree that the real difference is the level of comfort with technology. It’s not just that past generations did not know the inner workings of technology. It’s that they had no idea why they would want a computer, if they had one they were uncomfortable using it, and if they could use them they were still positively terrified of changing settings or doing other basic activities.
Kids today don’t think twice about picking up a new gadget and using it, and there is enough tech-savvy within most peer groups that they use them pretty effectively, and are able to find useful products or services that even pretty plugged-in adults don’t “get.”
All true. I am sole Tier III support for a multi-billion dollar manufacturing and distribution facility. That means the end of the line for anything everyone else fails at and I never have in 5 years of working there. Most of the technology in use there is at least 15 years old and some of it dates back to the 1950’s. It is all good. In my short interview, I told them, I can fix anything anything remotely electronically related in a very short time even if I have never seen it before because it is true. The reason is because I grew up dealing with primitive PC’s starting in the early 1980’s and messed around with lots of different technologies since then. I am a really good on both the hardware and software side and I have the experience and results to back it up.
I am not sure how younger people are going to get the same thing without formal training. They are certainly at least as smart as I was but those things take time and experience to learn (typing in programs from Byte magazine and then modifying them in 1984 was at least as useful as any formal course I ever took for example). IT professionals used come out of the ranks of people that built their own home computer and set up their own FTP servers but there is much less amatuer demand for that now.
I am training a few people now that are very smart and capable when it comes to the newer core technologies but they are completely lost when I try to explain to them that the workstation they are setting up also needs to run an emulator tapping into a mainframe several thousand miles away and there is no painless way to set that up. They will get it eventually but it does require lost of handholding even for people in their early 30’s with lots of previous experience.
Yes, many older people are phobic about “mashing some buttons until it works,” being afraid they’ll break something. They won’t, unless they open the wrong email. Which they will. Otherwise, breaking stuff usually requires more skill than they possess. But when trouble-shooting the next time I have to ask, “What does the screen say?” I will scream. Modern systems usually tell you what is wrong, and even how to fix it. Worlds better than “Error 421” in the old days.
I’ve had people, especially bosses, get mad when I told them they should play with their computers a bit, including mashing buttons to see what happened. They thought electronic devices should work perfectly, without any human input except maybe a psychic connection. These were often the same people who thought that a proper demonstration of a CAD system was simply plotting a drawing. With an old pen plotter this was ALWAYS followed by, “Bet you wish you could draw that fast.” <old rolleyes>
ETA: It took me a while to realize that Windows Solitaire was actually there to teach newbies how to use a mouse. Very subtle, Mr Gates.
