I think it is scary how quick kids are for getting around on an ipad, ipod, iphone…My 3 yearold niece knows how to do more things than I do…
I’m curious what people mean when they say things like this. Ipads and iphones are designed to be extremely simple, obvious, user friendly devices. No special skill is required to operate them, and for that matter, no special skill will really give you any more knowledge than a casual user. Anyone can learn all there is to know about operating them in about 10 minutes. Being able to work an iOS device is pretty much the least savvy technologically related task I can think of.
The underlying tech has gotten so advanced that it’s somewhere between magic and invisible. The devices today’s kids are using may as well be called kiosks. You can pick it up, do something with it and have no idea what’s actually happening.
Take a picture with a phone, Instagram grabs hold of it, and you can colorize, posterize, etc., all without knowing how to install Photoshop, add RAM and configure the system swapfile so it runs better, resolve missing DLLs and driver conflicts, obtain and install plugins, or how to manage files. In the phone, it just happens, in no small amount due to the technology being set up by the maker as a “walled garden” where you don’t need to know what directory the photos are being saved in. Just take a picture, tap the “old polaroid” effect button, and the photo flies off to the “album.”
Technologically amazing? Absolutely. Needs tech savvy by the user? Not at all.
But as people have brought up before, the number of adults that are baffled by these devices is extremely high. Even if they are simple to use, it still requires some know-how that these kids have and the adults don’t.
Sure, and RAM’s not even particularly difficult to change out so it’s a bad example. But people here are talking about writing programs to optimize configs for games on startup and so on that just aren’t necessary anymore. When I don’t need to learn how to write a batch file, the odds of me just deciding to learn a batch file for funsies are low. Kids don’t spend a lot of time with soldering irons and voltmeters because their parents did and went and developed technologies to make needing to do that stuff unnecessary, just as presumably, all the tinkering the grandparents did led to advances that meant kids in the 80s and 90s could spend their time learning how to use unix commands rather than something else.
Tech literacy has gone up, it’s just that people say it has gone up a lot more than it has. People see the tech savant and think he’s normal, when he’s the upper end. For every savant, there are 7 more average users and one tech dunce. So it evens out. But still the average is higher.
Another aspect is that the upper levels of tech literacy have gone up. Programming didn’t become simpler, as we were promised. It is now much more difficult, because we want our programs to do more.
How to install RAM:
-
Push latches to take out old RAM, if necessary.
-
Push new ram in and (hardest part) make sure that you are putting it in the right way. If the notch doesn’t line up, reverse. Push until it clicks.
Tough job. The hardest hardware thing it probably installing a heatsink, and even that is more frustrating than technically difficult.
Thanks for the bad memories! DOSBox and similar are saviors that I wish I had back in the day. U7 is now playable with Exeult which gets past all that memory management crap or the sound not working, etc.
I did choose your own adventures as a kid with Hypercard, or later a bit of Powerpoint. Such as “click here to suplex the ogre (goes to slide 47).”
Really this hasn’t changed at all. Gear heads 30 years ago could tune a carburetor in their sleep and had to have the skills to change a tire because poly glas tires wore out or blew out fairly quickly. Tuners today probably haven’t seen a carb outside of tv or a classic car show but can render a fuel injected engine perfectly stoichiometric inside of 6 seconds using a laptop to modify the engine map.
As an aside, you can pull apart an Ipod or smart phone to repair them, it just requires good eyes and different tools.
I think you’d probably find that most teenagers today are probably about as tech savvy as any time in the last 50 years. There were plenty of kids in my high school in the 80s that couldn’t build a computer or fix their own cars, and it’s the same today.
I will tell you one thing they know how to do–go on Youtube and fire our how to do things.
I just passed an ad on the subway for a coding school, advertising “Learn to Code Today.”
A generation ago, that message would have little resonance with a general audience. Most people would have no idea why they might even consider learning to code, or may even think it was something about cryptography. I doubt recreational coding schools even existed.
But knowing what you can do with technology is a big part of being tech savvy. It’s about being able to use technology to solve a problem. Technology is a tool, not necessarily and ends to itself. The value of being savvy in the first place is being able to use it to do useful stuff.
If my grandma gets a nice picture of a sunset that has a telephone in the way, she’ll just print it out and put it in an album somewhere.
If my cousin gets a nice picture, he’ll edit out the telephone pole, enhance the colors, do a bit of research on typographical blogs for inspiration, add an inspirational quote, share it with friends around the world on Tumblr, and then sell the results on Etsy, watching the income stream in to his high-yield internet based checking account.
Not a lot of technical knowledge required, but an enormous amount of technical savvy.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between building your own computer or rebuilding an engine and knowing how to put air in the tires or use a file tree. While you arguably wouldn’t be served to know how to research and upgrade your processor, you WOULD be served to know if you’re installing a program to your hard drive or to your SSD.