Some Homo Interneticus people are very computer savvy. Other Homo Interneticus people are addicted to games or forums/Twitter/Facebook. A Homo Interneticus addict may spend too much time on the media of their addiction to learn anything. That is sad. That is like an alcoholic working in a distillery.
The illiterate ones tend to invent and use unnecessary jargon that makes their communication more difficult to understand. If they’re really bad they use different colors and fonts.
WOW! I was indeed speaking about myself among others.
Now I am learning new cyberstuff in order to remedy the situation.
Hey 'Borgie! It’s been a while, how’ve you been? 
I have been OK. I almost left the board due to strong disagreements and a possibility of a ban.
I came back to discuss only computer stuff – this board has some best cyberexperts. Some seemingly impossible tasks have been solved via a short consultation.
I will not discuss sex, politics, and especially sex politics on SDMB.
How have you been?
What is a Homo Interneticus Human? Seems like that could cover a lot of disparate groups.
I like Gretchen McCulloch’s breakdown of:
Old Internet People
Full Internet People
Semi Internet People
Pre Internet People
Post Internet People
OIP would be anyone who got online when that meant doing actual work to figure out how to get online and the internet was BBSes, Usenet and no such thing as a search engine. Often a programmer or coder or STEMy kind of person (I assume this is somewhere north of 90% of the dope demographic)
FIP are people like me who got online in the 90s/00s. Almost certainly initially via dialup. Probably made a website or two on geocities or angelfire. Familiar with oldschool IRC, chatrooms etc. If not a coder, can do things like unpack HTML and troubleshoot internet issues.
SIP are in the same age cohort as OIP but they didn’t get online until their jobs changed and internet and computer skills became something they needed at work and then brought into their homelife.
PrIP are the same age cohort as SIP and OIP or older and they absolutely resisted the internet in their jobs and in their homelife until they couldn’t resist the siren song of pics of the grandkids on facebook anymore.
PoIP are the youngest cohort and they have no conception of a world without the internet immediately available on electronic devices.
OIP and FIP are gonna be your most cyber-literate demographics with PrIP probably at the lowest end of the scale and PoIP and SIP floating around the middle based on how much they care about understanding computers and the internet and how much they “just want it to work”.
And then there are hybrids. I was on the internet in the mid-90s via dialup. I was in chatrooms, etc., but don’t do much coding or HTML. I can not even begin to troubleshoot internet issues.
I’d have to go back to her book for specifics but McCulloch uses social media + age as a quick and dirty sorting. If your first social media was Usenet, you’re OIP. If your first social media was yahoo chatrooms, IRC, AIM, etc, you’re FIP. If you’re under 30 and it was facebook, tumblr, twitter you’re PoIP, over 30 and FB, Twitter, etc, you’re PrIP. I can’t remember what she thought Semi was. Email maybe? But email certainly existed before 2000.
I tend to think of it as being along the same sort of continuum of people who eat meat; at some point there were similar breakdowns- there were those who grew up raising, killing and eating what they ate, because that was the only option. Then you had the ones who went to specialized butcher shops, and requested certain cuts. Then there are the people who just buy processed meat products (premarinated chicken, frozen burger patties, etc…) at the store and cook it. And finally, there are those who just buy hamburgers and steaks from restaurants.
It’s a time and convenience thing. For most older people, they already had their hobbies and communication pathways entrenched, so they didn’t see the point of switching to online versions. (most old people I know still get printed newspapers and have land-line phones to go with their smartphones and tablets). Most people under about 47-48 probably picked up the basics of the internet during their college-aged days in the early-mid 1990s when having an email address and surfing the web was still a cool new thing. But we’re old enough to remember time without the internet.
It’s people like my niece and nephew who grew up in a world where even smartphones were something that came into ubiquitous use when they were small children, never mind internet access via a PC or emails via an old-school cell phone. So from their perspective, that stuff is about on par with the way that telephones, radios and televisions are to us- something you use, and when it breaks, you either get it fixed or get a new one, without much regard or interest in what actually makes it work.
Even I (a guy who was using BBSes and Fidonet email over dial-up in the 1980s), find myself being a little less interested in the nuts and bolts of things like say… 5G or things like that.
I have read all replies and they accurately describe the situation for normal people. But what about people addicted to games/forums? Here.
Many addicts are so preoccupied with their addiction that they can not learn new stuff. Can an alcoholic work in a distillery?
I believe it’s a job requirement.
I disagree. A real alcoholic would be unable to work in a distillery.
I am addicted to forums. But I find no happiness in voiceless talk. I must learn Discord.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at; as far as I know, those are separate things. I’m sure there are very tech-savvy people who are addicted to computer stuff and who still learn all sorts of new stuff. And there are probably some who are pig-ignorant about all things technological, but who are still addicted to social media/games/etc… anyway.
To use your analogy, I’m sure there are alcoholics who work at distilleries, but there are also probably tee-totalers who work there too. And there are assuredly people who consume in moderation who work there as well. And all those categories exist in all jobs outside of distilleries as well. I’m not sure that one is particularly related to the other.
Plenty of people are so involved in other stuff that they can’t find time to do things they think they want to do. The problem with the internet is that you can do stuff and not know anything about what you’re doing, and get away with it until something breaks.
Early PCs required you to do lots of stuff to set them up. Modern PCs you turn on and they set themselves up. Any non-trivial action scares people.
Heh. I’m older than old then, since I was on Usenet real early (when there was one alt.sex group, with low volume) but I was on message boards and chat rooms on PLATO 6 or 7 years before that. And ARPAnet.
Usenet was the citadel of cyberfreedom – no moderation.
{{Piper raises hand}}
Please Sir, can you explain where I feed the punch cards into my Mac to change the coding?
Have you ever corrected paper tape with a “chicken plucker”?
Except when it was.
There were eventually moderated groups, especially when groups got filled with spam.