Nielsen and Norman group know what’s up. I learned this at my first office job. Everyone thought I was a wizard hacker when I showed them inspect element. I got in trouble with my director who flagged IT Security when I showed my team lead an inspect element on some intranet page. I had changed a title to something else as a proposal and they had thought I had hacked their intranet and changed it myself. Triggered a whole security incident.
I thought everyone with a computer knew about this. I was wrong.
i used to worked for a public school district, and i once pointed out a guys laptop was infested with porn popups (~2000). the cops investigated me for reporting it.
That’s absolutely fucking bonkers. I’m hoping that this didn’t cause you any lasting consequences at work.
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Need some more details here.
A “guys” laptop? Like a student or a faculty member?
Did you report it to the police or to the IT department or other faculty? Who were you in this school? Teacher?
What do you mean by the cops “investigating” you? Like asking a few questions to get it on record? Or getting into your computer? Were they accusing you of something? Who called them in the first place?
it was a volunteer in the building. his personal device… and he was like 80 years old. i reported it to the ‘room’ teacher, as im just an IT guy.
the next thing i know, 2 detectives have me in a room questioning my knowledge of ‘lolita’. they really didnt like the fact that i pointed out this 80 year old guy was the victim of a drive-by popup storm on his laptop… common for the era.
teacher->principal->cops->me for some reason
i got nothing to hide, so whatevs
the volunteer was told not to come back
Sounds like maybe they found more than popups when they investigated…
Wow, this is bleak.
I read somewhere (I think the deloitte tech survey from a few years ago) that many people have replaced their pc with smartphones and use their phone as their primary tech device. Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.
I work in tech at a credit union and we’ve hit a weird full circle point where the new folks entering the job market need a lot of training on using a computer for this reason. It’s been very bizarre being back at a point where I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets.
I’m in IT. There was a time when I was sure that the younger generations would be eclipsing my technical skills. I knew where I came from, and what I was exposed to and assumed that the younger generations would have everything I had, and even MORE technical exposure because of the continuing falling cost of technology. For about a decade that was true, and then it plateaued and then, as you experienced, I saw the younger generations regressing in technology skills.
There was a time when I was actually worried about job security due to an overabundance of young people wanting to enter the field. Nowadays, not so much.
On the other hand, I’m instead now worrying that younger generations might become even less able to understand the importance of digital rights if they don’t even understand the basics of the technology.
Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn’t necessarily used much? There were people that were “computer people”, who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn’t need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.
Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.
The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There’s always a gap. It just takes different shapes.
Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They’re critical to life, enthusiast or no. That’s the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.
Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.
After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.
Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
We learned the technology to accomplish specific mundane goals, and along the way learned the inner workings of the technology which became applicable to the working world. Now, to accomplish those same rather mundane tasks there is very little to learn, and very little ancillary learning benefit derived from doing those mundane things.
Yes, when you were learning those, you had a viewpoint from the outside. That you know there are things like discrete math, electricity, magnetism, transistors, ones and zeroes, etc, and level above level from these things a machine has been built. You wouldn’t know how exactly, but you would understand how complex it is and how important it is to approach it with logic.
Now these people don’t think. At all. Ads yell with music, pictures and colors at them, computers they use are about poking screens with fingers, and it takes a lot of courage to abandon that context.
Like in that experiment with a white ball being called black and a group of humans where some have been warned to call it black and some start doing it because others do.
I keep hearing this but it’s perplexing.
Students have been using laptops in school and college for a long time now, no matter how much time they spend on their phone.
What I encountered in IT isn’t people who have no idea how to use a computer, it’s people that have very little idea how to use Windows over Apple or occasionally Chromebook. But even then, they usually still know Windows from needing to use it at some point in school. It’s the settings and other little things they struggle with, not the basics.
I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets
Or they come from iMac or MacBooks where right clicking is less emphasized as it is on Windows.
Could be, could be. This is just anecdotal on my part where I’ve helped people get up to speed and they’ve told me they basically never used a computer growing up. Maybe they don’t count Chromebooks as part of that group, dunno.
Shit I am a pretty high level electrical engineer, and even I loathe having to use Windows these days. I actually used to be team Microsoft, but have been primarily Linux for more than a decade now, and vastly prefer MacOS as an ssh client, which is mostly what I need a laptop to do.
They’re also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it’s identical, and you’re incapable of using marginally more complex things.
It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.
When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.
It’s also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.
Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.
So you start making things that don’t empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.
Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
“Mobile skills” are likely still lower skill. Tablets and phones are mostly content consumption devices instead of content creation (photos/videos excluded). Does anyone do serious software development on a phone? How often are mobile users writing papers or prose using only their touchscreen? How many people are doing complicated video edit on an iPhone? Can those tasks be done on a table/phone? Sure, but I don’t think its common.
The reason this is a problem is that it means there is a barrier between deeper computer skills and the devices/environment that people are using daily. The reason many of us became computer savvy on a desktop wasn’t because we wanted to, its because we had to to get the game running we wanted or we had to write the paper we were required to. So being familiar with other uses on a computer, it is only a very mild extension to writing a script if the need arises. The only “new” or “foreign” part is the script, not the environment or interaction of where you’re creating it.
With a tablet/phone as your primary device it means learning not just scripting, but learning all the skills necessary to use a computer. Its a high barrier.
However with their examples you don’t need to write a script, you can solve them that way but you really don’t need to for these examples. This is some basic search refinement skills (Outlook would even help you build this unlike say a Google search with refinement filters) and either a small spreadsheet or a calculator app to max out at their level 3.
Scripting this I would put at a level 4, but I would be interested where the authors of the paper would fit that in as its their research and what sort of percentage would fit into that skill set.
I think scripting is certainly a level 4 activity, since to even get started solving the problem you would need to navigate an IDE and have basic knowledge of a scripting language. Most people wouldn’t even know where to start.
I always wonder how it’s even possible. I can’t do half shit that I do on my computer on my phone. And even if I can, I need to spend like 3x-4x more time because how inefficient touch screen is.
Recently lived like that for a while - until a laptop replacement part arrived. And now I am skeptical. I refuse to believe someone would go mobile-only willingly and long-time. Maybe if they cannot afford a computer, at max.
I am primarily mobile only, but I am also a Linux user on desktop. I just don’t use the desktop very often because it’s less convenient to have to sit down in front of a desktop or laptop versus just pulling out your phone and checking something. It’s more a, it’s the device I have and it’s always on and I don’t have to go anywhere to get it. As I said though, I’m high in both mobile and desktop because I run Linux and know how to use the command line and I flash custom ROMs on my phone and use primarily open source software. I also submit bugs to many open source, desktop, and mobile applications.
I doubt that. Phones hide even more of the internal infrastructure than PCs do.
What do you think all those “hacker” scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?
Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.
Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.
Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.
We still have more and less powerful people in our world.
What I mean is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “user-friendly” computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.
I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email
I have seen worse. Normie’s around me use their phone to capture photo of the laptop screen and send the low pixel photo with less than half part in it including the actual document.
When I ask for a screenshot I get a Word document with a picture in it about 10% of the time.
I feel like that’s more a boomer thing.
I was looking at a spec from another government contractor and of course it’s a scan because fuck me. While I am reading it I suddenly noticed that it was made by a typewriter.
Never a great sign.
The screenshot thing is PAINFUL and way too common by management in particular
Lol screenshot, pdf, what’s the difference really?
I hate them so much when they do that. “I don’t know how to export pdf” - yet you know how to make screenshots which is a “secret” key combination that’s written NOWHERE on the ui.
How it’s possible that they think that’s ok to send four separate emails (separate emails because they click on the screenshot preview on the bottom of the screen and share that) with a screenshot of each page instead of just the file? How they don’t think “wait, is it possible that there isn’t a better way?”
Yeah this is very much not that they don’t understand there’s a better way. It’s that they don’t care to look up how. It’s pretty common. People just go oh I don’t know computers and you get whatever random crap they could throw together with zero effort lol.
There’s no secret to screenshots. They all have a phone.
Remember my old bomer boss who insisted I use the office scanner to scan documents instead of my phone. Not because it was better but because he paid for a scanner and wanted to get his money’s worth.
PDF scales when you zoom in on it.
Really?
The PDF contains the information. The screenshot contains a picture of the information.
It’s a tree vs. a picture of a tree. A recording vs. a live performance.
It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?
A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.
PDFs are searchable, zoomable (i.e. don’t look like shit on high-res displays), are often much smaller, have nicer software for handling them (image viewers are usually not designed for this task), and so on.
You’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re joking.
I am joking
When I read “never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse” my first thought was “wow, they only ever used punched cards” until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.
I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy – as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother’s grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It’s insane.
Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.
Oh I bet, and fwiw I think that’s a pretty good estimate of that bell curve – I’m just on the tail end of it, so I got to see an actual decline in tech literacy in the people literally in my immediate orbit. It was an interesting experience, for sure
I think for those of us that were born 2000 and later the amount of tech experience we have probably has a strong correlation with who was into PC gaming/modding as kids.
Most certainly.
My higher computer literacy stems solely from personal interest.
The IT education in school was basic office usage and other “normie” tasks. Not even typing classes…Still doing the 4,5 finger blind/hunt writing system.
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Born in that time frame. Windows XP was just finicky as hell, no matter how much praise it got later. If you wanted your Internet to work you just had to flush the DNS cache or just disable and re-enable the interface occasionally. Hell, same for my mouse - occasionally had to use the keyboard to disable and re-enable the mouse drivers.
Now shit just works. Only reason I’ve had to fiddle around so much in recent years is that I used Gentoo for a couple of years. Though by the time I was bored with it, it worked better than Windows XP ever did.
I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.:(
EDIT: Welp, I guess I just proved someone else’s point.
?
Btw the “>” at the beginning starts a quote.
To prevent that put a\before something like a*or. Like this:\\>. Hope I could help you :)That is exactly what happened. I was trying to jokingly express anger at seeing my birth year being correlated with being tech-illiterate, so I typed a ‘>:(’ emoji, not realizing I needed an escape-character to avoid it looking like quote.
Hope you get the same laugh out of it as I did lol
No worries, figured as much :D
we had typing class in elementary school circa 1995. that’s how I got to typing 150 wpm. almost useless now because of OCR, but still… sad to see computer skills lost these days.
I see ppl typing with 3 fingers and you have 10 of themI learned to type from instant messaging: ICQ and AIM. I know I did Mavis Beacon too but that was the practice that solidified it.
Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.
A lot of those typing things start you off with “here’s the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we’ll let you type g and h in addition.” and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I’m the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.
The last sentence resonates with me. I too wore a robe and wizard hat back in the day.
I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.
For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.
In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.
I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.
I know too many people like that and I hate them
“I’m no expert so I will dismiss this dialog without reading it” - “it gives me error but because I’m not expert I’m not going to read it” - “it says something but you need to come here to read it - no, I’m unable to read it because I’m not expert”
And at the same time believe in a million conspiracy theories in fields that they definitively are not experts in
I don’t hate them but I do hate the culture and systems that have created them.
My father-in-law got a Master’s Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he’s now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.
I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can’t even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).
Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.
<sigh>
I think it’s a mix of all of these things.
Being able to read isn’t quite equivalent to reading comprehension though. So between that, and lack of curiosity, laziness, defeatism, and more; it really does stunt the population when it comes to computer knowledge.
It’s the retarded UIs, I think. I function the same way when having to use Windows, Android, typical applications and sites. It’s an undertaking to use any of them to some end.
Now why do these people give up and offload it to us “sufficiently young” - they think these UIs are retarded for them, but work for us. Like “you wanted such things, you help me with them”.
And they can’t accept that such things are aimed at them and not us.
I don’t find this explanation remotely likely.
One can walled gardens, siloed services, lack of trust, oligopoly, widespread scams, legal pressure at everything good in the industry. It’s not the only factor surely.
Did you accidentally a word? Sorry, I don’t understand
add
Ah. I mean, those factors are bad for developers, power users, and/or normal users, but I don’t think they contribute to a lack of understanding of how computers work. It’s that people don’t ever have to interact with or understand the layer beneath the applications they use. That’s not a sign of bad UI, it’s actually a sign of good UI, but without proper education (the biggest factor imo) it does cause a lack of understanding. Ideally we’d live in a world where you don’t need to understand the underlying technology, but it is easy to do so.
Yes. When I use particularly badly designed software, where you know it’s from a lazy, cost cutting money grabbing company, and you know you need 8x more clicks, and where any miss-step, means you have to start again, I have great trouble motivating myself to use it.
Same. Then I go online and read how CLI’s are too hard to use and Linux popularity would be better were its UI’s more similar to Windows and MacOS, and that it’s become easier to use now, and that Gnome is on the edge of making that the reality.
By the way, the best time for Linux UI’s (easiness of use too) was IMHO when FVWM, Fluxbox, WindowMaker and Afterstep were still commonly used, and when people had a separate user (and possibly separate X session in Xephyr) for Skype, because it was the only proprietary program on their machine and hygiene\suspicion dictated isolating it. Look how far we have fallen.
You can critique UI design without using an ableist slur
OK
Yeah the biggest problem for people who can’t use a computer always seems to be that they just won’t ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything
There’s an XKCD for that, of course.
I’ve discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.
Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.
But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what’s possible. I’m the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.
I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settin
