Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We're in our early 40s.
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You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads đ
I swear I saw a study that basically came to the conclusion that there is a distinct curve in technological literacy where younger generations are used to tech âjust workingâ and not knowing how to navigate anything outside of app-based interface. Take all of this with a handful of salt bc I donât have source on hand.
This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there's a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.
In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already "failed" but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say "mostly" because we're already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it'll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.
Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.
As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It's highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.
As a instructor of IT I can absolutely confirm. A lot of Gen Z have not grown up with computers as a tool. I have a class of around 20 students, and maybe 4-5 have any knowledge of the various compression archives. I have to give primers on the proper way to save various file types otherwise they'll just create default.config.txt (6) and wonder why an install isn't working.
I thought you said zoomer parents and was about to get really mad and sad at the time.
I mean older Gen Z are 20-24. Iâm a millennial and I was a dad at 23 haha. Itâs early, but not unreasonably so.
To 26 actually. Gen Z starts in 1997.
Eh the borderline years are all subjective.
But yes. Mid twenties is a reasonable time to start having kids
Heh heh heh, I thought he said Boomer parents and I was wondering where the heck they got iPads
My brother is gen Z and is having a kid this year
Yeah, this is a thing. I know a lot of younger folks who don't really have a clue about how to do something if they don't have iOS version whatever or some other bespoke interface. (And no, I'm not a boomer)
CLI ultimately runs the world, and the younger folks who understand CLI are probably at a ratio roughly even to the other generations.
Whatâs a computer?