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I’m part of Gen Z, and no, we as a generation AREN’T tech savvy. just because we grew up with smart phones does not make us tech savvy. in fact, i actually think it made us dumber with tech. i’m the only one in my school who knows how to use a command line and code (i also use linux as my daily driver). meanwhile everyone else doesn’t even know what a freaking file manager is
Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.
Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.
As far as actual tech competency goes?
Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.
Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.
I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.
Hi, I’m a programmer. Most of my classmates didn’t know how to use Linux.
Now, I’ve realized that newer products are being developed via Visual Studio so……
Linux and command line knowledge aren’t the same as being tech savvy
linux can be used through mostly GUI now so i partly agree with you, but installing linux can be quite a hard task for those who aren’t tech savvy. i’m pretty sure being able to do the following can be considered tech savvy:
- change boot settings
- flash an ISO to a USB drive
- shrink windows partition into a new one for linux
- boot from USB
- actually install linux
- get used to linux
Edit: the thing is… everyone is so used to things being pre-installed (ie windows/macOS/iOS), being able to download apps easily from the apple App Store. anything even slightly more complicated than that is too hard for them. i’ve had a graphic design class with some people a few years ago and some of them had to ask me for help for how to open a file, save, and export. if something isn’t completely, 100% automated for them, they can’t do it.
Can you not order Ubuntu on a DVD anymore? Also you’re explaining dual boot. You can just single boot linux
i’m not sure. most people at my school use a laptop at their main computer, so they couldn’t use an ubuntu DVD anyways. i personally prefer dual boot over single boot
… did everyone remove the media drive off laptops? There are also external media drives.
New laptops don’t have optical drives. I don’t think there’s a single manufacturer that still has them.
Hell, most new computer cases (much to my chagrin) don’t even have 5 1/4" bays.
I think it has been probably more than 5 years since I have seen an optical drive on a new laptop.
ultrahellabased.tar.gz
Um is there anything special to use Linux? Click the GUI.
Well installing it. That alone requires a challenge most folks probably couldn’t overcome easily. People are accustomed to just getting a computer with a working os on it. Changing that os would be pretty hard for them.
And let’s be real, you at least need a degree of tech savvy to deal with the inevitable issues that will come up. Even on the simplest distro.
IDK, only times when I broke things on Debian were when I made the unwise decisions to do things I don’t fully understand (that doesn’t really happen now). And my elderly mom uses Mint with less problems than she did Windows.
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It’s a different paradigm for windows users. “Why won’t this exe/msi install on my computer?”
But also, once you realize the unlimited potential to customize it’s pretty special. I, for one, hate using anything without a tiling windows manager.
So how do you install things?
Red hat based? Install the RPM. Debian based? Install the deb, generally? Install from the repository. You can also install from source if you’d like
I don’t know what any of that means.
You don’t generally download the file like you would an exe or MSI on windows. Rather you enter a command line that tells Linux to connect to the repository (like an app store) of that particular type of Linux, pull the latest installation file and install it.
You can still download the file and install it directly, but it’s not a straightforward double click like on windows.
Install app from native app repository of chosen Linux distribution.
Look in the OS provided “App Store” first - GUI or not, your choice.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Look for a TRUSTED alternative App Store source. Then check the App Store again.
Still can’t find it? Look to see if there is a package available that your OS can recognize (different based on what flavor of Linux you’re running)
Still can’t find it? See if you can find the code to build the dang thing yourself.
Well yeah this is like asking an oboe player how they control pitch, and they respond “different embouchure is the universal way to do it, but adjusting the reed is the best way”
Go look it up if you don’t know what the terms mean
Installing things on linux is generally the same as phones. There’s a shop-like GUI where you can look up your applications and get them, they’ll also update automatically.
If the software isn’t in your distribution repository, that’s when it starts to be like windows, you need to hunt it down and either get an appimage or something like that, or build and compile it yourself.
The most common explanation I’ve seen, and imo it makes sense, is that things mostly just work now. Even XP required a helluva lot more troubleshooting and messing with stuff to make it work than today. So you not only have a bunch of people that have no troubleshooting experience, a large portion don’t even know how to properly search for things.
On the flip side, you have a lot more people doing insanely impressive stuff at a lot younger ages because if you have the drive to do it, there’s more material to learn than ever out there.
I’m a millennial but I grew up with Macs which mostly just worked, I don’t remember having to do much troubleshooting as a kid.
But for me it was more that there was nothing else to do. You got bored, and messed around with and explored the computer, figuring out what you could make it do. Even once we got internet, it was dialup, so you got online for a bit, checked some things, downloaded some shareware, then disconnected and were stuck with whatever was on the computer again to mess with.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
And yet the evidence seems to suggest that social media has actually increased their boredom. They take fewer risks and try fewer things because the comfort of their doomscrolling feed is always there as a digital pacifier whenever they feel emotionally challenged. In turn, this is contributing to increasing rates of anxiety because these young people are not challenging themselves and learning what they are capable of. Their bodies and brains are being programmed to retreat from problems instead of facing and overcoming them. All of that leads to a life where you’re just not getting out and doing stuff, meeting people or creating memories. That’s a life of boredom.
The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.
So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?
The darned neural implant generation doesn’t even know how to doomscroll with their fingers. Kids these days smh no cap.
There’s a common misconception among boomers and gen x that “digital natives” like gen z have a god-given tech proficiency. However, there’s nothing about being born with a smartphone in your hand that teaches you anything about tech.
It’s not like people are getting better at changing oil as car ownership becomes more common, right?
That’s like 80% autocorrect anyway (I didn’t write a single word correctly in this sentence).
I’ve seen people good at typing on a touch screen and they do so, astonishingly well. I myself, am not able to type on touch well enough and just use swype instead (despite the frustration).
I think “digital naive” is a better phrase than “digital native”. They are born with computers all around them. But most adults forget to / are not able to educate them about technology and their implications.
I believe it’s a little more sinister than that. There is less education around these issues because many services have adopted a highly polished, “Walled-Garden” approach to their presentation. This keeps people who’ve grown up with the concepts in their walled garden loyal to that specific service, and makes it difficult for people to dig under the hood and work out how things really function without the sugar coating. They get irritated quickly because they’re used to everything “Just working” and don’t have experience on more open systems.
Therefore, they would like there to be no need for tech education unless you plan on a professional career as a tech.
As long as ownserhip don’t get carried away with enshittification chasing next quarter’s finance call and drive users away by annoying them into putting the extra effort in to learning about alternatives, they could keep it that way forever.
Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.
Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.
I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.
I call them digital savages. You wouldn’t ask a jungle tribe about the Krebs cycle either.
Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.
By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.
The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.
Yeah, fair point. My first computer was a Tandy TRS80, followed by a ZX81. You pretty much had to learn BASIC to get them to do anything at all.
Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.
The tech-savvy reputation comes from the “digital native” narrative i.e. because they grew up with computers they must know computers, which is a silly fallacy because how one interacts with technology makes all the difference. It’s the same reason why everyone who grew up with electricity isn’t necessarily an electrician.
The tech savvy reputation comes from millenials. We ARE tech savvy.
Only the early ones. By definition millenials are birth years 1981 to 1996, so the last ones were 11 when the first iPhone released.
I think every generation has their percentage of nerds and that just was a little higher in late Gen X and early millenials because computers were so new and you had to tinker to get anything working.
As an older Gen Z, yeah you guys probably have a better grasp on modern tech. Weirdly enough I actually have found that a weirdly high amount of folks my age know old analogue tech better, like vacuum tubes and old cars.
Older gen z here too, born in ‘99, and while I haven’t noticed the analogue thing, I’ve 100% noticed tech illiteracy in general.
Like, I’m talking about having a downloads folder full of junk because they don’t know that that’s where downloads end up. Installers left untouched after programs are installed because they’re worried that deleting the installer will delete the installed program.
Imo being raised with closed ecosystems like iPhones really stunted tech literacy for a lot of people. I grew up jailbreaking my phones and used my parent’s windows pc, so I kind of escaped it.
Yeah im also '99, and the weird analogue thing is probably regional. Yeah I agree that the tech illiteracy comes down largely to closed systems like Iphone, the most tech literate folks I know that are our age were largely on the poorer side of working class. Which makes sense if you are using hand me down tech ya probably will be doing a bit of debugging.
Like, I’m talking about having a downloads folder full of junk because they don’t know that that’s where downloads end up.
Funny enough, at work I’ll often re-download a file if I need it because it’s faster to go to my bookmark, load the page, download the file, and then click on it in my browser’s recent downloads. Windows search is sooooooo absurdly slow.
But then came smartphones, and instead they grew up with that…
Being a tool user doesn’t make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.
In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.
Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).
That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.
Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.
It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.
That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.
People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.
It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.
You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?
I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.
Right? I grew up with pen and paper, but I’m better with keyboards.
They use apps.
On phones.
They aren’t tech savvy.
I’d also argue that your WPM typed on a keyboard doesn’t make you tech-savvy either. 1950s secretaries could type fast on a typewriter and that didn’t make them tech savvy either.
There are a wide range of computer skills. Being able to interact with a word processor extremely efficiently is a highly valuable tech skill. Someone who knows about processor architecture but can’t touch type is arguably more tech-savvy but also less useful in most office jobs. So I’d say that the secretaries were indeed tech-savvy in a way that was useful for their positions.
I don’t even know how fast I can type on a phone.
Even with word completion I find myself hesitating between the choice of word or typing it out.
I know it’s not near as fast as on a physical keyboard where is used to be around 90-120 wpm if I remember correctly. (Been a while since I had to do that at an employment agency)
Anyway, it’d be fun to see a thumbs only tiktok/Snapchat typer vs a mechanical typewriter type off.
And, tbf, most people are far from tech savvy.
Most are consumers. Some are really good consumers. Some are power users. Some know how to do things.
Very few actually understand it.
But, there was a time where there was indeed a necessity if you used the tech, you had to understand it.
It’s a pretty good indicator. If you spend all day working with computers chances are you’ll be able to type quickly
Gen Z is app savvy, not tech savvy. Very very different.
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don’t use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It’s pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS… I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren’t taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the “you don’t have privacy” motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
You sound exactly like my friend. But he would probably say stick to thinkpads
What tech savvy reputation? They doesn’t even know what a system file structure is. Neither the article writer, social media =/= tech-savvy.
but gen z is not tech savvy. They can use a browser. and watch youtube. They never advance past that stage
I think for the most part they are just “good” at using mainstream social medias nothing really more
You would think they know how to use a browser but in reality they only use apps. TikTok being their preferred search engine speaks volumes.
😔
Man look at millennials turning into boomers at record pace
“back in my day we did things properly, now all these damn kids… etc etc”
it’s not becoming boomers. It’s about rarely meeting one who knows that, for example, wifi is not the internet. I’m not asking for detailed tech knowledge. But getting a blank face if asked something as simple as “where did you save the file?” or replying with “in the gallery/google photos” means you are not tech savvy. these are the absolute basics.
What’s your sample size, do you actually talk to many gen z
If you asked them where they saved a photo on a smartphone they’re not going to tell you a filepath because that’s not how people use smartphones. I probably couldn’t tell you where photos are stored physically on my phone without going out of my way to find that info
Also Google photos is a valid answer to that question because the file is saved in Google photos, just because it’s cloud storage doesn’t make it not storage. In that case local storage is basically just a cache anyway
So not tech savvy?
because that’s not how a phone is used.
But it is how any phone/desktop/laptop pollworks. So you’re proving my point. Most can’t even tell if the file they want is on the device in the first place, if they use stuff like cloud backups. To those people, the file is “in google”. Not tech savvy
What’s your sample size, do you actually talk to many gen z
They aren’t the only ones to have noticed this issue.
If you asked them where they saved a photo on a smartphone…
“Where did you save the file” isn’t typically asked in the context of a smart phone. Maybe on Android more so than iOS.
I’ve literally never heard Gen Z described as tech savvy.
Yes.
Calling GenZ tech savvy for always using a cell phone is like calling grandma a mathematician because she spends all day at the slot machine.
Boomers go confused when gen y switch to gen z and forget to get updated script from cable teeeveee
The boomers says that to them but that’s really not true, this day this generation is less and less “tech savvy”, they’re just good at using the basic way social media
Their parents don’t even give them PCs, only phones, how would they even learn?
People who know nothing more than how to operate a smartphone are not tech savvy. They can’t even do that properly. Never seen anyone from that generation use an ad blocker or revanced or anything else that combats enshittification.
Being able to use TikTok on your phone doesn’t make you tach savvy. They don’t know anything about how it all works. It’s a false dichotomy.
Yeah. I’ve noticed the new generation coming into the workplace can’t do shit on a computer.
They’ve grown up on apps that have simple interfaces and limited options. Give them the freedom and power of a workstation and you’ll find they never learned to learn real software.
I’m a programmer. I write hundreds of lines of code a day (of varying levels of quality ofc). I also fix technology (phones, laptops, desktops. tablets, etc). I’m probably one of the most “tech-savvy” people I know. I very rarely type faster than 70 wpm. it’s just not necessary for what most of us are doing.
But think about arguing online! It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm, but usually stay in the 100 wpm range.
Programming? Idk, I spend more time thinking than typing personally. Good code requires you to consider all the corner cases and such.
I prefer to argue on the internet via my phone, which I can type pretty fast on thanks to the swipe to type.
and yeah programming simply doesn’t require fast typing, I tend to diagram everything out on my whiteboard before even opening my ide. I just have to write tons and tons of code since I’m in a few low level programming classes
I prefer to argue on the internet via my phone, which I can type pretty fast on thanks to the swipe to type
I’m the opposite… I rarely reply when I’m on my phone because swiping and tapping away at the touchscreen keyboard is so slow and inaccurate. I spend more time correcting swypos than I do writing I think.
Meanwhile on the desktop I can punch out a shining example of wit (or at least a spoonerism of that) at 100+ wpm at 100% accuracy.
Sent from my phone, slowly.
I diagram everything out in my brain and it evolves continuously while I’m writing code
Sometimes I feel it’s a miracle I get anything done at all but then usually the end result is better than what I’d originally envisioned so it kinda balances out.
I used to do that but the more I get into os programming the more I’ve found myself scrapping entire 1000+ line files and rewriting the entire thing 🙃
and I think “it’s a miracle I get anything done” is a very common thought in most programmers heads lol
and yeah programming simply doesn’t require fast typing
Funny enough making MC plugins and mods while moderating my own server was what got me to over 100 WPM
Because without meds my brain fires so fast that if I DIDNT type at 115 I’d have forgotten where my for loop was going before ive even finished the conditions it triggers under
My code is slooooooopppyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy thanks to that, but it’s also not for anyone else’s eyes ever so im good
The someone else’s eyes are your eyes a few months down the line when you have to fix something
Bold of you to assume I don’t just let those errors in the log pile up
If I don’t look at the log then they don’t exist!
It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm
I’m limited by the rate at which I can think of bullshit.
Agreed. I write slow and incomprehensible. I read slow with shit comprehension. Passed engineering school with very high GPA and am successful in my engineering career. These metrics are bullshit boomer click bait.
Almost as bad as “Gen z/a can’t read analog clocks!”
i could type insanely fast when i was younger
developed RSI at work
not worth it
80wpm is pretty common for a typical average typing speed for anybody who can touch type, 100wpm is more common among programmers, and people who do a lot of typing. Anything faster than that and you have had hand injuries and use a fancy keyboard now, or you will soon have hand injuries.
typing speed is rather funny.
Copy and paste is the fastest type
Gen X that think Gen Zs are tech savvy are probably the people that the actual Gen X nerds shake their head at when we have to teach them how to put an URL in the address bar instead of searching for Gmail and clicking on the link every. goddamn. time.
Yes, as a Gen X I’m sometimes surprised how tech illiterate some of my generation are…
Then I remember when we were kids and people like me using computers were seen as weird geeks and “normal people” wouldn’t get close to a computer.
Ngl I hate most of the new domain options. Was that site a .com or .net was fine. Now you have a dozen common options and many sites have a silly name. Look at lemmy itself for great examples of it.
It seems like a kind of horseshoe thing where Boomers are computer illiterate because they weren’t around when they were growing up, while Zoomers are computer illiterate because they grew up primarily interfacing with technology via the simplified, corporate-approved mobile phone platforms. Gen X and Milliennials came of age when computers were still more of a Wild West.
