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.
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.
Am millennial. I was taught not to believe anything that anyone said on the internet anywhere and to never tell anyone online a single detail about your irl life, and I had to learn how to figure stuff out myself when my parents weren’t watching. It’s a skill that can be learned, it isn’t inherent to millennials, though granted we all had a lot more fucking about to do with our devices in our time so it makes sense that most of us picked it up.
Nowadays my parents readily believe all the crazy shit people write on the internet about politics and suffer from identity theft because they give their data to just anybody, and kids don’t know what a file explorer is or how to read an error message without instinctually shitting their pants. What the fuck happened?
I feel like for a brief, beautiful span of like 5 years between 1998-2003 everyone was all mostly on the same page with tech stuff, and then we got left behind in the valley of sanity while the two generations adjacent to us melted their brains. But I was less than 10 years old during that mythical time so what the fuck do I know, I was mostly busy playing Donkey Kong and learning times tables.
People on TikTok are pretty bad at just believing everything they hear because someone made a video. Like, a few weeks ago random people were putting up “recordings” of that titanic sub and everyone in the comments was eating it up. Makes me concerned for real internet literacy.
I’m of a similar age to you. In my elementary school, we had to learn to use Windows 95, Apple II PCs, iMac G3s running OSX, Windows 98, and I think we had to type a few DOS commands in for e.g. playing Oregon Trail on floppy disk.
Before us were people who mainly learned computers as command prompts, after us were kids who got OS X as their idea of “a complicated computer”.
To me OS X felt like playing with those oversized Duplo blocks when I was used to regular Legos, y’know? Too simplified sometimes, but you could make it work.
Nowadays people barely know what files are, let alone the dark arts of CLI.
It’s a weird feeling, having seen technology explode in complexity, then implode into crippling oversimplification. Not like simple tech didn’t exist before, like game consoles, but now it’s all average people understand.