It only relatively recently occurred to me that the vast majority of people use the Internet either solely or mostly with a mobile phone. It blew my mind since I grew up with PCs and modems and the Internet is so much better on a large screen that’s not half full of ads.

Let’s be fair though. Adobe changes the Acrobat interface every two weeks for no reason. PDF has always been an absolute shitshow, super slow, walled garden format. After like 30 years it’s still a 30 step process to add a note box with an arrow that looks half decent

OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…

They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.

Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

this is less a problem of ‘people are stupid’ and more ‘educational institutions have been dismantled over the last several decades and large numbers of people are pushed through school despite being functionally illiterate, if they graduate at all’

You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It’s free entertainment and nobody can stop you

> be me
> zoomer
> use linux
> i use linux
> i don’t know how to use windows, or macos
> i dont know how to use the most popular operating systems
> wait
> i am the joke now

As a boomer, reading this thread/discussion has been so amusing in many ways while enjoying my cuppa tea this morning. A classic “the younger generations are stupid.”

The older generations looking down the ones that follow. And the following generations looking down on those that precede them. And no one understanding ain’t none of us are all that bright.

Ever has it been, and so ever shall it be.

We grew up in an analog childhood, but digital adulthood.

We’ve been at the cusp of all the changes, we probably had to boot into Ms DOS and navigate to the A:// drive to play whatever was on the floppy disk with a whopping 1.44mb.

Now you download almost instantly to your phone/tablet. The internet as we knew it is mostly dead, everywhere is a walled garden of shit.

Expectation: these new generations are practically born with computers in their hands when they grow up they are going to create a new world so fast and develop new technologies

Reality: if tik tok doenst work they don’t know what else to do with their 1000+ euro smartphones

The number of people in this thread stumped by the “rotate a PDF” comment, even what it means at all, while a smartphone has been 95-100% of their “computer” usage in their lives.

Me: Behold!

*quickly presses Control+V

Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!

True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.

Boomer don’t know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don’t know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can’t help themselves and have low standards.

There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.

This thread if it was explained by Kayne West. Funny, but mega Slur warning

It’ll depend on their hobbies. PC gamers will know this stuff, or at least how to figure it out.

Would love some older internet gen input here: is this a “gen [whatever] is so [negative trait here] because they are [generation group]” or “younger ppl be stupid”?

Context: Am a millennial. At my first “real job” (as in, in the industry I got my degree in) I worked with ONE (1) other person, who was an early Gen-Xer. After developing a report with each other and becoming friendly, he lamented to me about how it seems like “millennials (not you, of course)” seem so helpless - like they can’t figure things out on their own. Always asking “where is-” or “how do i-” before even examining the problem at hand and/or the resources available.

This dude was a self-proclaimed “blue fish in a red sea,” and we worked with a wide age-range of sales ppl. I mention this, bc in the two years I worked with this nerd (and he was a fucking nerd, taking into account modern day and late 80s-early 90s standards of the term), his complaints about millennials never sounded like media parrot-speech. He was literally befuddled about the operational differences between generations.

It 100% seemed like an ageist thing. This was the late 2010’s, pre-covid.

I’m in my 30s now and am equally baffled when my teenaged niece (weird familial age gap - not relevant here) doesn’t know how to make the tap water hot when there’s only one knob instead of two. She asked outloud but I refused to acknowledge or answer her. Niece figured it out shortly on her own, as expected.

So-… maybe younger people are just, yknow, dumb? Or recognize that, when surrounded by more experienced others, it takes less effort to ask for guidance than to waste energy through trial and error-?

Not trying to prove a point here. Just legit curious if anyone older has had similar experiences and can offer insight into whether this is a “zoomers are-” or “younger people are-” observation.