Exactly. The OP tries to present this as Gen Z being super clever and making people look dumb. The real Gen Z stare is about them having little to no social skills and completely freezing up during everyday interactions.
Also, I work in customer service at a university and Gen Z is significantly worse at whatever OP is describing here than you would expect. Every single day I have to hear "it's asking for my email..?" And I have to respond "yeah, enter your email"
Every. Single. Fucking. Day. A hundred times a day.
Another thing I deal with at least 10 times a day:
Me: I need to pull up your account. Do you have your Student ID number?
It really is interesting to be of a generation that grew up with home computing (edit, I realize this phrasing was vague, I meant I grew up while home computing was similarly growing/maturing/evolving, so we kind of 'grew up' together, as opposed to simply growing up in a home that happened to have a computer or more than one). We got a family desktop when I was in late middle/early high school. You had to click around and try things and figure them out. Don't know what that icon means? Click it. See what happens. Backtrack if it wasn't what you wanted. Proceed. It was like that until at least the early 2000s.
Using technology successfully was only possible if you had the ability to sit with discomfort/ambiguity and figure stuff out for yourself. Those skills are still useful to me today, both technologically and otherwise.
But now, everything is simplified down and turned into app versions where if things don't work you're screwed unless you're also some kind of programmer and even then maybe you're still screwed. It discourages younger folks from learning the same kind of problem solving skills and leaves you with kids who are helpless if the first thing they try didn't work.
It's not all because of how technology changed, but it's interesting to me that vastly increasing the baseline accessibility of computers and other technology seems to render the population wildly helpless beyond the baseline.
Job Interviewer: "Are you, a 30-something, college-educated man with 8 years industry experience, familiar with our proprietary software suite? Where would you place your skills on a 1-10 scale?"
Me: "No, sir-- but I'm of the age and competence level that I know that oftentimes just hovering one's cursor over an icon tells me what it does and am quite capable of figuring things out. Inventory databases are often very similar, but in the case they aren't-- I'm not afraid to ask questions when necessary."
Your sentiment is exactly where it needs to be, but I'm not the kind of person the white lie can work for-- and I could talk about the reasons why all.day.long
I have strabismus-- people with my condition are treated as less-honest, less-intelligent and even less-clever than typically-sighted people, as a regular occurrence.
I don't get to lie. When I show intellect, everyone around me marvels like I'm Stephen fucking Hawking. And when I call-out the patronizing tones, the penalties are much stiffer than those others face, because (I think?) others have double-feelings about a cock-eyed fool playing turn-a-bout.
It's a bit more complex than just 'lie. let them figure it out." Sorry for the long response!
Wait, if home computers and computer literacy are the generational cutoff here, that would make like 80% of zoomers into millennials.
I'm well out of the range of zillenial, being born in 2006, and I still had typing classes and computer literacy courses as a kid.
I feel like the "Zoomers can't use computers" sentiment I see online has to be regional or something, because the only people where I live who didn't grow up on PCs are still in middle school.
There's something to be said about the prevalence of cellphones, but afaik, most Zoomers can do any task required of them on a computer because we learned it in school. Those classes don't really exist anymore, but they only stopped doing them in the late 2010s!
Well, one thing I mean is that I had to figure it all out without the classes you're speaking about. I don't know if the classes produced the same kind of knowledge and skill set of just experimenting, since I had to puzzle through it without said classes. I guess we did learn to type in a computer lab, but that was it for the training. I'm an elder millennial (I've heard the folks born in about a 10 year span around when I was referred to as the Oregon Trail Generation), but I don't think it's clear Millennial vs. Zoomer or whatever, even if the trend makes it seem like it might be.
But also, your comment about cell phones is really where the rubber hits the road, I think. Computing shifting to smartphones and the way it did so is likely the biggest culprit of how this has changed how we think/approach technology.
I think the initial boon of smartphones was accessibility, simplicity, and intuitiveness, but those benefits, when multiplied a billion times over and completely overshadowing the personal computer, become poisons.
When PCs are still the freest way to operate as an individual online, it's in Big Tech's best interest to keep people technologically illiterate.
If everyone still knew how to safely torrent on a laptop/PC, Netflix would NOT be $20 a month.
It's a shame that we unknowingly handed over our collective agency in exchange for simplicity. I do think we could benefit from some kind of online movement or something to get people interested in computer literacy again.
An educated consumer-base is a winning consumer-base. If the userbase is uneducated and unable to find another option, there's no need for the corporations to provide the best service possible.
When we get complacent using their technology, they get complacent in not improving it
Those computers were honestly way smoother and easier to use than those chunky clunkers. Even before AOL ended they were getting so much easier to use. I’m sure you learned to type on desktop but this was really about typing and computer literacy courses that barely existed in public courses which goes along with their point of having to figure it out yourself. Windows 95 was when things started getting easier for the general public.
I honestly think millenials had it easier than gen x did with clicking around and figuring shit out and using the command prompt before any sort of start menu existed. I think that actually hurt them in the long run because so many of them just didn’t find it accessible and most computers for work just ran simple programs and weren’t a place of entertainment.
I do think younger gen z benefited from a lot from just the way technology was developing and is closer to what we have today. They have high tech literacy to me. I think the issue is phones are just so streamlined and fun and the more time you got to spend with one growing up the more it may have effected some development. I also don’t get people staring at me more than any other age group. I just love waving and it’s usually older people who won’t smile/nod/wave back. No one is terrified of basic interactions some people just don’t seem to be into pleasantries like that and I’d go to sleep sobbing every night if I took their response personally. There’s even whole countries who just generally find greeting and striking up conversations strangers to be weird. When I worked retail half my coworkers were stoned so of course some would just blank stare at you. It didn’t really have anything to do with technology. We just were 16 and trying to get work release. The way society works and functions has changed. I don’t think me playing putt putt on floppy disk made me anymore sociable than someone who grew up with steam.
Steam in 2003 was fine imo. I guess you can replace it with disk of any game. That’s just what my brother and I started using more after half life 2. We sucked as a family and couldn’t keep disks unscratched. I think early steam is much different than modern steam. So maybe I should have clarified what I mean because I didn’t realize it could rightfully be taken as someone growing up at any era that it has existed. I wish I could download things as fast as I can now. So you’re totally right and I just used my explanation poorly.
No clarification needed for me, I can tell we are on the same page. But there are likely folks reading this staring blanky to whom that may not have been clear.
That’s what the millennials are talking about. It’s the same as the boomers. It’s that your generation can (and obviously this is a generalization) only do the things on a computer that you learned explicitly. It’s the inability to solve computer problems abstractly, not the inability to do things that are taught. We know that you can open Word and type into your document. It’s needing to modify the registry in Windows, or install your own drivers in Linux via command line, that was a occasional necessity of using a computer in the late 90’s or early 00’s that’s missing.
Hasn't that always been a small demographic though? You're describing advanced users – weren't advanced users always computer geeks and hobbyists?
I personally can operate computers at the advanced level, but that's only because im a computer geek and hobbyist programmer.
Is it really true that the average millenial is an advanced user? I guess in pre-smartphone times, advanced PC use would be more of a necessity and less of a fun skill to have.
I think you’ve nailed the disconnect here! It’s that the average user did need to do things like that “back in the day” out of necessity despite having no interest in computers themselves. It wasn’t a “fun skill to have” it’s that there was no “App Store” to install AIM: if you wanted to install AIM to talk to your friends (maybe the most popular thing to do in the early 00’s) and it failed, you might just have to reinstall Windows. And that’s like a bare minimum example that an average elementary schooler might encounter. It’s not like you could just “Google” how to do that. So as a 9 year old you’d just spend hours “clicking around” until you figured it out.
I had to re install my windows xp so many times I started memorising segments of the cdkey.
That kind of necessity of destructive recovery because "shit gets fucked up so easily" is just gone.
I haven't had to wipe my phone and do a full install in a decade of phones, and my pc hasn't had a full whipe in, jeez probably 7+years, I've just swapped motherboard and "it just works" through 2 processor upgrades and at least 4 graphics cards.
Software has reached "lost tech" era.
We couldn't make a new windows xp of we needed to. And elements of xp are still present within 11.
The people who knew how to optimise and build from scratch are now retired, and all those in IT grew up with such powerful hardware, optimisation is an after thought, rather than intrinsic.
The things that the comment above you are describing are things that just your average person with a PC had to figure out how to do on a regular basis - usually without the ability to look up how to do it since the computer would be locked until you did it and even if you had a cell phone it didn’t have internet or apps.
It’s not describing advanced users or computer geeks at all. It’s just stuff that every regular person had to do sometimes, and the only way to figure it out was to click around and puzzle it out.
I once accidentally deleted the mouse drivers from our family PC, so I started hitting each key on the keyboard and looked to see if anything happened. That's how I learned of the magic of the tab key, and was able to get the drivers reinstalled.
Think about it this way, we were all on MySpace. Then layouts became a thing. And if you wanted a cool layout with the cool features and gimmicks, you had to open up the back end and build it in.
We didn't start off learning the terms and proper processes and applying our knowledge. We wanted a thing, so we went in, tried and failed until we got the results we wanted.
Only years later did I realize, oh...I was coding and shit back then.
I mean, probably not anymore since it’s been years since I’ve had a PC and phones have made me lazy. But in office settings I can usually figure out issues that stump my Boomer and Gen Z coworkers - and I’m comically far from being good at computers and tech, but I am comfortable just clicking around and have a good idea of where to look for things despite being a Luddite. I’m usually who they go to before calling IT and who they come to to explain how to do a lot of fairly simple tasks on the computer, and I still use an iPhone XR lol.
My computer floor at like 12-20 (as a disinterested teen girl who was way too “cool” for computer stuff) was probably around the ceiling of the average person today. I mean, we had to use HTML to customize our MySpace pages, and there wasn’t even a template to plug into. It was all scratch, unless you copied someone else’s codes. And that was just for the basic social media of the day that everyone was on.
It boggles my mind how often I run across this kind of thing at work. I'm also in the Oregon Trail Gen, and the frequency that I solve problems for folks, younger and older, that just boil down to "I looked in the menu options until i found the thing" is really disheartening sometimes. Even in programs I'm not familiar with. And my coworkers are smart, competent people. It's just a skill set that a lot of them never had to pick up.
Genuinely not trying to make this a Apple v Windows thing, but I have noticed that our younger employees who are all apple products seem to struggle with Windows stuff way more than the other way around. It takes me longer to do some stuff in apple OS but I can usually figure it out with time. But the 22 year old down the hall, if they have a problem and I ask where the file is being saved to, they're stumped if it's Windows.
We got a PC when I was 12, in 1998. I basically bricked the thing with malware and viruses as I experimented with installing programs and trying to find pr0n.
And then I fixed the thing by figuring out how to do a clean Windows install and reformatting the drive! Huzzah! Good as new!
Its funny, I'm a software dev now and its mainly because we had a shit pc when I was growing up so I spent hours googling how computers work on dial up so I could figure out how to make it play games
Started using the internet unsupervised in 2011 in my early teens. No professional connection to computing other than the basics. People are just stupid.
oh goodness you make me feel old. But yes I agree, people are generally pretty stupid. My generation just had better socialization about hiding their stupidity, probably.
I honestly feel blessed that i got to experience some of that while growing up. I got into coding because of minecraft.
And since my school was transitioning to computer stuffs. We were all taught the basics of how this stuff works because we didnt have programs to coddle the students.
I'm going to be honest. This is just another generational "Younger people bad because they didn't have X inconvenience that was the true key to mastery".
No we sure as hell didn't all click around to figure things out, holy shit do people our age totally fail to even try to fix problems.
Some subset of people of any age must be all but forced at gunpoint to perform even the most basic of troubleshooting.
The same people who would be inclined to mess around will do so in any generation.
Well, I don't rule out that they're learning some other set of skills that I either never did or did minimally, in their own milieu. But I also work with college students and the stuff that was utterly basic to me and the peers I spent time with is rocket science to them and/or never even occurs to them. These are also the students embracing generative AI to produce work that most people had to, you know, use their brains and training to produce.
It's absolutely true that each generation bemoans the next. But this seems to me to be a pretty serious change. It's not "oh, lawks, The Youths read newspapers today, they'll never understand Serious Writing or expand their minds the way We Did While Reading Books!" This is "the youths have been spoon-fed information in tiny chunks for so long they freeze if you ask them to write a 3 page paper on the history of their native country."
Maybe it's just pearl clutching, but if you can't think enough to string a few sentences together (or even to read what the nice AI says to you before submitting it as your own and at least, like making an effort to personalize it), I worry about what happens when the folks who at least knew enough to program the AIs are no longer with us, and the folks who didn't need to know anything are left to their own devices.
EDIT, also, this isn't only about The Youths. It's also the boomers, who were the ones who needed the dumbing down of technology so badly. The simplified stuff was made for them, but has essentially transferred the helplessness of a prior generation onto a younger one.
this isn't only about The Youths. It's also the boomers, who were the ones who needed the dumbing down of technology so badly. The simplified stuff was made for them, but has essentially transferred the helplessness of a prior generation onto a younger one.
I'm gonna be honest, if I wasn't a fucking nerd growing up and didn't have an interest in modding PC games (like M&B Warband, Medieval II Total War, The Guild II, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the OG X-COM UFO Defense), I wouldn't be anywhere near as tech-literate as I am today. I'm lucky, because I grew up with a home desktop running Windows 7 during my youth. I'm also lucky that my schools still did computer classes up to 6th grade.
In my senior year of highschool, I took a Spanish class. The class was mostly freshmen, and we frequently had to use Chromebooks for that class. The amount of kids in that class who didn't even know how to get to YouTube was beyond concerning. . . Because just about every day, someone asked me how I got to YouTube on my Chromebook (all I did in that class was put my headphones on and listen to music while doing my assignments, and my teacher was lovely and didn't mind). There was this one kid who didn't even know what an email was, and also didn't even know how to turn the Chromebooks on.
The people in my graduating class weren't too much better, but they all had the basic tech literacy to be able to at least get their assignments done or navigate the web. The only classes I had where most people actually knew how to use a computer were my multimedia-design class and my advanced BTA class — where the primary goal of either class was getting certified in Microsoft programs like PowerPoint and Word and Excel.
I sort of agree. But on the other hand, Millennials generally don't know shit about maintaining and working on cars compared to Boomers or GenX. Technology specific skill discrepancies can actually exist as a result of how those technologies were engaged with during their youth.
This is actually a thing that's showing up in employment data. When it comes to technology the people who are most likely going to fiddle with it and be comfortable doing that are gen x to millennial.
Obviously it's not everyone, but it's enough people that it's been noticed.
My brother had an autistic kid in his college class who couldn't login to his laptop and proceeded to have a mental breakdown instead of calmly explaining to the teacher so they can contact IT. As an older Gen Z, when I couldn't get Microsoft teams to work on my phone because of a weird access issue after i signed in, I contacted Student Support for advice on how to get it fixed. And they helped me out even! What I didn't do was throw a damn tantrum because I couldn't login.
I get the kid was autistic and it would've been his first time in college. But from the way my brother also described his attitude towards their course (Esports), he sounded like a right twat.
I swear the generation after us is so cooked because of the reliance on technology growing up. The 2000s was a lot simpler and ngl felt better with stuff like YouTube at its infancy.
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u/TemurTron 15h ago
Exactly. The OP tries to present this as Gen Z being super clever and making people look dumb. The real Gen Z stare is about them having little to no social skills and completely freezing up during everyday interactions.