The digital native is a myth
nature.com
nature.com
What is happening is that there are now different sets of skills: touchscreen skills and keyboard skills. It isn't even that they are particularly good at using phones (students say they don't see email announcements because they don't check email. I ask them why they don't set up their phone with the university email. They say they don't know how) but that they use phones more and have less experience with laptops and desktop computers (while setting up for presentations I see them struggle to log into email or google slides. They type google and enter to go to google.com, then search for youtube, then at youtube they search for the video they want to show. Strangely, when they cut and past a url they almost always right click and select paste then hit return and nearly never use "paste and go" which is right below that in the context menu. They don't know ctrl+f.)
So if "digital natives" means anything, it doesn't mean that they are automatically good at tech.
The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world.
Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password.
And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line!
There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here.
Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.
It's easy to brush off the millions of things that computers allow us to do that we couldn't do before because of some terrible UIs.
Computers suck, the internet sucks, but the pony express and cargo boats sucked worse. I can get a message across the world in about a second. No applause for that though. No praise for the things we can now do. We're just too eager to find things we wish we could do, and blame our current technology for not knowing our dreams.
If only those pesky users would just read the source code, they’d understand why this site works when you put www in front of it but doesn’t work without it! And if they want it changed, well it’s open source! They should send a pull request!
One way to do everything robs people of their ability to think.
Under that definition, I don't think that there's ever been a successful developer. I'd set the bar more at the ecosystem level. Once a user learns how an ecosystem works, the software in it should be as intuitive as the complexity of their tasks allow. Anything more seems like making perfect the enemy of good.
I realise this isn't really the crux of your post, and I broadly agree with you that computers still suck. But the answer to this question is CMD + left arrow. I have no idea what applications you're using where this doesn't work.
I haven't seen any macOS applications that don't accept Ctrl-A (or any other Emacs-style shortcuts, while we're at it). Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.
After all, we do that too with git and containers.
If you broke your editor's buttons / view settings, but also typed a dozen pages, you don't want to undo your typing to undo your settings changes.
It's Control-A in every app!
(or Up if it's a one line text field)
The opposite is true too.
No, they're amazing machines and don't suck. They just don't meet our arbitrarily high expectations.
But [thread] OP is correct. UIs absolutely do suck.
The proof is that after fifty years of UI design, there's still no such thing as a standard system/technique/anything for assessing the quality, reliability, and effectiveness of a user interface.
There's been almost no effective research into cataloguing the most common kinds of user error OR developer error and designing systems that minimise those errors.
There's a lot of tribal and religious noise about operating systems and languages, but virtually none of it is based on empirical research.
The mouse skilled people where way more advanced and picking up the taught skills much faster in the practical courses, so I had to tune the program to haptically help the novices and do only non-mouse-favoring questions in the exam. The beginners and the women were equally good in the academic skills, but the women still left from 50% down to 20% for social reasons. But in the end - in the office - the numbers were equal again, even more than 50%, so I was happy.
https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Bes...
I believe that's what drives comments like "kids these days are so good at technology". When archetypal Aunt Tilly looks at somebody younger using a computer, she sees that they do not hesitate when navigating around, quickly clicking on everything that appears.
However, that doesn't always mean they know what they are doing. They're simply much more comfortable trying and hoping that it won't end badly. (Or at least not badly in a way that they can recognize, until someone tells them that their computer is full of malware.)
It's almost impossible to to mess one of these devices up (other than malware) for good, but I think most people who are not very technology literate see them as precariously balanced items that crumble at the slightest touch.
Also, last thing you want is for it to be stuck in some "useless" state when it is needed...
"A kid puts his hand up. He tells me he's got a virus on his computer. I look at his screen. Displayed in his web-browser is what appears to be an XP dialogue box warning that his computer is infected and offering free malware scanning and removal tools. He's on a Windows 7 machine. I close the offending tab. He can't use a computer."
[...]
How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?"
Why the hell do we expect kids to know things nobody ever told them that they exist? That seems to me like a more reasonable question. Kids don't know how human body works till we tell them, they don't know how to read unless we show it to them, why would we expect them to know how to reinstall operating system when no one ever used the word operating system in front of them?
If no one ever show RAM to kid, the kid wont be able to react on request to change it. That is the default state, the state when a kid knows a thing is a state achieved by somebody teaching the thing to kid.
Computers are now appliances rather than power tools.
I think that all the kids should be taught enough about computers to know it is no magic, that it is learnable and actually easy once you want to do it (and you dont actually need to be genius to learn it as many believe).
However, I really don't think they all need to know Linux administration.
As an aside, I always thought that the age rage for millennials was about twice as broad as it should be. I don't really find myself identifying with the older members of the cohort.
Cars are so reliable and take so little maintenance nowadays, he marvels at them. OTOH they're also very unfriendly to the shade-tree mechanic. The engines are covered by plastic cowling panels. Everything is packed in so tightly it's a nightmare to change anything. And it's all controlled by proprietary black-box computer systems.
I think people are overreacting to simple facts of life: if a technology is mature and the services around it plenty and cheap, there's no point wasting your time learning the ins and outs of it.
I don't see what the problem is if someone doesn't know how to add a RAM stick just because I do, the same way I don't feel compelled to know how to replace a light bulb to save myself a tenner
"[Some of us chose] to debug viruses, worry about floppy disk compatibility, learn how to change out failed hard drives, etc. if we simply wanted to use technology at all"
Now, Millennials is a pretty uselessly broad term, so depending on what age range you are actually talking about, there is slightly more truth to this. If you are talking about someone who is 29-34 today, then you would be an early adopter of these technologies and it did require a high level of expertise. However this was a very small portion of the population.
If you are talking about 22-25 year olds, then computers and the internet had become more common in households and de-skilling. I know plenty of people who have used and owned computers most of their lives and have never debugged a thing.
Nerds have the inability to understand that most people use computers like any other tool. They do not obsess over it, seek to understand how it works, or otherwise care.
Like a microwave, they buy a new one if their current computer "breaks." Like a light fixture, if it malfunctions, most people hire a repairman instead of doing it themselves.
This has always been true for the mainstream users of computers. It only seems more absurd now because 16-19 year olds have had smartphones and other technology luxuries their whole lives, and so we expect them to have invested more interest into truly learning how to use them and how they work.
But availability of a technology does not have much of a connection to proficiency of said technology.
Ironically, I am sure most of the people here who whine about how little other people understand computers have a similar lack of understanding for other objects they use everyday. How many people in programming/I.T. know anything about plumbing or car maintenance?
As for this 'millennial' business, I think you can quite easily divide the cohort into conscious before they had access to the internet and vice-versa. This obviously varies between geographic regions, socio-economic status and a number of other factors, but from personal experience, there is a massive divide between the two.
DOS and earlier Linux and a more transparent and layered setup. But these days we have stuff reaching all the way from the office suite to the GPU for reasons I can only consider eyecandy.
They will almost always use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key, so rather than momentarily hold down the Shift key and press the letter they want capitalized, they will press the Caps Lock key, type the letter and then press the Caps Lock key again.
Considering that there is only one Caps Lock key compared to two Shift keys I am not quite sure why they do it this way since their hand has to travel further when capitalizing letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard.
The other day one of my coworkers, a senior engineer in his 40's. Sent a simple C++ program he had written to dump some data into a CSV file to another coworker(a new graduate in her early 20's) via email. I was CC'ed. The email body simply said:
Usage: convert.exe [infile] [out.csv]
She stopped by my desk later in the day I mentioned in passing "How did that program work out for you?" she then complained that she couldn't work out how to supply the program with the arguments - double clicking the file did nothing for her. Turns out she had never used a command line in her life.
I was shocked I grew up on the command line it boggles my mind to thing there is an entire generation who has been raised on nothing but a gui. This is quite a smart person with an (non software) engineering degree mind you.
One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).
The result of that is you had people as early as elementary school being exposed to programming through Commodore, TRS80s, Apples, etc. Being exposed to something so young tends to give you more understanding over time. Of course, it wasn't for everybody.
Today, computer are more abundant than ever, but they already do stuff. They've, for the most part, become appliances. You have to actively seek out programming whereas before, the computer didn't do much without it.
I'm a little biased though.
I sometimes think that perhaps the myth of the digital native generation arose because an insanely high percentage of the population is so illiterate with computers that they think that just because the kids are spending all of their time in front of screens it means that those kids automatically "understand" computers when in fact they are just learning very specific applications of computers.
I also think it's a bit of a cop out on their part (not sure that it's the right word). The computer illiterate are so turned off by the idea of trying to understand computers that they will gladly throw compliments at any kid just so that the kids will shut up about anything relating to computers. "Oh ho ho, I'm so old you know I don't know anything about them computers and phones and what have ya. But you kids, you grew up with these things, so to you they are second nature."
Edit: Sibling commenter about millennial vs gen z has a good point. Still I think that it's mostly those of us that made an effort to learn that it goes for though, just like with the people that grew up before that with home computers.
My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you."
I agree we are still humans and no shocking net-new amazing multi-tasking or concentration skills will come out of the "digital generation". That said these kids are growing up on the shoulders of giants and will expect things to just work. If anything, that could make things harder because they may not want to learn how to make new things work.
All this said my grandmother lived through horse and buggy, radio, TV, Color TV, Computers and men on the moon. She used to say the more things change the more they stay the same. Because people are basically the same no matter when they were born.
Jaron Lanier challenges the Turing test original intend asking if we as humans are lowering our human capacity so machines pass the test. [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434322-but-the-turing-test-...
on the one hand that will be great. a partner who never gets tired no matter how many questions you ask.
on the other hand it's a brave new world. especially when as the computer gets better they might get used to the partner that always does there requests and upset with the real people who dont ?
I'm sure it will all be fine somehow.
It started with, "surely, if the computer can beat a human in chess, that must mean it's intelligent". Then went from there.
>>I couldn't help but think it won't be too long until kids don't need parents much
I think you meant need as pure "question answerers," but we do a few things for the kids that Siri and Alexa wouldn't have the stomach or, for that matter, the arms for. Oh, also: love!
Eg:
Instead of:
- Why does it rain ?
- Well, you see, there's that thing about clouds that goes through different pocket of air and...
Try:
- Why does it rain ?
- To make vegetables grow :).
YMMV
This has almost always been the case. Have you met a single millennial?
After some quick searching, it appears the starting birth year for millenials can be considered to go as far back as 1977. Having personally been born in 1980, I've never characterized myself as what I hear a "millennial" to be, and the people I know in my age range feel the same way about themselves.
I suspect that not wanting to be labeled a millenial is one of the defining characteristics.
I suspect this is true for literally everybody. Which is because these characterizations are reductive nonsense: people contain multitudes.
But, people like their boxes and generalizations, or so it seems.
So to me it does feel like those "new" problems are not so new after all. Technology is just changing the mode of interaction, not the fundamental dynamic that lets kids entertain themselves without their parents.
There's more to parenting than on-demand answers to questions, and obedient execution of verbal commands.
This was done to avoid heresy, insurrection and rebellion, but it has wider implications.
Computers are just another tool in this change. In fact, computers could even help parents to regain a bit of the privilege to provide education to their children.
Or let Bezos dictate which views your child acquires.
But if it helps to ease your cynical concerns, you can donate money to Wikipedia.
There was a lot of questions growing up about particular hobbies for example, that I would just find online as no one in my small town would have any similar interests.
Same deal for homework eg; Algebra that my parents weren't able to answer, as neither had finished high school themselves nor having gone on to take STEM-ish careers.
Learning how to properly search is pretty much one of the most valuable skills you can have!
I think talking to Alexa is wonky on the surface, sure, but it's just changing the way in which you access the same information.
That said, there's a huge difference between getting your first computer at 12 and getting your first computer at 3 (or at least largely unmonitored access to one). It remains to be seen how interaction with technology at such a young age affects social development and maturity, whereas technology's impact on our lives occurred after that development had mostly finished.
Just then they heard the children calling, "Daddy, Mommy, come quick -quick!"
They went downstairs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. "Wendy? Peter!"
They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. "Peter, Wendy?"
The door slammed.
- Ray Bradbury, The Veldt[0]
There's far more to nurturing children that what we have been able to pinpoint so far (as parents and as scientists).
It takes a village.
Sorry, our post just reminded me of the scene :)
Reminds me of the movie, Her
On the technical side, I completely agree with this article. Most people my age (late 20's) and especially younger ones, don't have a clue about the insides of their devices, or how the internet actually works. They also don't seem to be interested in a lot of this stuff. They also tend to think that everything that has to do with their devices is complex.
On the 'functional' (for lack of a better word) side however, they seem to know exactly what to do on the internet. They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible. They live on the internet, live stream everything they do and make lots of selfies. This seems to be the reason why we're starting to see lots of younger kids becoming YouTube famous, or starting viral marketing companies.
The last thing, to me, is the part where people really become 'digital natives' in stead of 'technical natives'. Also, because most devices are so hard to open, most kids won't even get to see the technical side anymore, unless they want to build a gaming PC.
Is it specific to an age group, though? My mother is in her 60s and she seems to have no problem getting 100+ likes on FB every time she posts a pic of her grandkids. She knows what _her_ peers want to see.
That's a great skill to have, you know, now that you can buy groceries and pay rent in likes and retweets.
You can't pay rent in likes and retweets, but you can pay rent in dollars earned by you getting your company likes and retweets. More and more companies are hiring "social media experts" (often interns, if my anecdotal observations are anything to go by) for exactly this reason.
By mine, they're almost always women too. I have yet to see any men as social media managers. (again, anecdotal.)
women have managed to literally create a job title that is literally posting stuff on social media and getting paid for it. absolute genius.
The vast majority of young people involved in them struggle to promote their work on sites like YouTube and Twitch. There are definitely more young people than old getting popular there sure, but it's most likely not the majority.
But at the same time these are unnerving. It's not about "not knowing how to use computers" it's about NOT READING WHAT'S IN PLAIN SIGHT
He's not complaining that she doesn't know that the proxy blocks streaming video, he's complaining that she doesn't know that her powerpoint presentation uses streaming video and what the ramifications of that are.
Read the article again and this time actually look at what he's complaining about, not just the tech keywords in the story. His problem is with her demeanor, not her skill.
There's another way to read every single one of his examples: as evidence of a design failure. For example:
> A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message.
Users are so bombarded by unhelpful dialog boxes that many are trained to dismiss them as fast as possible. It becomes subconscious, some users literally can't see the dialogs anymore.
> I hand back the laptop and tell him that it's infected. He asks what he needs to do, and I suggest he reinstalls Windows.
This is obviously not the users fault. It's the responsibility of the system designers to make it hard to subvert. iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done (through means that the author doesn't approve of, like application signing).
> I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her.
Poor design decision. Normal users in 2017 basically never want no-network, dedicating the cost of a physical switch to it is doubly bad.
My point is that the author needs to stop lamenting that the hoi polloi have breached the gates and start taking seriously the question of how to design general purpose computing that actually serves most human beings. "Use Linux" is not, by itself, a remotely helpful suggestion. His "Mobile" suggestion is indistinguishable from satire.
If even a company with $200B in ready cash on hand, humongous design and manufacturing resources, and full control at every part of the vertical stack can't make a general purpose operating system with these values, what hope do the rest of us have? iOS is extremely limited in what it allows you to do. If it isn't, then how come macbooks still sell?
I've been a tutor at the tertiary level before. Some people just can't be fucked putting in any effort to get what they want. Fuck them; they get to be called incompetent - don't shift the blame. If someone could barely drive a car and smashed it into every tenth lamppost, you'd call them an incompetent driver. Or another example: I can't cook for shit. I can follow a recipe, but it's not going to be very well done. But you would never make the argument that it's the recipe-writer's fault that I couldn't make a good souffle.
It's reasonable to expect users to meet developers at least partway here; reasonable to expect some learning curve for an incredibly complex, capable device.
Trivially related, I'd like to preemtively apologize for some of that code. I am not actually a programmer, I'm a mathematician. I programmed out of need, until I was able to hire qualified professionals. Sadly, I did not stop there. I am a pretty horrible programmer.
Take for example brick and mortar architecture students. Most of those born mid 1970ies would at one point have put a lot of research in speccing out their personal CAD machine, learn how to apply cracks for the piracy countermeasures of the day and design multiple generations of less and less inadequate personal backup strategies. Their peers ten years older? None of that DIY, most would probably have jumped straight from paper to a professionally supported workstations. Their peers twenty years younger? Walled garden app stores.
I don't know where the barrier is. I can explain how a CPU works, the various protocols for some networking, etc... Those are what I'd say are at a superficial level. I haven't even built my own system - for years.
My son knows a bit, though his older sister knows less of the technical aspect - and she's a physician. She is a bit older than him. I'm not sure if it is strictly an age thing, I guess.
To fight windmills, as per the English idiom 'to tilt at windmills', means to attack non-existent enemies out of a delusional sense of righteousness (from the last bit is derived the word quixotic). In the stories Alonso Quijano read so many romantic novels about knights and chivalry he went insane, renamed himself Don Quixote, and set off to vanquish windmills he imagined were giants and swear fealty to an innkeeper he imagined as a lord (for the honor of his lady love who doesn't actually exist).
This paper's authors being the Don Quixote figure doesn't make sense, as I doubt they were trying to insult themselves. A more apt analogy would be the companies trying to grapple with a new generation of digital natives are windmill fighters (fighting an enemy that doesn't exist), while the paper's authors are Sancho Panza desperately trying to get them to see reason.
They're close, but to me there's a distinction between the two.
This might be a case of pop culture failing to capture the essence of a reference, and the misunderstanding gaining higher prevalence than the true meaning. Calling someone 'nimrod' is another example. Nimrod was, unironically, one of the greatest hunters in the bible - smart, swift, strong. But Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd that, and Fudd was an idiot. So anyone not familiar with the Bible character thought nimrod == idiot, rather than Bugs calling Fudd that sarcastically.
Back in the day the difference between a computer user and a computer programmer was, at best, blurry. You had to know how to program to use a computer.
And hardware and operating systems were complicated things you had to study, they weren't the appliances of today that "just work".
I think the breaking point was around the time Windows XP and Mac OS X were released. The difference in skills between those raised before that time and nowadays is mind blowing.
So the digital native exists, you just won't find one without grey hair.
I touched my first computer in the early seventies. It was from HP, took punch cards, mag strip cards, keyed entry, and could output to a plotter, tv, or LED. It was horrible. I hated it.
Late seventies, early eighties, I now have to use a terminally connected computer and have a computer at home that required additional memory, just to use lowercase letters. It was horrible. I hated it.
Late eighties, it hasn't improved. No, no it has not. I still have to dance a strange dance and wait for my work to be completed. Usually, that meant waiting for my work to be completed in another part of the university. If I wanted to search the 'net, those searches went out to people - who'd send me an answer back in as long as 72 hours. It was horrible. I hated it.
I pretty much hated computers until the 2000s. Oh, I used the Infernal Beasts of Spite and Retribution - but it was adversarial. We're on friendly terms, more like old enemies too tired to continue fighting but with mutual respect.
I don't like programming, tweaking, or fixing. I will, but I don't like it. In fact, I use Linux because she's a familiar beast and I pretty much don't ever have to screw with it. It does what I want and stays the hell out of my way.
That's the short version. It usually contains more details and a whole lot more vulgarities. As a parting comment, it has been wonderful to live through these changes and advancements.
I got into computers as an interest because on Windows 95, 98, 2000 for WorkGroups, and other contemporary Windows versions (we were not affluent), code of some sort was just a step or two away from using the machine at all. Most computers today (iPhones, WinRT, etc.) don't even have shell scripts on the desktop or a javascript console in the browser. Operating systems in the late '90s and early oughts gave an impression that there were consistent underlying concepts like files and processes or at least tasks. You used to be able to market your dual-core processor as being able to run more tasks simultaneously without trouble, nowadays you just tell the consumer it's "faster", and they don't understand why the same app runs slower on their new phone than the last.
So to a 6 year old who can't use a keyboard... well I don't see keyboards disappearing quite that quick, but it's obvious that voice interaction is going to feature quite heavily into the future of computing.
And I just noticed I’m breaking my rule of never responding to the kind of troll who would put “M$” to mean Microsoft so I’m going to end here. I’m sorry for wasting my time.
As for those other things, those are matters of personal distraction. It may not seem acceptable to have a computer or an internet connection at the desk, but that's a matter of self-discipline. Everyone talking all the time around you is something you can't overcome simply by disciplining yourself.
- hands free
- quicker for short queries ("set a timer for 5 minutes")
- quicker when precision is not necessary (voice to text can be quicker than typing)
- doesn't require extra hardware
- innate/intuitive skill, doesn't need to be learned/practiced
- no need to point + click. Like terminal, input what you need and go directly there
- accessibility is 100x better (kids, elderly, disabled)
These are all related to my own situation and preferences, of course, and I'm sure that there are some people where your list of positives vastly outweigh my list of negatives. No one's served well by assuming that everyone has the same requirements.
I find it interesting how people tend to get stuck to the current forms of technology and then become outraged when anyone dares challenge it. Who needs Windows, I boot straight to DOS. Windows N sucks, I'm going to stick with Windows N-1. Blackberry phones are useless and pretentious, I'm going to stick with Nextel. The iPhone is stupid, I need a physical keyboard. Bluetooth is awful, I need my headphone jack. The iPod is worse than a Nomad. The iPad is just a big iPhone. And now, apparently, voice control sucks, I'm happy with my on-screen keyboard.
And as history shows us in nearly every one of those cases, us tech guys are typically the worst judge of how well a new technology will fare in the market and what consumers actually want.
Nah, on-screen keyboards suck, I'm happy with my non-mobile devices (when possible). Bluetooth is an expensive pain in the ass, though ;-)
I'm used to my desires not meshing well with the way that markets go (and I'll bet that other like-minded techies are too). Out of the specific things I mentioned with voice recognition, most of them will change with technological improvements and shifts in societal norms. Change is inevitable.
Honestly, I'll still find a way to do what I want, even if most other users are happy to have tech go in a different direction. I'm not deluded enough to think that what I want is what anyone else wants.
I can do anything voice can do faster with my fingers since waiting for the parsing ofte takes quite long.
As an added benefit I don't give AppGoogle more information than they need about me.
Unless, of course, you had keypunch operator minions available. I preferred to do it myself, as it would take me longer to hand-print the contents into those little boxes.
We were shocked to see it.
She's Spanish native. And she was not as fluent at her own native tongue as some other kinds her age. Her parents don't know how to use voice. No one around her does. I only use it for setting alarms and never _in front of anyone_ (I'm self conscious about it).
I'm not sure why anyone is shocked to see someone using modern technology that's made available to them. How do you figure humans learn? We build on what was learnt before, which requires a degree of familiarity.
But I guess she has seen her family use whatsapp audio message all the time and established the analogy herself when she saw the "mic" icon on youtube.
It is also a testament of the ease of use of some of this tools.
It's a bell that can't be unrung, and it's at least as invasive and pervasive as what Orwell envisioned... but most participate voluntarily.
For example I don't upload images of any photos I take from my smartphone and I don't use social networks at all. However my spouse does, my friends do, and they all refer to me and pictures of me they've taken and there is nothing I can do to stop it. I can ask them to not do that and to minimize it if they must do it anyway but that's the extent of my control as far as that goes.
I could be completely disconnected from the internet, but my view is the disadvantages there, due to the aggregate mass populace's use of it, are too much for me to tolerate. So I use a popular browser and engage in various online activities.
Technical professionals are arguably the indigenous natives, present "before it was cool" and working to coerce a inimical environment into something suitable and appealing to people.
[1]http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
The thing is, the term 'digital native' has been heavily used as a way of saying that children that grew up surrounded by tablets and TVs and the internet actually learn differently from the so-called digital immigrants.
For an example, see these quotes by Marc Prensky cited in the literature thousands of times:
‘today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors’ [1]
‘Our students, as digital natives, will continue to evolve and change so rapidly that we won’t be able to keep up’ [2]
‘Our young people generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do’ [2]
‘In fact they are so different from us that we can no longer use either our twentieth century knowledge or training as a guide to what is best for them educationally’ [2]
Now this might immediately sound extremely suspicious for anyone who has some background on the research of how humans learn, but it's a common myth all over the learning world. 'Oh I can't learn from books, I need interactive videos and apps, that's why I have bad grades.' Actually computers are an excellent choice for learning if applied correctly, but this is not what is usually being implied in these situations.
There's a big confusion between how much children are familiar with using technology from a consumer's point of view, and the natural human ability to learn. The latter hasn't changed.
The debunking of 'digital natives' is not new either [3].
By the way, for anyone interested, I recommend Hattie and Yates' book on learning [4] as a great, very balanced, modern introduction.
[1] (cited 18000 times!) Prensky, Marc. "Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1." On the horizon 9.5 (2001): 1-6.
[2] (cited 1000 times) Prensky, Marc. "Listen to the natives." Educational leadership 63.4 (2005).
[3] (cited 2700 times) Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton, and Lisa Kervin. "The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence." British journal of educational technology 39.5 (2008): 775-786.
[4] Hattie, John, and Gregory CR Yates. Visible learning and the science of how we learn. Routledge, 2013.
Because nobody makes good old fashioned cellphones that can only make calls they were all upgraded to touch-screen smartphones. A lot of them came to me for direction to perform the most basic tasks. They were interested in downloading apps, getting the news from their devices, managing pictures and generally browsing the internet from them.
At first I explained every step of the process and I noticed they would all mechanically memorize the steps without really understanding any of them. So I changed my approach. I told them that, software wise, whatever happens to their device I can repair it and that instead of waiting for me to have a minute to go over the steps with them, they should try themselves and if something bad happens then they should come to me.
This has changed their behavior dramatically. They are now more confident using their devices, knowing that someone can get them out of trouble should problem arises, and try new features by themselves. An example of that is when they enabled voice control and started to play with it.
I like to separate users in two categories that I consider more realistic than "Digital Native" and so called "Digital Immigrants". I refer to them as having an "Active" position toward technology and a "Passive" position. The active crowd search for solutions themselves and learn by exploration while the passive crowd pretty much will only do as directed and what they have been taught with clear explanation. I noticed this pattern of refusing to explore new tools and platforms when exposed to one not closely related with age, as many young "Digital Natives" would get extremely confused when exposed to a new tech. Even stuff as basic as an oldschool car GPS (not their usual phone) would confuse them.
Pre-internet era - people know little but do a lot and deeply
Post-internet era - people know a lot but do little and shallow
They don't understand the how and why something works, and they don't care.
and get off my lawn. :)
The nerd aristocracy's grip will forever remain unchallenged.
Yeah. This story reminded me of the Star Trek: TNG episode Schisms. There is a scene when Riker, Troi, and LaForge are on the holodeck trying to recreate the aliens' surgical table from memory. The way the characters interact with the computer to accomplish an extremely complex task -- build a model of a table from fragmented dreams -- is remarkable.
The scene showcases how natural and comfortable they are at talking to the computer. Though the episode has its detractors, I'm glad they made it. I can imagine the characters regularly using the holodeck to model and design all sorts of objects in the course of their normal duties. It demonstrates that the power of their tools goes way beyond silly period-piece virtual reality games.
The twenty-forth century nerd aristocracy no longer needs to use plastic keyboards and text editors from the 1970s. That doesn't stop them from being sophisticated users of their technology. Programmers, even.
It's not about digital native but having expectations of interactive objects.
The idea that you can dismiss the idea of digital natives just because people still learn differently is a little wacky. Digital natives imply familiarity and comfort with the digital technology they grew up with, not anything else.
This was a (brilliant) minority of this generation.
Consider if a community designed a new language. By definition, no one in the community would be a native speaker. Couples start having children and teaching the children that language. Those children will be the first native speakers. The best of the non-natives would still have more technical knowledge of how the language works than the average native speaker. That's the situation that we're looking at here.
I'm sure a younger version of myself would have completely failed a basic test of computer literacy. And yet, I set up DOS extended memory, configured hardware settings for the Sound Blaster, and calibrated a joystick, so I could play Tie Fighter.
The only skill I think a school might have valued was that I learned a tiny bit of basic to fiddle with that qbasic game where the gorillas threw bananas at each other.
> People born after that date are the digital natives; those born before are digital immigrants, doomed to be forever strangers in a computer-based strange land.
That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple.
I tend to agree, But younger people have the 'advantage' of being submerged with computers from a very young age. Children tend to pick up things quicker and easier compared to adults. (this is especially true with language, learning a second language as a child is far easier then doing the same as an adult).
Also, i think its unfair to judge people on their knowledge about computing when they are not in the computing field.
most people don't know how to gearbox in their car works, yet they are still able to use a car just fine.
Yes but you wouldn't call people who don't know how the gearbox works "mechanical native" or something like that just because they grew up with cars. You acknowledge that there are people like mechanics who know that stuff because they learned it, and other people who do not because they did not learn it. It has nothing to do with generations and so on.