The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
thewalrus.ca
The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
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Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#2Consumer tech has been refined and dumbed down to the point where everything just sort of magically works, and since it's "magic" you never have to dive into the nuts and bolts. By making it so easy to use, we are depriving people of their opportunities to organically learn like people in my generation had to.
Exceptions exist.
* Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#3There's definitely a false equivalency being made in being "more connected" as meaning "superior."
Certainly younger generations will always be more accustomed to interfacing with technology (this will never change). But that doesn't mean they understand it.
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#4I guess the first generation of digital natives (and those older who caught up a bit later in life) will remain the only one who had to touch relatively low level stuff (things as simple as a tree of folders and file endings).
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#5The people who are "digitally superior" as those who take an active interest in learning the tech. They are young or old, and constitute only a small percentage of the population.
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#6Consumer tech has been refined and dumbed down to the point where everything just sort of magically works, and since it's "magic" you never have to dive into the nuts and bolts. By making it so easy to use, we are depriving people of their opportunities to organically learn like people in my generation had to. Exceptions exist. * Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe - YouTube || https://www.youtub…
In what way were people able to introspect into their computing devices for learning? By being able to poke around OS details or the filesystem?
Doesn't it sound more important to have an IDE + fluid building so people don't have to care about the details?
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#7Related, http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Computers, for the majority of people, are now principally consumption devices, with some small amount of guided typing of tweets and chats (which I think I would argue is effectively consumption still, in much the way that I'd consider someone speaking on the telephone to be a consumer of that service).
I would not expect someone who watched a lot of movies to be good at making them; I would not expect someone who reads a lot of books to be a whizz when it comes to typesetting and printing; I would not expect someone who eats a lot of sandwiches to be competent at baking bread; I would not expect someone who watches Netflix and reads tweets to be good at configuring or programming the computer they're using to do it.
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#8It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers.
Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes need to free up memory by messing around with config.sys and autoexec.bat. Good times...
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#9Consumer tech has been refined and dumbed down to the point where everything just sort of magically works, and since it's "magic" you never have to dive into the nuts and bolts. By making it so easy to use, we are depriving people of their opportunities to organically learn like people in my generation had to. Exceptions exist. * Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe - YouTube || https://www.youtub…
Regarding computer literacy, there are two glaring difference between the current generation and the one who grew with computers in the 90s: one is the one you mention; in the 90s we were our own tech support, so to speak, and when DOS didn't want to run that shiny game that you just got, it was up to you to figure out the problem and hopefully to find a solution. We learned a lot because we had to.
The other is that most devices are increasingly more geared towards conmsumption and less towards experimentation and creation. On one hand, I used to do crazy things with assembler, regarding direct access to ports and interrupts, that no current OS would allow. On the other, the shift towards phones has greatly changed (and IMHO, reduced, mostly) what we do with our computers.
The good news is that the info is out there for the ones who do want to learn; we didn't have that privilege. Still, these are a minority, and in my experience, the average 18yo person preparing right now to start a degree in CS (or whichever career centered around programming) knows way less about computer than what we used to know at their age.
Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
#10It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers. Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes nee…
Your comment about config.sys and autoexec.bat brought a smile to me. Definitely good old times.
Also miss messing around hexadecimal editors to cheat in games.