Kids Can’t Use Computers

Modern children (and a lot of adults) are digital natives. They are immersed in technology, feel comfortable with it, reach for it before anything else when working/relaxing/etc.

Immersion, however, is not the same as mastery. Fish live in water but that doesn't mean they understand what that means, or how to respond to problems within that water [1].

Modern mainstream computers are hostile to user understanding in the name of UX. You get happy paths and rigid defaults and hidden complexity, all in pursuit of smoother, frictionless computing. That's all fantastic, until something breaks and you're suddenly lost, outside the well-lit paths.

If there ever was a generation of 'digital natives' in the way that people tend to mean that phrase - in touch with technology, in control and aware of their devices' capabilities - then it's not modern children. It's a generation back, when trying to get a computer to listen to you involved hacking your way through awkward commands and workarounds, learning as you went.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/97082-there-are-these-two-y...

This piece started pretty nasty. >I smiled and introduced myself as I sat down beside her. She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it. I've been mistaken for a technician enough times to recognise the expression.

'I'll need to be quick. I've got a lesson to teach in 5 minutes,' I said. 'You teach?' 'That's my job, I just happen to manage the network team as well.'

She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB she'll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with.

The amount of contempt for this person because she just looked at him feels absolutely huge.

> All through their lives, I've done it for them. Set-up new hardware, installed new software and acted as in-house technician whenever things went wrong. As a result, I have a family of digital illiterates.

In my opinion this feels like a huge part of the problem. Of course most people aren't passionate about software and all the inner workings of computers. For the mainstream and general population, the better way to have them learn about computers is to educate them. The way to do it is to make them learn to solve their own problems, understand what went wrong and guide them to handle it themselves for next time.

"Just making it work" whilst considering the other person a fool because they don't know much about computers creates this "us vs them" mentality. The geeks vs socially adept people.

People are also "car-native" these days. They know how to drive (actually many don't anymore).. But people have no idea how a car works, and can't do anything.

People have always been "human natives" We are all human, but none of us understand how humans work (mainly speaking to psychology on a biochemical mechanistic level here)

Start making computers that are actually personal again. Personal computing used to be all about the computer as a tool to enhance your life, they aimed to be discoverable, understandable, and as simple as they could manage. They sought to allow users to create their own workflows for their own needs, and attempted to on-ramp beginners into increasing levels of programming to suit their needs.

But today, personal computing is dead. The computer is owned by Microsoft, Apple, or Google, and the user is cattle to be farmed for ad revenue and saleable data. Discoverability is non-existent, and increasingly we're told that there is a wide gulf between "normal user" (almost universally framed as only slightly more intelligent than a chimp), "power user" (who are expected to put up with hoop jumping, bad abstractions, and overcomplicated nonsense), and "developers" (who's time is so sacrosanct that 1 second saved for them is worth 10B seconds of wasting user time).

People don't understand computers because software these days works very hard to keep them from understanding them. It isn't profitable for a user to actually use their computer for their own needs when it is much easier to addict them to social media and show them ads.