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A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

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Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#111

Post by dorchadas »

bachbach wrote: post #95
mikebelanger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason for the decline in self-built in homes is advancements in modular home building. They're much better, and more economical than ever before. Even my Dad, who self-built two large homes himself, admitted it doesn't make sense to self-build. One is better off just working more in whatever specialty they do, and getting a modular home.

We're not buying those either. I've seen only one prefab in my area. We're not even building Tiny Houses. That movement has faded away as the land permission issue dominated over their advantages. Meanwhile: https://youtu.be/M73r32vK7C4 That's not a joke - there is a steep decline in being 'handy' - I'm doing everything I can to learn how to be but it still feels a bit unnatural. That lack of adaptability is like an…

I feel the biggest issue with owning a house is the amount of debt recent college graduates are already in. If I didn't have my student loans hanging over me, I would've totally gone and bought a house, or built my own (everyone in my family has built their own, pretty much, so I have a wealth of knowledge to draw on thankfully). But, I can't afford it. I feel that's part of the issue with many people choosing to pay rent over building. Not to mention trying to save so you have a decent down payment size.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#112

Post by jacquesm »

21 wrote: post #63
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more important is the nature of PCs vs mobile devices. The mobile platform is designed to commoditize the user and create a stark division between users on one side and content and software creators on the other. You can't easily create anything of any substance on a mobile device and the ecosystem discourages it by e.g. treating user data as unimportant. PCs were designed to be devices for people to create thin…

> You can't easily create anything of any substance on a mobile device The instagram community would like a word with you.

You just made his point a lot stronger.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#113

Post by dorchadas »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #103
jdietrich wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mostly forgotten how to write with a pen. I am absolutely fine with that.

I use fountain pens exclusively and take pride in my penmanship. I also love my Apple Pencil - it lets me use and practice my skills, and is a very good approximation of several different types of nibs. Even my older Wacom tablets weren’t as good.

Any tips on improving penmanship? Mine has always been absolutely horrible, which stinks as there's lots of things I prefer to write out by hand. Most things, in fact, unless it needs to be electronic.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#114

Post by messe »

innocenat wrote: post #94
ssivark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one can technically vomit out a few hundred words using a small touch screen. But the tools make it damn difficult to edit and re-organize text. Does this mean that all such reports are basically stream-of-consciousness writing instead of a more carefully polished piece of work?

It's not hard to edit & reorganised with larger screen smartphone at all.

It seems like it would be more awkward than with a mouse+keyboard controlled text editor, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I'd love to get better with working with touchscreens, but I haven't seen any way of getting the composability I've become accustomed to on the *nix command line and associated editors (be it vim, emacs or even the monoliths of atom and vscode).

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#115

Post by LyndsySimon »

megaman22 wrote: post #37
strken wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always felt that young people are seen as good with computers because they're more confident and less afraid of failure, and that even if their only experience is instagram they're more likely to google a scary error message or click around at random in various menus.

I'm not sure that that is the case, any longer. I have a lot of trouble with our college-aged interns, because they will barely make an effort to try doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them. Sometimes I just want to yell at them to run the code and see what happens, and then try to figure out why what happened happened. And these are computer science majors.

Maybe they need someone to yell at them to break them out of their comfort zone and learn something new. They might find they enjoy it or even that they’re good at it once they do it.

It’s human nature to feel like the next generation is coddled, of course. Maybe the real problem is that the current generation isn’t as capable of instruction as previous ones.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#116

Post by LyndsySimon »

ssivark wrote: post #61
crazygringo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently worked in education... yes. Anecdotally, I tended to see it at the community-college level with students who owned a large-screen phone and didn't own a computer. I don't think anyone is writing whole research papers or serious lab reports on phones. A two-page reading response is totally doable. Something with footnotes or equations, not so much.

Yes, one can technically vomit out a few hundred words using a small touch screen. But the tools make it damn difficult to edit and re-organize text. Does this mean that all such reports are basically stream-of-consciousness writing instead of a more carefully polished piece of work?

The more I use my iPhone X, the better I am at it. I actually prefer its keyboard to the iPad’s for prose now, because you can long press the period and select text much more easily. If you can do that with the iPad, I’ve not found it yet.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#117

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

Great insightful comment, I've never really typed on anything but an IME keyboard on a computer, so I wasn't familiar with how easy it is to type kanji / hanzi on a phone

IME keyboards (for Japanese) has always confused me, since sometimes if you input hiragana or katakana it would translate to the kanji equivalent because japanese is kind of weird in that they have 3 written types. Thats just a quirk with Japanese itself though. I'm am glad that English doesn't have such an issue though. Then you have Romaji, the English - Japanese phonetic equivalent

Its also important to note when doing these comparisons, Japanese has a significantly lower information informational density than that of other languages. It also has a low reading speed rate too (informational rate), but very high speech rate (e.g. how fast you can talk with the language). English is actually very high across the board.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-efficient-highest-infor...

The article here has an image of the table I am thinking of (its the first response) for the data, from lyons et al. But, it does omit certain languages that are of interest as well, namely arabic. The rate at which you can write arabic and achieve the same level of information by hand is very closely related to that of English shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand. This might not tie directly to texting, but its worth mentioning because notetaking efficiently requires quickly capturing information. Some people prefer by hand others by typing etc

I don't really know all the slang terminology in Japanese all that well, but in English we have things like brb lol btw lmfao roflcopter fam. I don't really know what the Japanese equivalent at all of this is, and I wander whether if you were to compare Japanese Slang to English slang / Ebonics, which input type method is superior on a phone? The japanese flick input method or a traditional qwerty keyboard. My bet is on the latter though (QWERTY)

Like I know instead of saying わたしは you could just shorten it to ぼく は (only if your male though). Which means "I am ..... {{doing something}}". You could just say instead "{{doing something}}" too, which gets the same point across. In mandarin you would use 我是 which is pinyin is typed "woshi" which is the equivalent.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#118

Post by natch »

jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

On a tangent here but curious, if you know: what's the closest input method you can get to flick for Chinese? I realize the languages are quite different (might be botching this, but my fuzzy understanding for Japanese is it has kanji+katakana+kana+romaji, where Chinese has only hanzi + pinyin|zhuyin/etc.) Do you think flick is compatible with Chinese?

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#119

Post by arnaudsm »

matz1 wrote: post #107

The world are always evolving. Nothing sad about this. This is like saying young people can't use abacus anymore. These new generation of young people will grow up and with new kind of input method or paradigim. Who knows maybe the traditional way of programming with keyboard will evolve to something completely different for the next generation of people.

There are strong implications to this change.

PCs are (almost) open platforms, with control, and oriented to create content. While Phones are closed, made for content consumption, and frequently don't even have a file browser.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#120

Post by eric_h »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
21 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't easily create anything of any substance on a mobile device The instagram community would like a word with you.

You just made his point a lot stronger.

There is plenty of truly artistic content created on mobile devices and posted on Instagram, it's not all fake vacation selfies.
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