Duh. They use phones mostly. A lot of the gen z people I know are just as bad as boomers with tech. Millennials and gen x had that sweet spot of “actually having to learn how shit works not just iphone go brrr.”
Yeah I don’t know why the article mentions Gen Z’s “tech-savvy reputation”. Being able to operate a cell phone doesn’t make you tech savvy.
Gen X and Millennials grew up using command line and troubleshooting computer problems before the Internet. Their tech skills are way higher than Gen Z.
I never needed to use command line, but I did hone my typing skills on MIRC and ICQ.
*Mavis Beacon.
Anyone responsible for the family IT services had to learn cmd.
Pretty sure booting into DOS before loading Windows and playing the Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe both count as command line experience.
I also think that as smug as a lot people feel about this, it doesn’t seem far off to think that physical keyboard typing skills could be substituted with newer technologies, or refined versions of existing tech. At least in terms of performing most office job functions.
I’m not saying it’ll be more efficient, or better, just that it wouldn’t be a surprising next step given the trends being discussed here.
If that happens, I have no doubt that smugness will turn into self-righteous indignation and a stubborn refusal to abandon the tactile keyboard for older generations, myself included.
I just hope that if that transition occurs during my lifetime, it’s an either-or situation, and not a replacement of the keyboard.
Key chording has always been faster than conventional single letter typing, and that tech has been around for a long time now in the form of stenography machines. Yet most people learn on a conventional keyboard because it’s simpler and more ubiquitous. This is true even now that chording has been adapted to programming and similar tasks.
You have to remember we live in a world where most people don’t even know how to write properly, even those who do it as part of their job like doctors. If you draw letters by moving your fingers, you’re doing it wrong by the way. The actual proper technique involves using your shoulder, elbow, and wrist to do most of the work. We’ve known about this for centuries, and these techniques were designed with dip pens, quils, brush, and fountain pens in mind. The cheap ballpoint pen along with rather bad instructions from teachers has led to proper handwriting technique being forgotten, and causes problems like RSI in people who handwrite regularly.
Oh ball point pens. Last I heard one of the thing they do preserve in primary school over here is the good ole progression from pencil to fountain pen and sticking for that for the whole four years. Pencil because if you use too much force you break the thing without breaking it, it’s just annoying, and that’s the point, once they switch to fountain pens they’re not going to bend them. Also, cursive from the start. There’s important lessons about connecting up letters in there: Writing single letters properly is harder than cursive because on top of moving your pen over the paper, you have to lift it. Much easier if you already have proper on-paper movement down.
I am quite partial to ink rollers nowadays but still can’t stand ordinary ball points. They feel wrong.
Anyone else play Montezuma’s Revenge or that DOS King Kong game throwing explosive bananas after inputting stuff for height, angle, force?
You mean that inferior version of Scorched Earth?
Lol. I just went googling and it was Qbasic Gorrilas! Now that takes me back.
AI powered keyboard let’s go. Honestly the amount of typing I’ve been able to cut out by just clicking the ai suggested replies in Teams instead of actually typing something out to respond to my coworkers is pretty high.
I learned mine playing a MUD
You typed fast or you died.
For me it was WoW back when it was more social and you had to communicate via text mid fights and whatnot
Thats largely because 90s software was jank, and the internet exposed all kinds of more jank and viruses… but now, most things just work. Also, most people arent really using desktops, they’re using phones or tablets or game consoles, where the OS is very much locked down.
The average user experience has abstracted away understanding how things actually work.
Software is still jank. Well maybe except zfs and sqlite, but the rest is jank. Also seL4.
This is why I feel disconnected from most of my gen z people
Yep. And phone typing is the ‘hunt and peck’ method of keyboard typing. Which is unfortunate because it’s ingraining the slowest way to type onto a whole generation.
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Autocorrect begs to differ, usually only when the word is out of my field of vision.
I took typing, on typewriters, but got efficient years later on IRC and ICQ. 60+more wpm. I’m still fairly proficient on a familiar KB too.
any good IRC servers left or did it all move to discord? Ive been meaning to get on an IRC server thats not just a mirror of the in-game chat of the game I play.
Gen Z here, most of my online life is on IRC. Learned about its existence a couple years ago. It is very much alive, although most people left there are at least semi-technical, and I miss the non-technical crowd.
I don’t know, it was a very long time ago. Maybe do a search, based on your interests?
Tried using swipe typing before and honestly I’m just faster typing normally.
Yeah, autocorrect is bad enough without the extra emphasis on it with swipe.
It’s vastly better when you need to type with one hand
Can confirm, it’s worth the effort.
It works well for casual conversation. But if you’re trying to have a technical conversation it will fail on uncommon or custom words or phrases.
Yeah, I’m a swiper myself and I can’t imagine anyone being able to swipe without knowing the keyboard layout like one would for typing.
A swiping motion and muscle memory for tapping are two different things. It took a while to get fast with my thumbs even though I type fairly fast on a keyboard.
There’s a mode where you swipe your finger over each letter in order and it auto completes the word. Not sure how often younger people use it (though I wasn’t aware you could do that until I saw someone younger doing it).
Sounds like predictive T9 but slower
T9 was supreme.
No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.
They also stopped teaching typing in schools. My younger family members never had an computer class or a typing class.
Anything beyond ~2002 became worse than the predecessor in IT related tasks.
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One difference is that the touch-screen typists rely heavily on autocorrect. I don’t think they’re actually as accurate as you think - their spelling and typo errors are being covered up more than yours on the desktop computer.
I’m part of Gen Z, and no, we as a generation AREN’T tech savvy. just because we grew up with smart phones does not make us tech savvy. in fact, i actually think it made us dumber with tech. i’m the only one in my school who knows how to use a command line and code (i also use linux as my daily driver). meanwhile everyone else doesn’t even know what a freaking file manager is
Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.
Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.
As far as actual tech competency goes?
Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.
Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.
I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.
Hi, I’m a programmer. Most of my classmates didn’t know how to use Linux.
Now, I’ve realized that newer products are being developed via Visual Studio so……
Linux and command line knowledge aren’t the same as being tech savvy
linux can be used through mostly GUI now so i partly agree with you, but installing linux can be quite a hard task for those who aren’t tech savvy. i’m pretty sure being able to do the following can be considered tech savvy:
- change boot settings
- flash an ISO to a USB drive
- shrink windows partition into a new one for linux
- boot from USB
- actually install linux
- get used to linux
Edit: the thing is… everyone is so used to things being pre-installed (ie windows/macOS/iOS), being able to download apps easily from the apple App Store. anything even slightly more complicated than that is too hard for them. i’ve had a graphic design class with some people a few years ago and some of them had to ask me for help for how to open a file, save, and export. if something isn’t completely, 100% automated for them, they can’t do it.
Can you not order Ubuntu on a DVD anymore? Also you’re explaining dual boot. You can just single boot linux
i’m not sure. most people at my school use a laptop at their main computer, so they couldn’t use an ubuntu DVD anyways. i personally prefer dual boot over single boot
… did everyone remove the media drive off laptops? There are also external media drives.
New laptops don’t have optical drives. I don’t think there’s a single manufacturer that still has them.
Hell, most new computer cases (much to my chagrin) don’t even have 5 1/4" bays.
I think it has been probably more than 5 years since I have seen an optical drive on a new laptop.
ultrahellabased.tar.gz
Um is there anything special to use Linux? Click the GUI.
Well installing it. That alone requires a challenge most folks probably couldn’t overcome easily. People are accustomed to just getting a computer with a working os on it. Changing that os would be pretty hard for them.
And let’s be real, you at least need a degree of tech savvy to deal with the inevitable issues that will come up. Even on the simplest distro.
IDK, only times when I broke things on Debian were when I made the unwise decisions to do things I don’t fully understand (that doesn’t really happen now). And my elderly mom uses Mint with less problems than she did Windows.
Depending on the distro, its generally no harder than windows… infact it probably easier since you dont have to go make an MS account.
It’s a different paradigm for windows users. “Why won’t this exe/msi install on my computer?”
But also, once you realize the unlimited potential to customize it’s pretty special. I, for one, hate using anything without a tiling windows manager.
So how do you install things?
Red hat based? Install the RPM. Debian based? Install the deb, generally? Install from the repository. You can also install from source if you’d like
I don’t know what any of that means.
You don’t generally download the file like you would an exe or MSI on windows. Rather you enter a command line that tells Linux to connect to the repository (like an app store) of that particular type of Linux, pull the latest installation file and install it.
You can still download the file and install it directly, but it’s not a straightforward double click like on windows.
Install app from native app repository of chosen Linux distribution.
Well yeah this is like asking an oboe player how they control pitch, and they respond “different embouchure is the universal way to do it, but adjusting the reed is the best way”
Go look it up if you don’t know what the terms mean
Installing things on linux is generally the same as phones. There’s a shop-like GUI where you can look up your applications and get them, they’ll also update automatically.
If the software isn’t in your distribution repository, that’s when it starts to be like windows, you need to hunt it down and either get an appimage or something like that, or build and compile it yourself.
The most common explanation I’ve seen, and imo it makes sense, is that things mostly just work now. Even XP required a helluva lot more troubleshooting and messing with stuff to make it work than today. So you not only have a bunch of people that have no troubleshooting experience, a large portion don’t even know how to properly search for things.
On the flip side, you have a lot more people doing insanely impressive stuff at a lot younger ages because if you have the drive to do it, there’s more material to learn than ever out there.
I’m a millennial but I grew up with Macs which mostly just worked, I don’t remember having to do much troubleshooting as a kid.
But for me it was more that there was nothing else to do. You got bored, and messed around with and explored the computer, figuring out what you could make it do. Even once we got internet, it was dialup, so you got online for a bit, checked some things, downloaded some shareware, then disconnected and were stuck with whatever was on the computer again to mess with.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
And yet the evidence seems to suggest that social media has actually increased their boredom. They take fewer risks and try fewer things because the comfort of their doomscrolling feed is always there as a digital pacifier whenever they feel emotionally challenged. In turn, this is contributing to increasing rates of anxiety because these young people are not challenging themselves and learning what they are capable of. Their bodies and brains are being programmed to retreat from problems instead of facing and overcoming them. All of that leads to a life where you’re just not getting out and doing stuff, meeting people or creating memories. That’s a life of boredom.
The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.
So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?
The darned neural implant generation doesn’t even know how to doomscroll with their fingers. Kids these days smh no cap.
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don’t use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It’s pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS… I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren’t taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the “you don’t have privacy” motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
You sound exactly like my friend. But he would probably say stick to thinkpads
They use apps.
On phones.
They aren’t tech savvy.
I’d also argue that your WPM typed on a keyboard doesn’t make you tech-savvy either. 1950s secretaries could type fast on a typewriter and that didn’t make them tech savvy either.
There are a wide range of computer skills. Being able to interact with a word processor extremely efficiently is a highly valuable tech skill. Someone who knows about processor architecture but can’t touch type is arguably more tech-savvy but also less useful in most office jobs. So I’d say that the secretaries were indeed tech-savvy in a way that was useful for their positions.
I don’t even know how fast I can type on a phone.
Even with word completion I find myself hesitating between the choice of word or typing it out.
I know it’s not near as fast as on a physical keyboard where is used to be around 90-120 wpm if I remember correctly. (Been a while since I had to do that at an employment agency)
Anyway, it’d be fun to see a thumbs only tiktok/Snapchat typer vs a mechanical typewriter type off.
And, tbf, most people are far from tech savvy.
Most are consumers. Some are really good consumers. Some are power users. Some know how to do things.
Very few actually understand it.
But, there was a time where there was indeed a necessity if you used the tech, you had to understand it.
It’s a pretty good indicator. If you spend all day working with computers chances are you’ll be able to type quickly
The tech-savvy reputation comes from the “digital native” narrative i.e. because they grew up with computers they must know computers, which is a silly fallacy because how one interacts with technology makes all the difference. It’s the same reason why everyone who grew up with electricity isn’t necessarily an electrician.
The tech savvy reputation comes from millenials. We ARE tech savvy.
As an older Gen Z, yeah you guys probably have a better grasp on modern tech. Weirdly enough I actually have found that a weirdly high amount of folks my age know old analogue tech better, like vacuum tubes and old cars.
Older gen z here too, born in ‘99, and while I haven’t noticed the analogue thing, I’ve 100% noticed tech illiteracy in general.
Like, I’m talking about having a downloads folder full of junk because they don’t know that that’s where downloads end up. Installers left untouched after programs are installed because they’re worried that deleting the installer will delete the installed program.
Imo being raised with closed ecosystems like iPhones really stunted tech literacy for a lot of people. I grew up jailbreaking my phones and used my parent’s windows pc, so I kind of escaped it.
Only the early ones. By definition millenials are birth years 1981 to 1996, so the last ones were 11 when the first iPhone released.
I think every generation has their percentage of nerds and that just was a little higher in late Gen X and early millenials because computers were so new and you had to tinker to get anything working.
But then came smartphones, and instead they grew up with that…
Being a tool user doesn’t make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.
Right? I grew up with pen and paper, but I’m better with keyboards.
In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.
Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).
That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.
Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.
It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.
That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.
People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.
It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.
You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?
I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.
but gen z is not tech savvy. They can use a browser. and watch youtube. They never advance past that stage
I think for the most part they are just “good” at using mainstream social medias nothing really more
You would think they know how to use a browser but in reality they only use apps. TikTok being their preferred search engine speaks volumes.
Man look at millennials turning into boomers at record pace
“back in my day we did things properly, now all these damn kids… etc etc”
it’s not becoming boomers. It’s about rarely meeting one who knows that, for example, wifi is not the internet. I’m not asking for detailed tech knowledge. But getting a blank face if asked something as simple as “where did you save the file?” or replying with “in the gallery/google photos” means you are not tech savvy. these are the absolute basics.
What’s your sample size, do you actually talk to many gen z
If you asked them where they saved a photo on a smartphone they’re not going to tell you a filepath because that’s not how people use smartphones. I probably couldn’t tell you where photos are stored physically on my phone without going out of my way to find that info
Also Google photos is a valid answer to that question because the file is saved in Google photos, just because it’s cloud storage doesn’t make it not storage. In that case local storage is basically just a cache anyway
So not tech savvy?
😔
I’ve literally never heard Gen Z described as tech savvy.
Yes.
Calling GenZ tech savvy for always using a cell phone is like calling grandma a mathematician because she spends all day at the slot machine.
Boomers go confused when gen y switch to gen z and forget to get updated script from cable teeeveee
The boomers says that to them but that’s really not true, this day this generation is less and less “tech savvy”, they’re just good at using the basic way social media
Being able to use TikTok on your phone doesn’t make you tach savvy. They don’t know anything about how it all works. It’s a false dichotomy.
Yeah. I’ve noticed the new generation coming into the workplace can’t do shit on a computer.
They’ve grown up on apps that have simple interfaces and limited options. Give them the freedom and power of a workstation and you’ll find they never learned to learn real software.
Gen X that think Gen Zs are tech savvy are probably the people that the actual Gen X nerds shake their head at when we have to teach them how to put an URL in the address bar instead of searching for Gmail and clicking on the link every. goddamn. time.
Yes, as a Gen X I’m sometimes surprised how tech illiterate some of my generation are…
Then I remember when we were kids and people like me using computers were seen as weird geeks and “normal people” wouldn’t get close to a computer.
As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.
One thing that’s really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.
So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years,
That should literally never be the case. How do you even find your home position like that.
The quick and simple way to learn proper touch tying is simple: Use a typing tutor program. It really is all about writing random stuff without looking at your keyboard, that’s all there is to it, depending on layout what you write may make more or less sense. Do that until you can actually type blindly, if you need a refresher for symbols then do that, it’s worth the time investment, just for the love of everything don’t look at your keyboard and don’t ever rest your index anywhere but where you feel that they’re in the right position. Not some feel-good “feel” but those nubs on the keys (f and j on qwerty). feel them.
for the love of everything don’t look at your keyboard
Signed,
Xennial who was in IT for 25 years and never learned to touch type
There’s a common misconception among boomers and gen x that “digital natives” like gen z have a god-given tech proficiency. However, there’s nothing about being born with a smartphone in your hand that teaches you anything about tech.
It’s not like people are getting better at changing oil as car ownership becomes more common, right?
That’s like 80% autocorrect anyway (I didn’t write a single word correctly in this sentence).
Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.
I think “digital naive” is a better phrase than “digital native”. They are born with computers all around them. But most adults forget to / are not able to educate them about technology and their implications.
I believe it’s a little more sinister than that. There is less education around these issues because many services have adopted a highly polished, “Walled-Garden” approach to their presentation. This keeps people who’ve grown up with the concepts in their walled garden loyal to that specific service, and makes it difficult for people to dig under the hood and work out how things really function without the sugar coating. They get irritated quickly because they’re used to everything “Just working” and don’t have experience on more open systems.
Therefore, they would like there to be no need for tech education unless you plan on a professional career as a tech.
As long as ownserhip don’t get carried away with enshittification chasing next quarter’s finance call and drive users away by annoying them into putting the extra effort in to learning about alternatives, they could keep it that way forever.
I call them digital savages. You wouldn’t ask a jungle tribe about the Krebs cycle either.
I built my Gen Z nephew a PC with a GTX 950 a few years back. When I went by to gift him a new video card I found out that he hooked up his video output from the motherboard the whole time. Don’t know how that reflects on all kids from his generation but it was kinda funny.
That’s funny but is a mistake that much more tech savvy people make. Although, they would figure out they made a mistake much sooner.
That fps ain’t right dawg!
DRI_PRIME=1 goes brrrr
Pretty sure someone who doesn’t know to plug their GPU in is probably not running Linux
Idk, i specifically plug it into motherboard since i use cheap used gpus that can break easily, example is Nvidia p106, it doesn’t even have video output, and it’s easier to flip DRI_PRIME from 1 to 0 than redo the cables
That’s a conscious decision though I said someone who doesn’t know
Does Gen Z actually have a tech savvy reputation? I was under the impression that the last few generations aren’t that great with computers as they more grew up with mature technology. It is the Gen X and Millennials that are more digital native while having used computers where advanced skills were required.
Depends, the younger half that’s adjacent to gen alpha? Sure.
On the other side of that coin, I’m in my mid 20s. Not sure about the rest of the older members of gen-z, but my first experience with a computer was Classic Mac OS and Reader Rabbit.
I barely remember when we got the late PIII purple Compaq presario running XP when I was like 3/4. Playing red faction, and shit my brother showed me on new grounds. I remember my mom showing me how to pirate sabbath using Morpheus. Filling the machine up with useless IE toolbars.
Early YouTube was fucking sweet in the worst way possible, though at first I had to sneak it because that was considered a not-for-kids site at the time.
No one my age really touched a smartphone til like middle/highschool. By then we where all already playing halo:CE and early releases of MC on the win 7 machines in the lab.
I personally had already had basic Photoshop/paint.net and scripting/programming skills trying to make shit for Minecraft (and Roblox before that.)
Granted I also might be a bad example because I ended up working in IT, have written software to some capacity since I was 12, collect vintage machines, and keep a server rack as a pet. Furthermore, the vast majority of my daily computing happens within a collection of virtual machines running Debian.
Personally my solution to the problem was building a Linux Mint machine for my niece and her stepbrothers. Took them a bit to figure things out, but it seems to be going well.
Also bonus ageing juice for all you geezers out there:
Gen-z will technically be entering its thirties soon :P
Gen-z will technically be entering its thirties soon :P
Fake news. We’re still in the year 2018 and I’m stayin 18 forever. Σ(’ ε 'oﾉ)ﾉ
Does Gen Z actually have a tech savvy reputation?
Yes, with people who consider “uses the latest trending social media app regularly” to mean “tech savvy”. They are less technologically literate than Millennials, though, having been exposed to fewer transitionary technologies and being raised in a world where certain technologies, like the smartphone or internet, are so ubiquitous that there isn’t any of the “this is what it is and how it works” type education.
The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker who attempts to teach ESL. At first glance they may appear to be of equal ability but the ESL teacher who actually understands the what and the why because they have studied the language themselves will be a far more effective teacher than the native English speaker who basically acquired all of their skills by default and has never had that deeper understanding of them.
The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker […]
This example is perfect - native teachers (regardless of the language being taught) are often clueless on which parts of their languages are hard to master, because they simply take it for granted. Just like zoomers with tech - they take for granted that there’s some “app”, that you download it, without any further thought on where it’s stored or how it’s programmed or anything like that.
Another example I heard recently was in relation to cloud storage. Some younger people don’t understand what “stored in the cloud” actually means, nor do they understand the importance of physical backups. They have just grown up in this world where you can upload something with the promise that it will be there forever, without really thinking about where that file is actually being stored or what that could mean for its future. For my generation - millennials - we went through all these different phases of portable physical storage. We had our floppy disk, then we had our CD, then we had our USB drives, then we had our portable hard drives and now we have cloud storage. There was this evolution to the technology that we were exposed to that allows us to zoom out a bit and see cloud storage as connected to all these other forms of portable storage and, therefore, not inherently infallible or eternal.
I agree with you. I think they would kick everyone’s ass at thumb typing though. I was a T9 champion.
so… people who take typing lessons and actively try to improve it have better typing skills than the ones who don’t. Shocking.
I mean, as a millennial, I mostly taught myself to type. I’m fast enough, but have bad technique and could be faster. I was only ever actually trained to type in grade school, and barely. Once in a while in computer class we would play an educational typing game.
My mom is much better at typing than I am, because she was trained to type in college. That’s not really a thing anymore.
I learned by playing StarCraft on 56k modem. VoIP was not possible so you had to type fast. Style is wildly non-standard but i was typing fast enough not to see a benefit from standard style.
I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.
And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I’m now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I’m familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I’m probably hitting about 65 or 70.
