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Sadly if most computers weren't 'walled garden' experiences then maybe the kids could learn to tinker and fix them. As it is if the issue can't be fixed from a settings app then they're stuck.

gen z here, can confirm. most of my peers just do not care about learning how things actually work

Try teaching them.

Yes. We are.

The weird bit is that our parent's generation is also the one that build the damn things in the first place!

OG DOS command line interface nerds unite

but yes. it helps to have grown up alongside the IT industry and internet

Hey remember when computers become essential to day to day life and schools started making it part of their curriculum? Yeah me neither.

For gen x and millennials, they got those skills for free cause their toys incentivized them. As in we got that for free.

It was never guaranteed for that to keep being true. And giving you basic knowledge for the world is usually what schools should do but they never did cause there is money to be made with dumbed down tools.

I literally just watched a video of a dude telling a story about how when he was 13 in 2012, his Xbox 360 controller stopped working and he thought the whole console broke when he just had to replace the controller batteries. 🤣

I think centralization played a big role in this, at least for software. When messaging meant IRC, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Xfire, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or any number of PHP forums, you had to be able to pick up new software quickly and conceptualized the thing it's doing separate from the application it's accomplished with. When they all needed to be installed from different places in different ways you conceptualize the file system and what an executable is to an extent. When every game needs a bit of debugging to get working and a bit of savvy to know when certain computer parts are incompatible, you need a bit of knowledge to do the thing you want to do.

That said, fewer people did it. I was in highschool when Facebook took off, and the number of people who went from never online to perpetually online skyrocketed.

I teach computer science, I know it isn't wholly generational, but I've watched the decline over the past decade for the basics. Highschool students were raised on Chromebooks and tablets/phones and a homogenous software scene. Concepts like files, installations, computer components, local storage, compression, settings, keyboard proficiency, toolbars, context menus - these are all barriers for incoming students.

The big difference, I think, is that way more people (nearly everyone) has some technical proficiency, whereas before it was considered a popular enough hobby but most people were completely inept, but most of students nowadays are not proficient with things past a cursory level. That said, the ones who are technically inclined are extremely technically inclined compared to my era, in larger numbers at least.

Higher minimum and maximum thresholds, but maybe lower on average.

I feel this meme so much, TPM. I had to look up how to reinstall Windows 10 for my kid's computer because it was all messed up. I don't know my way around Windows anymore, but she's apparently unable to just look this shit up and do it herself.

Wait, sort of like my parents and in-laws...

Boomer here. As a lifelong software developer I've always known more about computers than most people in my age group generally, but I've always assumed younger people know more than I do because they've grown up with so much more tech. Maybe they tend to be more at user-level with it. I've never thought about that.

Idk. I built my first computer at 6 and ran an irc server for my class mates back in middle school. And I’m sure not many people would have done that back then either.

Im sure there’s plenty of curious and tech inclined kids these days. They just aren’t the majority. But we weren’t back then either.