My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
I think the opposite actually. We had to live through rapid changes in the way we used and interacted with technology in our early years. I think we may be slower to adopt certain things than the younger generations because of “fuck change”, but on a whole I think we will be more technically competent with newer technologies as they emerge.
deleted by creator
As a milenial, we were taught how to sewrch for solutions and trying to figure stuff out.
Chances are millenials will deal with tech far better thqn gen z. We might stumble when shit is so dumbed down its not even intuitive, but hey, we can actually search for solutions and use more than two brain cells.
Am millennial. I was taught not to believe anything that anyone said on the internet anywhere and to never tell anyone online a single detail about your irl life, and I had to learn how to figure stuff out myself when my parents weren’t watching. It’s a skill that can be learned, it isn’t inherent to millennials, though granted we all had a lot more fucking about to do with our devices in our time so it makes sense that most of us picked it up.
Nowadays my parents readily believe all the crazy shit people write on the internet about politics and suffer from identity theft because they give their data to just anybody, and kids don’t know what a file explorer is or how to read an error message without instinctually shitting their pants. What the fuck happened?
I feel like for a brief, beautiful span of like 5 years between 1998-2003 everyone was all mostly on the same page with tech stuff, and then we got left behind in the valley of sanity while the two generations adjacent to us melted their brains. But I was less than 10 years old during that mythical time so what the fuck do I know, I was mostly busy playing Donkey Kong and learning times tables.
People on TikTok are pretty bad at just believing everything they hear because someone made a video. Like, a few weeks ago random people were putting up “recordings” of that titanic sub and everyone in the comments was eating it up. Makes me concerned for real internet literacy.
I’m of a similar age to you. In my elementary school, we had to learn to use Windows 95, Apple II PCs, iMac G3s running OSX, Windows 98, and I think we had to type a few DOS commands in for e.g. playing Oregon Trail on floppy disk.
Before us were people who mainly learned computers as command prompts, after us were kids who got OS X as their idea of “a complicated computer”.
To me OS X felt like playing with those oversized Duplo blocks when I was used to regular Legos, y’know? Too simplified sometimes, but you could make it work.
Nowadays people barely know what files are, let alone the dark arts of CLI.
It’s a weird feeling, having seen technology explode in complexity, then implode into crippling oversimplification. Not like simple tech didn’t exist before, like game consoles, but now it’s all average people understand.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I’m 40 and I’ve never scanned a qr code in my life. So yes, absolutely.
Please don’t ever scan a QR code! You have no idea, just like shortened URLs, where it will take you.
What am I to do if I ever go to a restaurant that only has qr codes for menus?
Or you could get a QR code reader that displays the URL before opening the browser.
A lot of websites that offer 2FA will require that you scan a QR code. Are you just never using 2FA?
The only 2fa I’ve used sends an alphanumeric code that I type in.
Yes. Absolutely 100% yes. I meet people my age who have comparable tech skills to my grandpa. This is not related to age, its related to how much work you put into your devices.
The discussions here about how “today’s tech is so dumbed down” kinda makes me laugh, because it’s what I was saying when Windows 95 released.
Honestly, I doubt it. We got in on this sort of stuff early in life, so I don’t think we’ll struggle.
Not at all. I’m a late Gen Xer, almost a millennial. I thrive on learning new technology. I live for it.
In my experience, if anything, late iterations of Gex X tend to be slightly better with new tech than Milennials, because we grew up having to know how it works in order to use it.
In the days of constant blue screen of death.
There seem to be a lot of us GenX /“Xenials” here in the fediverse already and I think that’s why. We don’t need everything handed to us in its final form.
The people that were near that X/Millennial transition are the best at adapting to new tech in my experience. Enough access to have a computer in their formative years but not far enough along for that computer to actually worked well.
Me too
deleted by creator
Same. Except when teleporters come around. You’ll only teleport me over my dead body.
I am sure some gen Xers do fail to adapt, but at the end of the day, I don’t even think it’s a generational thing: Some people adapt and keep moving, some people get stuck.
Yeah I know boomers that are more tech savvy than some millennial. Really if you are curious and have an interest, you would keep up even at Biden age
I know a few people who are and do. Even 20+ years ago, I can recall old people who taught very young me all sorts of “cutting edge” tech shit. I had a greybeard teach me about IRQ addresses in the 90s, I’ve since forgotten it all but that’s not really the point.
“Gotta change those jumpers, man!”
I was just thinking about this. I’m really not sure. I think technological progress is not the core issue but rather a sudden paradigm shift in how you interact with what you use on a daily basis.
For instance, there was a generation that grew up without cars and never learned to drive even after they became commonplace. Just too big a jump from previous methods of transportation. But their children who grew up with cars didn’t have any issues as the technology matured and new features were added.
So the question is will there be another significant paradigm shift in our lifetime that isn’t just an evolution of current interfaces and tools, but rather a sudden change in how we interact with technology?
Who knows…
I think this is right. I’ve been thinking about this a bit as I watch who in my office starts using LLMs and more importantly how they are using them. The folks in their 40s or 50s have largely ignored it, I remember a gen xer sending an email around in may talking about this neat new ChatGPT her middle school kid showed her. I know one xer in my office whose straight up afraid to even try it. Those closer to gen z will use it, but in a very basic way - just asking straight questions seeking information, get frustrated when it can’t handle complex questions or they get lied to, then quit. Millennials seem to be better about using it for what it’s good at, generating ideas, startingn places for documents, editing/proofreading, etc. Maybe it’s because millennials were in that sweet spot between the older folks who didn’t grow up with tech and the younger folks who are used to apps that just work without having to think through how to make the thing do what you want. Maybe millennials are more interested in tech generally since we saw it change so rapidly in our lifetimes. Maybe it’s just my small sample size of a 40ish person office.
There’s a neat phenomenon where people born before a life changing technology will never see it as being life changing.
Anyone who grew up before the internet only sees it a some place to chat with friends and not the de facto way international business is now conducted. Anyone who grew up before planes only see them as some way to get to a holiday destination quicker and not as the way a huge amount of cargo shipping is done today.
To these people, going back in time seems simple. They could certainly live without the internet or planes or any other new fangled devices! They might, but society wouldn’t be able to. I can see AI being the new thing that changes society that we all think of as being some silly little toy.
Generative AI is definitely this. You can tell by how personally offended people got instantly. How they freaked out about what this could change, and how despite their strong feelings towards it, they don’t learn to use it.
Also, it’s a paradigm shift - it basically lets you grab a random high schooler and ask them to do any task at 1000x speed. Maybe it’ll be great, maybe it’ll be done all wrong and full of made up facts. It’s a random high schooler, you’re not sure what they know and you can’t trust what they give you, and if you try to blame mistakes in your work on them no one is going to accept that as an excuse - but if you hand them appreciate tasks and properly check their work, you can accomplish tasks drastically faster
Your question reminded me of an interesting article I read a while back: Gen Z Is Apparently Baffled by Basic Technology.
It’s kind of a click bait title, but I think it’s still interesting. Technology is definitely generational, and I’m sure there are some things millennials will be better prepared to use in old age, but there will likely be lots of new tech that will be a struggle to learn.
I feel the’ve gotten too much of a streamlined experience compared to what millenials grew up with, who had to be able to do a lot more bugfixing to get things to work the way we wanted to.
Definitely. I feel very lucky to have been able to experience it all. I wonder if my personality would have led me to it anyway but I guess my personality was shaped by growing up through it. Would I be as curious otherwise?
You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅
Yeah, this is a thing. I know a lot of younger folks who don’t really have a clue about how to do something if they don’t have iOS version whatever or some other bespoke interface. (And no, I’m not a boomer)
CLI ultimately runs the world, and the younger folks who understand CLI are probably at a ratio roughly even to the other generations.
What’s a computer?
As a instructor of IT I can absolutely confirm. A lot of Gen Z have not grown up with computers as a tool. I have a class of around 20 students, and maybe 4-5 have any knowledge of the various compression archives. I have to give primers on the proper way to save various file types otherwise they’ll just create default.config.txt (6) and wonder why an install isn’t working.
I swear I saw a study that basically came to the conclusion that there is a distinct curve in technological literacy where younger generations are used to tech “just working” and not knowing how to navigate anything outside of app-based interface. Take all of this with a handful of salt bc I don’t have source on hand.
This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.
In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.
Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.
As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.
I thought you said zoomer parents and was about to get really mad and sad at the time.
I mean older Gen Z are 20-24. I’m a millennial and I was a dad at 23 haha. It’s early, but not unreasonably so.
To 26 actually. Gen Z starts in 1997.
Eh the borderline years are all subjective.
But yes. Mid twenties is a reasonable time to start having kids
Heh heh heh, I thought he said Boomer parents and I was wondering where the heck they got iPads
i think everyone can learn how to use new tech, its more a question if you still want to.
For example i dont feel the need to get into tiktok…but if tiktok existed 15 years ago i would have.
Here are still old people using CLI text based browsers on a dialup connettion who never felt the need to upgrade to a more visual way to browse the web…even if they could learn it.
At a certain age u just stop giving fucks about new things maybe.
Depends on the personality of the person.
I knew someone born in 1905 who was excited by personal computers and happily using email into her 100s.
Millenial here: No because we’re used to change and I’ll never be old!
Edit: Fuck, I’m old :( How the hell did this happen???
Seriously though, we’ve lived through a hell of a lot of change. Arguably more than other generations. I’ve gone from having a rotary phone to having the world’s knowledge in my pocket in 40 years. And we’ve mostly embraced it all along the way.
The only constant is change.
Even for us younger millenials, we saw the rise and fall of the early internet, the beginnings of social media, grew up with flash games in our browsers, and now we’ve got these Star Trek-like folding smartphones and checks notes smart sunglasses?
Like you, I’m happy to keep adapting. Hell I’ll go full cyborg if that becomes a decent option in my lifetime.
Speaking of having the world’s knowledge in your pocket, did you know you can download a local copy of Wikipedia? Check out Kiwix. English Wikipedia with images is only like 80GB. Something to read when you’ve got no signal.
