this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I’m having a very hard time accepting that your 60 year old parents, after seeing Linux, said something along the lines of “What was windows doing for us?”
I teach adults 40-80 on how to use Windows products. I’ve taught over 5,000 people this year so far. The vast majority didn’t even understand the concept of browser tabs or copy/paste. These are people well into their professions in corporate office jobs. They don’t even know what an operating system is.
Today's 40 year olds graduated in the high school class of 2002...there are people from that era that can't copy/paste? For real?
I expect someone in their 40s to not know copy and paste. The more savvy that I have worked with/taught knew they could right click and then click “copy” from the drop down list. Ctrl+c blew some peoples minds when I showed it.
People who are good with tech VASTLY overestimate the general public’s tech literacy. But don’t take my word for it, take this study’s word: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
As a Gen X member who is 50 yrs old, a grandparent of two Grand kids, I never touched a computer until I was 12 years old (1986), this, I think gave me a head start into the computer world with an old Radio Shack Color Computer II (hooked up to my TV) with a Tape Drive to load programs with. With some of the older Gen X group starting to reach retirement age, I think we will probably have a larger portion of the population more adapted to computer than the Boomers before us. That's not to say that during the 80's and 90's everyone was into computers though. The important thing was that schools had Timex Sinclair computers and mostly Apple II computers which were the workhorses even into my high school years in the early 90's, so exposure to computer basics such as copy/paste and Word processing were certainly well know then!
I say all of this to mention that while right now, some of the older generation generally knows how to copy/paste, isn't scared of breaking the computer and pretty much get a long fine with them. I'm more skilled than my peers in a lot of areas but that's because I've used them non stop for so long and the others used them only in school but never saw the value until around Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
I believe there will be a shift of more computer literacy as the Millennials and Gen Z's reach my age and older. The writers then may say that compared to the previous generation (ours), that they are miles ahead in their skills and literacy. Even my Grand kids are growing up with exposure to tablets and phones (VERY SPARINGLY), but also live out in the rural country so are getting great life exposure to great outdoors. :) (Ages 2 and 6). One can only dare to imagine what technology we may have 40-50 years from now when they reach my age range.
Yeah but...I mean...wow. I graduated HS class of 2003 and I can't remember anyone handing in a hand-written paper in any of the 4 years.
How do people be around this stuff for half their life and not know basic things like Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
We must live in entirely different realities then. I'm 50, and I find myself being the goto guy for anything tech for anyone between 15 and 40 in my environment. It just so happens that most tech savvy people in my environment are between 45 and 65 years old.
What country is this?
What, in 2024, makes you think anyone's environment is relegated to any one country? But if you must know, it's a large part of the US, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Mozambique, and about 15 other countries. There are some very technically skilled folks between 25 - 35 years old, but the percentage of that group pales in comparison.
You might be misunderstanding what I’m saying. I haven’t said that there aren’t any in the 40+ crowd that are tech savvy, just the overwhelming majority arent.
It’s not me who’s just spouting this, I’m paraphrasing a study that was done that found these results:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
I did read the study before responding. You are talking about the abilities for computer use for age ranges. The study talks about the range between 16 and 65 years old, yet does not segregate into shorter age ranges, it generalizes in that broad range. However, you do mention smaller age ranges, and I countered that, in my experience, your assessment is inaccurate.
I said we live in different realities because:
I'll go even further. My kids (9 and 11 years old) are better trained to use anything thrown at them regardless of UX, because I take the time to take them through logic and common sense exercises with different systems regularly, which is way more than can be said about the upcoming generation. Kids today are being taught to "do this always" for any step instead of pushing them to figure out how to work out stuff. This creates a train of thought that's detrimental to them because their brains will get use to "this is how it's done", effectively blocking the "and what happens if I do this instead?". Does that make sense?
However, people from my generation, who started becoming adults when computers (regardless of OS or brand/manufacturer) were just becoming mainstream in households and workplaces, we had to adapt to how things worked as they evolved with little to no help. This is what allowed us to still be able to keep up with anything that shows up new, all the evolution of software and hardware over the years, and the new technologies.
I am all too aware that there are some seriously skilled and smart younger individuals out there. These are curious and risk-taking people that are always hungry for knowledge. I know quite a few people like this, but this, unfortunately, is not the norm, again in my experience. Similarly, there's a bunch of people from my generation that just learned the basics to be able to go about their day, and never learned how to change a freaking DNS address in their device.
Having said that, my response to your original comment remains, based on my first hand experience on how skills across age ranges differ in a generalized context over many different countries and cultures.
You keep referencing your own personal tech adeptness as some sort of gotcha against what the study found. This is exactly what they say. People well-versed in tech greatly overestimate the general public’s tech abilities.
You are in your own bubble. Your kids are good at tech because YOU are good at tech. Just peruse through your posting history. You’re posting about hacker conferences and running local Joplin services. You are NOT the average tech consumer. Congratulations on being surrounded by like minded peers. You are not the average.
The findings of the study went absolutely over your head. You’re clearly very tied to your personal experience and cannot see outside of it so any more interaction or discussion would be a waste of both of our times. Take care.
You're correct, the older I get, the less I care about things outside my circle, but the fact remains, that study you are pushing does not segregate the age range. They talk about the broader 16-65 years old, and you reference the segregation based on your personal experience teaching those age ranges you point out.
Now, out of curiosity, how is that different from what I'm doing?
You may be right, someone here is arguing for the sake of it.
You have a great day too, buddy.
I've met people who don't know what a URL is.
The kind of people that google "facebook" when they want to visit facebook.
Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.
This is why it's becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they're trying to access
I do not use Google products or use FB or most social media and family looks at me as if I am from Mars. Some do not even know what Linux even is. If I installed it on their machine and didn't tell them what it was, they would just think it is "another" Windows.
Once a non-tech guy asked how I find stuff if I did not use Google Search. Another thought that I used Terminal, not because I need it but because I wanted to look Retro.
To plenty computers or tech in general are not their thing.
I think you're overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you'll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.
While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it's the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.
There's a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they've seen that things aren't so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.
Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.