So, just a short followup on the previous post, since it’s fun to make fun of teenagers – especially in my line of work – it’s just as interesting thinking about the ‘why’ of it all.
Nor do I think it takes much originality of thought to come up with a few reasonable hypotheses as to this frankly strange a foreign behaviour when faced with hi-tech objects such as computers, ESPECIALLY given that they are literally a generation born into and bathed in all this high-tech stuff.
But therein lies the catch, especially when I compare them to where I come from. While i’m hardly the standard by which anyone would – or should – measure tech-savvy, I nevertheless had a computer from an early age, before the Window95 era and even before the days of easily-accessible internet.
When i was their age and messing around with computers they were faaaaaar from perfect and even reliable. A computer, a program or your internet connexion and various websites not working were perfectly normal events that even formed a non-trivial part of the high-tech experience. And so, you learned patience, and more importantly you learned how to manipulate the system and tweak it to get what you needed. You had to learn to tinker and hack your way to make the thing work. NOTHING was perfect then.
And then came the 2000s and computer technology became much more of a consumer product, and thus greatly improved, everything got smoothed out and mostly because of Apple computers became perfectly functioning objects even for the biggest of neophytes – and esthetique to boot.
But this improvement and optimisation came at a price, computers became much more of a closed system, more expensive as well and more difficult in general to tinker with. The fact that they were not accessible to a wider public meant that a great number of people with little or no technical ease were using them. Computers were no longer for the geeks and the nerds.
By the time my current generation of students were born, the smart phone and more importantly the iPhone had been invented, so almost all of my student have grown up with a very different notion of a personal computer : smart phones, or tablets and maybe a few lucky ones with actual PC’s or laptops if they have grown up in a more tech-savvy environment.
For them, computers are a unitary object, there are no cables (other than for charging) there aren’t any buttons, or keyboards (other than virtual ones), you don’t really control much other than your screen brightness and sound volume, and if your device doesn’t work, well …. you go and buy a new one, since there isn’t much else you can do! You dont need to write code, or mess around with apps other than install or uninstall them, and things work perfectly fine … most of the time.
In that light, it’s not so strange or funny that when i tell them to turn on the computer they push the button on their monitor. Or that they press ‘F’ and ‘9’ when i tell them to press ‘F9’ to compile, they’ve never seen a function key on a virtual keyboard on their iPhones!
I can’t help feel a bit sad though. I mean, it is an inevitable part of how technology evolves. My dad was able to take apart and put back together any car engine (and dreamed of doing that with me), and outside of my own lack of interest in it when i was younger, by the time i got older cars were just too well-built and optimized for the average tinkerer to be able to do much with it. It’s the same with computers, or any technology once it matures. It just works, but we’re all the more dependent on it, the more it transforms into a magical black box of technology.
It’s the same with … any technology once it matures. It just works, but we’re all the more dependent on it, the more it transforms into a magical black box of technology.
And that is where things stand with this generation of youth. yea they’re the digital generation, yea they’ve grown up bathed in high-tech electronics, but they’ve never had to deal with it as anything other than a magical black box that just works. And specifically when it comes to personal computers, the more it’s become a wide-spread consumer product the more it’s become a minimalist easy-to-use interface, exchanging everything for the sake of intuitive and easy use.
I can’t help but feel like there’s something valuable lost in there somewhere, in the long run.
