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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Technology
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My point is that when we learned to interact with technology like computers, we had to start at a much lower level, that naturally gave us a deeper understanding of the technology because it was required to use it. I learned the MSDOS command line when I was 6 years old, not because I wanted to learn about the technology, but because I wanted to play games on the computer. It just happened to give me a basic understanding about how a computer's file system works.
These days you don't have to worry about any of that, as technology is for the most part effortless to use and doesn't require any understanding below the surface. So naturally Gen Z people won't pick up the knowledge Millenials did, not because they're dumber, but because they don't have to.
It’s not that I don’t think this argument is compelling, I just think ultimately it’s a theory without any sources behind it and it’s up against a lot of equally compelling, competing theories. There are so many things to consider here. For instance: access to technology has rapidly expanded. When you and I were going on the Internet in 2003, we only did it with PCs and for limited windows every day. Many of us shared a family computer, for instance. So we had fewer vectors or opportunities to be scammed.
I could see this. For awhile in tech I found an advantage in understanding of the old issues with hardware like irq and memory as useful even after windows had papered over it all. That has fallen to the wayside as various cluster type of setups has become the norm and the individual host has become less important but it was surprising how much obsolete stuff was still sorta useful later. The halflife of tech information is short but it has a long tail.