The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
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I started noticing this 10 years ago. To me, this isn't some new phenomenon. However, it feels even worse now than it did back then.
The number one thing that makes me go JackieChanWTF.jpg is when people don't even know how to navigate through directories.
I post this a lot but it’s true. Younger people definitely have problems with this.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
My aunt is a teacher and I remember when she started talking about how her school was getting Chromebooks I thought that wasn’t going to be good for learning how to use “real” computers. Same with phones and tablets. Everything is too abstracted away from the user so they never have to know what a directory is.
Google is buying the generation Apple is close to and Microsoft more or less failed to catch.
It's like a vicious cycle:
- People are tech illiterate
- Tech companies design things for the lowest common denominator.
- People don't need to learn anything new and become even more tech illiterate
AI is going to make it so much worse. You'll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone.
You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone
...Those won't go away, right? People aren't going to start talking on the bus for their phones to auto-type the text messages they want to send through chat, right...?
Yeah that's fair.. Bad example :p
You mean the twenty to thirty somethings that have come along. They have one folder with all their stuff in it and sometimes spend quite some time just looking for a file because they are unwilling to organize it or even sort it by file type.
I'm a 20-30 something (26) and, generally, I think it's younger people who are starting to struggle with this (<21 maybe?). All of my classmates seemed to be OK at handling files. From what I saw in highschool and college it was more to do with computer hygiene than incapability.
I am 22 and yeah I have some friends and some younger relatives that don't know how to do that. It's because they grew up with smartphones. I think we were one of the last generations (at least where I live) that smartphones only became prevalent after we were teenagers so using a computer for most things was still something we learned.