It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers.
Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes need to free up memory by messing around with config.sys and autoexec.bat. Good times...
I'm seeing this right now, I grew up programming (started at 7), at 9 I was way more computer fluent than my 9 year old step-son is now.
I think it's simply that modern machines are (generally) so reliable that you never have to get under the hood to figure out what broke until you (rarely) do and then you have no conceptual framework for trying to resolve what is broken.
His trouble shooting process is handing it to me and telling me "it's not working".
I refuse to fix it unless he watches and pays attention to how I'm fixing it, slowly he's starting to understand that none of this stuff is magic.
I don't care if has no interest in computers generally but I think it's important that he realises the devices/technology he interacts with isn't just a magic black box.
He was interested in what I was programming the other day though so I told him we could build a website together as long as he chose the subject, wrote what he wanted to put on it and wrote the code with my supervision, inevitably it's going to be about Fortnite but I'll take whatever wins I can get.
Generally I'll ask answer his questions with questions, we had a discussion about IP addresses the other day (though he had know idea what an IP address was) because he was curious how one computer "talks" to another so I asked a bunch of questions "Assuming you had lots of computers how would you tell one from the other" "I'd number them" "Ok, so what if you wanted to replace a computer but keep talking to it as if it was the old computer?" "I'd make it so the numbers could be changed for each computer", "OK, so you have millions of computers with millions of numbers how would you know which number went with which computer?" "well...I'd name them but in a way that I could say this name belongs to this number", I was proud, he pretty much figured out DNS without knowing DNS was a thing.
So then I showed him the config panel for a web host and pointed out that his names and numbers where an actual thing.
> I think it's simply that modern machines are (generally) so reliable that you never have to get under the hood to figure out what broke until you (rarely) do and then you have no conceptual framework for trying to resolve what is broken.
You have the same problem with cars. When I was 18 I was able to disassemble and reassemble my car and basically fix anything which broke. I even replaced the bodywork one time after a crash.
Today nobody even changes their summer-/winter-tires on their own anymore, let alone changing oil or renewing breaks.
You could also say that the machines became so reliable and so complicated that most people don't need too look under the hood and if they need it's too complicated anyway.
I grew up learning programming at early age.
Things got more reliable, and more automatic too. Setting up a web page is easy, dynamic db apps are trivial now. In the pas you would have to do all that yourself
However, if you somehow get into new areas, it feels similar. Like smart home tools of today are very badic and requires a lot of troubleshooting.
In fact, it is much harder to tinker with technology than it used to be. Not only is it more complex, but phones are also locked down so you are not really able to control your own device, or it does at least require quite some effort to do so, and can't be done using the device itself. Both Apple and Google in practice discourage people from tinkering with the device.
It might be harder to tinker with The Device, but tinkering kids these days are not bereft of options. When I was a teenager I remember badly wanting a "386 single board computer" which I saw advertised in the pages of Popular Science for hundreds of dollars. Imagine the things I could do with a whole computer small enough to hold in one hand! It could breathe new life into my projects and bring my tinkering to a whole new level! Sadly this marvel was beyond my budget at the time but today you can buy dozens of such boards for a fraction of the price. Boards with a dizzying array of integrated peripherals teenage me wouldn't have even known what to do with. Today there are uncountable open source projects you can download immediately to run on these boards, whole sophisticated stacks which can be imported now and torn apart to be stitched back together tomorrow. A tech-interested teen today can buy devices with their pocket change that have more power and flexibility than any of the platforms I had access to as a kid.
I remember having a hard time searching for information when I was young, as it was pre-internet and I was reliant on my parents on driving me places like the library to access information.
Nowadays, if you want to learn the ins and outs of something, you can order books online or watch informative video tutorials made by people who have been in the tech field for a significant amount of time.
It's only harder if you make it harder and don't put any thought into it.
Desktop computers still exist, and you can still order the parts to make your own. You can even buy cool glass cases where the parts are exposed and all light up.
Raspberry pi are essentially free, and can be used for all kinds of interesting stuff. Do that.
See also Razer synapse, the El gato streamdeck, programmable keyboards, all of which still exist.
Sure, if you were part of the tiny fraction of kids who were actually tinkering with computers. Most weren't. I'm sure the overall level of technical competence is higher today.
I think it's just about desire and passion. I'm a computer programmer, recently writing zines that teach programming by creating art, and I was pretty sure my kids would be technically inclined. They aren't. They just don't have the same desire and that's okay.
we’re all outliers here. The majority of kids in the 90s were no more tech savvy than today’s median kid. Probably less. You’re likely in the 90th percentile for the hacker mindset - that most kids are less geeky than you are should not be a surprise.
I'd put the top more or less at the rise of Linux, the BSD's and similar systems. While fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT might have given people the impression that they were 'programming' their PC's in reality all they did was find the right incantations to get their games to work. Porting one of the free OS's to new hardware is at a different level from shoving some drivers in high memory to make room for Doom.
A bit of this lives on in porting e.g. newer versions of Android to hardware which has been left behind by the manufacturer without a shred of documentation or care. If and when one or more of the alternative mobile operating systems get a foothold this might open another avenue for this type of hacking.
> I'd put the top more or less at the rise of Linux, the BSD's and similar systems.
I'm not sure the two compare so well. Kids that fiddle with Linux do so out of curiosity. For the other kids, the closest you'll ever get to config file fiddling might be when they're forced to use Linux -- which could happen, for instance, when their techie parent refuses to have a Windows box or a Mac in the house.
By contrast, take any household with a Windows box and a few kids. The latter will want to play games on the former sooner or later.
Yup. There was a time I could write out a win.ini file from memory and understanding all the options. Today, doing the same on any platform would be impossible.
It's been many years. Computers have gotten far more complex and reliable. My uncle knew how to rebuild his car engine, I don't. Same thing.
A few years ago if you downloaded a web page you could repair it with Greasemonkey and user scripts. Now web pages are React or native apps and near impossible to tinker
When I was a kid, my dad changed the oil in our cars, replaced brakes and spark plugs, and if it broke down he could at least diagnose it if not fix it himself.
Now I'm grown up, and cars have changed a lot. I have a tesla, and the only thing I can really service on it myself is the washer fluid. But it's also more reliable and doesn't need constant tinkering.
This was what came to mind reading this. I was of the "tinker" generation with computers, which have changed a lot since then. More reliable, more user friendly. I don't expect my children will have the same relationship with them I did, just like I didn't have the same relationship with cars my parents did. But maybe they will be the tinker generation of something else...
Although I would like to think that the next generation will be renowned for the "tinkerers of something else that comes out", it is also true that industry and society has changed a lot in that regard. Back in your parents day, your dad was able to have a holistic view on his car and repair many parts also because it was more simple back then. And it was also possible to repair TVs, toasters, lawnmower and whatnot. This has just completely changed for many reasons. Things are becoming more complex and more "consumer-friendly". But in fact "consumer-friendly" nowadays feels more and more like keeping the user limited (or maybe even stupid) to never even try to ask questions/put the technology into perspective finding new use cases for him/herself or even fixing things for themselves (think about Apple policies...). So I do believe that for "tinkerers" to have a come-back a completely new era would first have to evolve again.
Indeed. Things become more consumer friendly, i.e. more general public friendly, but less power user friendly. This happened with cars (they have many electronic components that aren't as easy to repair as it was in the past, when everything was mechanic) and has been happening with computers for some time, regarding both software and hardware (walled gardens, dumbed-down operating systems with fewer and fewer configuration options[0], simplified UIs, etc).
[0]: I can only talk about Windows, which is what I use extensively. I noticed that there are many things that I could do in Windows 7 (sometimes using non-Microsoft tools, like Open Shell) and that are not possible any more in Windows 10.
Yeah, I wonder of "tinkering" isn't bound to diminish with technological progress. If things like cars and computers become more sophisticated over time, presumably that pushes them progressively beyond the abilities of laymen. (More optimistically, they may simply require less tinkering to begin with.)
Tinkering is encouraged by glitches or under-optimization really since there is a reward to improvement. It brings to mind Turning's bicycle - while needing to reattach the chain every 200 yards may make you more handy one that stays on wkrks far better.
Sorry but I don't buy the argument...or perhaps can't is more appropriate?
There are only two things that genuinely preclude owners from servicing their own vehicles (Tesla or otherwise): a lack of will, and vehicle manufacturers refusing to sell technical manuals[1] to anyone other than authorized service shops.
Sure technology has appreciably advanced in 30 years, but the fact that technical details and know-how are scarce commodities in the age of information is not a generational coincidence.
A major difference is that our relationship to risk has changed. For example, working on some parts of a Tesla or some parts of a hybrid would mean working with high-voltage equipment. Although I know some of the principles, I am hesitant to be my own electrician. I'm very cautious just doing a jump start.
Of course, this has always been the case, people just accepted (or didn't understand) the risks. The capacitors in an old TV could pack quite a charge. Working on a roof has its risks. Early chemistry kits let kids blow stuff up. Apparently it was accepted more, before.
I took OP's comment to mean that tinkering is largely unnecessary now. Previously with both cars and computers you needed to know how to tinker because things didn't work perfectly so often. In the 80s both your computer and your car would need servicing/troubleshooting more often than today. I never tinker with my car or laptop now simply because I never have the need.
Computers, for the majority of people, are now principally consumption devices, with some small amount of guided typing of tweets and chats (which I think I would argue is effectively consumption still, in much the way that I'd consider someone speaking on the telephone to be a consumer of that service).
I would not expect someone who watched a lot of movies to be good at making them; I would not expect someone who reads a lot of books to be a whizz when it comes to typesetting and printing; I would not expect someone who eats a lot of sandwiches to be competent at baking bread; I would not expect someone who watches Netflix and reads tweets to be good at configuring or programming the computer they're using to do it.
I have long thought the term 'digital native' is a sort of filter for people who are not actually technologists but avid consumers of mostly social platforms.
I (as a computer scientist) have never heard people actually working in tech refer to themselves as that.
It's a term and concept that came out of essentially sociology writing by a number of different people in the late 90s and early 2000s.
As the linked article suggests though, it's not clear it's a particularly useful term. The digital immigrants are often more tech savvy in at least many respects than the natives because they once had to be. And most of the people I work with in tech have had absolutely no problem fully incorporating the rideshare, social media, video/ music streaming, and mapping apps into their everyday lives even though many first encountered them as adults.
Are there age-based differences in media consumption etc.? Sure. But that's much more about generational preferences and habits than having grown up before the Web.
It is about ability to use as opposed to ability to design and repair. Those are separate skills and it is possible for a shocking degree of range.
A "digital native" could set up a projector easily while being clueless to the underlying principles beyond "must be plugged in and this connected to this". The fact use is so common compared to design makes it stand out more - especially since it is easy for them.
Meanwhile an electrical engineering professor may be capable of designing and diagnosing it and know about all of the nasty design pitfalls like "if you try to make the cache too low impedience for low latency it can lose its DRAM state" or "wired this way will add noise to your analog signal" but have trouble operating the menu or unable to use a tablet with the ease of a toddler.
It is possible for both to learn the other side of course.
It's a useful term that I like to use when politicians propose something stupid or harmful that is related to digital technology. It's fitting because it sometimes seems that they want to push their visions of how the internet should work on others. A good example is the current copyright reform of the EU.
I always assumed it was coined by a manager somewhere who was impressed by his teenage intern's ability to set up his email. There are a lot of people who aren't just not technical but actively phobic of computers, I think 'digital native' is more like knowing how to drive than knowing how to fix a car.
The people who are "digitally superior" as those who take an active interest in learning the tech. They are young or old, and constitute only a small percentage of the population.
This is something that I realized a couple of decades back, when my generation was supposedly the computer savvy one, after meeting a man in his sixties. While teaching computer programming to children I noticed that people tended to correlate screen time with technical ability, even when the child was a passive consumer. When I talk to children and youth today, I recognize similarities between the ones that I hold technical coversations with and my peers while I was growing up. I would not be surprised if the proportion of youth engaged with technology remains relatively stable from generation to generation.
I guess the first generation of digital natives (and those older who caught up a bit later in life) will remain the only one who had to touch relatively low level stuff (things as simple as a tree of folders and file endings).
I remember when one of the markers of being a technical person was using the word directory vs the word folder.
It seems arbitrary but I think the reason is that non technical users always feel more comfortable sitting at the exact level of abstraction of the interface without translating it into what it actually is, in computing terms. A folder is something you recognise, you put files in it, there's even an icon that looks like a folder - a file extension is the 'type' of the file and controls the progam that will open it. That's all you need to know.
I'm not sure those non technical users have got less technical with time, I just think the abstraction has moved up a level from the OS and file storage being something they have to think about regularly, to now apps mostly just handling storage and files for you and presenting the data through their interface (i.e. The concept of a file being separate from the app that uses it is going away somewhat).
The people that were dealing with folders and file extensions may seem now in retrospect to be more low level, but they weren't. That was just the interface/abstraction available to them at the time. I don't think they had a better model of what was going on underneath than someone today who just taps app icons etc.
I think language is not the best indicator, because I think one should obey the masses to keep communication efficiently, even if it hurts a bit sometimes. (drone = quadcopter, autonomous quadcopter = autonomous drone or something, app = mobile app, AI = ML/DL/if)
In my house, Mom and Dad are scientists, and quite tech savvy in our respective fields, including digital technology supporting our work. I also happen to have taken up programming and electronics as hobbies starting around 1981.
So I'm a tech savvy parent. Yet I've noticed some age differences. My kids are "quicker" at picking things up. They can notice a tiny detail on a big screen, and are more likely to recognize and remember the meaning of an icon, whereas I have to hover over it with my mouse pointer and hope for a tool tip to pop up.
So things like GUIs will seem more intuitive to them, when the real advantage is their ability to quickly distinguish a bunch of tiny abstract symbols.
Readit News
Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes need to free up memory by messing around with config.sys and autoexec.bat. Good times...
I think it's simply that modern machines are (generally) so reliable that you never have to get under the hood to figure out what broke until you (rarely) do and then you have no conceptual framework for trying to resolve what is broken.
His trouble shooting process is handing it to me and telling me "it's not working".
I refuse to fix it unless he watches and pays attention to how I'm fixing it, slowly he's starting to understand that none of this stuff is magic.
I don't care if has no interest in computers generally but I think it's important that he realises the devices/technology he interacts with isn't just a magic black box.
He was interested in what I was programming the other day though so I told him we could build a website together as long as he chose the subject, wrote what he wanted to put on it and wrote the code with my supervision, inevitably it's going to be about Fortnite but I'll take whatever wins I can get.
Generally I'll ask answer his questions with questions, we had a discussion about IP addresses the other day (though he had know idea what an IP address was) because he was curious how one computer "talks" to another so I asked a bunch of questions "Assuming you had lots of computers how would you tell one from the other" "I'd number them" "Ok, so what if you wanted to replace a computer but keep talking to it as if it was the old computer?" "I'd make it so the numbers could be changed for each computer", "OK, so you have millions of computers with millions of numbers how would you know which number went with which computer?" "well...I'd name them but in a way that I could say this name belongs to this number", I was proud, he pretty much figured out DNS without knowing DNS was a thing.
So then I showed him the config panel for a web host and pointed out that his names and numbers where an actual thing.
You have the same problem with cars. When I was 18 I was able to disassemble and reassemble my car and basically fix anything which broke. I even replaced the bodywork one time after a crash.
Today nobody even changes their summer-/winter-tires on their own anymore, let alone changing oil or renewing breaks.
You could also say that the machines became so reliable and so complicated that most people don't need too look under the hood and if they need it's too complicated anyway.
https://github.com/qlaffont/fortnite-api
However, if you somehow get into new areas, it feels similar. Like smart home tools of today are very badic and requires a lot of troubleshooting.
I remember having a hard time searching for information when I was young, as it was pre-internet and I was reliant on my parents on driving me places like the library to access information.
Nowadays, if you want to learn the ins and outs of something, you can order books online or watch informative video tutorials made by people who have been in the tech field for a significant amount of time.
Desktop computers still exist, and you can still order the parts to make your own. You can even buy cool glass cases where the parts are exposed and all light up.
Raspberry pi are essentially free, and can be used for all kinds of interesting stuff. Do that.
See also Razer synapse, the El gato streamdeck, programmable keyboards, all of which still exist.
Phones are not the only computers.
My zines, if you're interested.
https://gumroad.com/l/splashofcode/hn
A bit of this lives on in porting e.g. newer versions of Android to hardware which has been left behind by the manufacturer without a shred of documentation or care. If and when one or more of the alternative mobile operating systems get a foothold this might open another avenue for this type of hacking.
I'm not sure the two compare so well. Kids that fiddle with Linux do so out of curiosity. For the other kids, the closest you'll ever get to config file fiddling might be when they're forced to use Linux -- which could happen, for instance, when their techie parent refuses to have a Windows box or a Mac in the house.
By contrast, take any household with a Windows box and a few kids. The latter will want to play games on the former sooner or later.
Also miss messing around hexadecimal editors to cheat in games.
It's been many years. Computers have gotten far more complex and reliable. My uncle knew how to rebuild his car engine, I don't. Same thing.
Deleted Comment
Now I'm grown up, and cars have changed a lot. I have a tesla, and the only thing I can really service on it myself is the washer fluid. But it's also more reliable and doesn't need constant tinkering.
This was what came to mind reading this. I was of the "tinker" generation with computers, which have changed a lot since then. More reliable, more user friendly. I don't expect my children will have the same relationship with them I did, just like I didn't have the same relationship with cars my parents did. But maybe they will be the tinker generation of something else...
[0]: I can only talk about Windows, which is what I use extensively. I noticed that there are many things that I could do in Windows 7 (sometimes using non-Microsoft tools, like Open Shell) and that are not possible any more in Windows 10.
There are only two things that genuinely preclude owners from servicing their own vehicles (Tesla or otherwise): a lack of will, and vehicle manufacturers refusing to sell technical manuals[1] to anyone other than authorized service shops.
Sure technology has appreciably advanced in 30 years, but the fact that technical details and know-how are scarce commodities in the age of information is not a generational coincidence.
[1] https://www.helminc.com
Of course, this has always been the case, people just accepted (or didn't understand) the risks. The capacitors in an old TV could pack quite a charge. Working on a roof has its risks. Early chemistry kits let kids blow stuff up. Apparently it was accepted more, before.
Computers, for the majority of people, are now principally consumption devices, with some small amount of guided typing of tweets and chats (which I think I would argue is effectively consumption still, in much the way that I'd consider someone speaking on the telephone to be a consumer of that service).
I would not expect someone who watched a lot of movies to be good at making them; I would not expect someone who reads a lot of books to be a whizz when it comes to typesetting and printing; I would not expect someone who eats a lot of sandwiches to be competent at baking bread; I would not expect someone who watches Netflix and reads tweets to be good at configuring or programming the computer they're using to do it.
I (as a computer scientist) have never heard people actually working in tech refer to themselves as that.
As the linked article suggests though, it's not clear it's a particularly useful term. The digital immigrants are often more tech savvy in at least many respects than the natives because they once had to be. And most of the people I work with in tech have had absolutely no problem fully incorporating the rideshare, social media, video/ music streaming, and mapping apps into their everyday lives even though many first encountered them as adults.
Are there age-based differences in media consumption etc.? Sure. But that's much more about generational preferences and habits than having grown up before the Web.
Deleted Comment
Meanwhile an electrical engineering professor may be capable of designing and diagnosing it and know about all of the nasty design pitfalls like "if you try to make the cache too low impedience for low latency it can lose its DRAM state" or "wired this way will add noise to your analog signal" but have trouble operating the menu or unable to use a tablet with the ease of a toddler.
It is possible for both to learn the other side of course.
It seems arbitrary but I think the reason is that non technical users always feel more comfortable sitting at the exact level of abstraction of the interface without translating it into what it actually is, in computing terms. A folder is something you recognise, you put files in it, there's even an icon that looks like a folder - a file extension is the 'type' of the file and controls the progam that will open it. That's all you need to know.
I'm not sure those non technical users have got less technical with time, I just think the abstraction has moved up a level from the OS and file storage being something they have to think about regularly, to now apps mostly just handling storage and files for you and presenting the data through their interface (i.e. The concept of a file being separate from the app that uses it is going away somewhat).
The people that were dealing with folders and file extensions may seem now in retrospect to be more low level, but they weren't. That was just the interface/abstraction available to them at the time. I don't think they had a better model of what was going on underneath than someone today who just taps app icons etc.
So I'm a tech savvy parent. Yet I've noticed some age differences. My kids are "quicker" at picking things up. They can notice a tiny detail on a big screen, and are more likely to recognize and remember the meaning of an icon, whereas I have to hover over it with my mouse pointer and hope for a tool tip to pop up.
So things like GUIs will seem more intuitive to them, when the real advantage is their ability to quickly distinguish a bunch of tiny abstract symbols.