This seems silly. Lots of kids never learned about computers even when they were available. A chromebook was just an electronic school aid. If the interest was in computers they would learn about computers.
I think this is a fairly dumb take. In the schools that I saw that had chromebooks a kid might be taking English, Math, AND computing. It really was up to the school (and parents) to introduce computing, not the machine that was the general replacement for books.
Anecdotally: a high school near us requires every student to have a computer. They do not hand out chromebooks and the requirement specs are a higher end Mac or PC laptop that the kids are required to bring to classes. These kids use blender, maya 3d, office suite, video and music editing software for example. They absolutely do not know any more about computers then chromebook kids (with a few exceptions). Having access to a computer doesnt magically make them know about how computers work.
The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It’s also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
Probably a great way to get them comfortable with pc hardware too - want that new GPU? Here you go. Install it, you just get the one so be careful and learn how to do it right.
I probably wouldn’t let my son install a GPU until he’s a bit older just because of the cost lol but it is simple enough for a teenager to do, I think.
I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let’s plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
That’s awesome, I love hearing stories like this. I was lucky to have access to a PC since I was about 8 years old and computer literacy is probably the most useful skill I have. Nothing teaches PC literacy better than pirating software with complex readmes lol or having to fix the family computer because you infected it with a virus. Had me stressing, looking at the task manager and searching for the origins of every .exe to find the culprit
Ya know they make a valid point. Part of the learning experience growing up and going to school in the 90s and early 00s was figuring out how to bypass the school’s restrictions with proxies, or how to load Quake 2 onto every computer in the district so we could sneak and have little impromptu LAN parties, etc. Hell, one of us got caught hacking into the student records portal to change his grades and after he graduated they hired the kid to work in the IT department. He works for a local ISP now.
Nowadays they don’t know how to use a computer, they just know how to click icons and get apps from sanctioned app stores.
I still did that in the 2010s tbh. Though I was a dying breed admittedly
I don’t know where people get this idea from. Kids are still hacking their school computers, just as much as we were back in the 90s. If anything, kids are more knowledgeable on bypassing these systems now than we were then; ask any school’s IT admin, kids are doing wild shit with their computers and tablets.
Don’t forget, people like you and I weren’t “normal kids”. We were a very stark minority. That’s still the case with today’s kids. I think you’re just not seeing it because you either don’t have children in your life that you are in regular communication with, or aren’t present on the social platforms today’s kids are on.
And at the same time large sections of them are as tech illiterate as the boomers. There is a huge divide between the ones hacking everything and those that have only ever used an iPad or similar cloud-based devices and don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works. And they sit right next to each other at school day after day in the same general classes.
How many kids are you exposed to? I think you’ve made up quite a story with a giant brush here.
I don’t work with kids children, but that’s not what I claimed either, I was talking about Zoomers being as tech illiterate as the Boomers. I work frontline IT support, so everyone down to those right out of high school and entering the workforce at a business with locations statewide. So firmly working with Gen Z entering the workforce now and through the last decade. Current Zoomer ages range from about 13-28, I’d say that’s enough time and breadth to have a relatively decent sample size for an unscientific comparison like this.
I’ve managed MSP teams supporting 1000 ish users.
You’re just letting biases affect your perception. The vast majority of adults use osx and Windows just fine.
don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works.
Why would they, though? The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge, just as we didn’t need the knowledge of how punchcards worked (although I think there are a few Lemmings around here who may actually be old enough to qualify). We needed to know how folders work, because that was the norm during our upbringing, but that’s no longer the case.
We didn’t stick to our predecessors’ methodologies. Neither will our successors. They’ll evolve and grow beyond the technology and the norms that we’re familiar with, just as we did with the generation before us.
The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge.
That’s just factually not true for anyone that works in a medium to large company. Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled. The only people at any of our business locations that don’t need to know how that works are the environmental services and food and beverage employees. The rest of the employees absolutely use basic knowledge like that every single day. And not needing that definitely doesn’t apply to any IT adjacent profession, which have expanded dramatically since I was in school.
Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled.
Eh, kinda of, but modern enterprise document storage is largely evolving away from it for general business users. I say this as an IT professional that has been an active consumer of the evolution over the last 25 years. Yes, SMB/CIFs/NFS shares still exist in the corporate enterprise, but modern enterprise systems are doing document storage more in Sharepoint, Google Drive, or even object form (storage buckets). All of these last three don’t use a traditional file system where folder (directory really) navigation is a required skill.
This is especially true with Google drive. Yes, there are folders, but its equally likely that the file you need isn’t even in your folders because its been shared to you by another user from one of their folders. Links, bookmarks, and free text file searches are often more useful for locating document that navigating a traditional directory tree. This is somewhat true in Sharepoint too.
Corporate employee here, can confirm. Now you just turn on auto save and forget about it.
Edit: This came off intensely aggressive. Sorry.
I’m looking down the barrel of a massive project to shift all of our departments away from network shares to SharePoint. Simultaneously, my team is going to stop supporting “special” permissioned sub-folders, like share/Facilities/Managers/ so people can’t see their co-worker’s yearly review. Each Sharepoint site’s “owner” (read, department manager) will be responsible for access management in their own site.
Also, knowing some of these departments, they will absolutely run up against the limit on amount of files in a single Sharepoint site. My boss seems to refuse to believe that’s possible.
This is going to be such a clusterfuck. I am afraid.
Original comment:
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
I can’t speak to Google Drive, as I’ve only used that minorly as an end user. Object based storage is an entirely different use case than document/data organization.
File names and tags with shit chucked in what is effectively a root folder are not adequate for most companies’ data organization and “securing so only the right people have access” needs.
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
Users are horrible at file management, but you know this part already. When your users have fully evolved away from SMB/NFS shares to Google Drive or Sharepoint it works like this:
User1: “Can you update the financials for your project for this quarter in the file QuarterReporter?”
User2: “Yeah absolutely, where is QuaterReporter?”
User1: “Its in the Reports folder, but theres a few version of it. Don’t use QuaterReporterV1. Use QuaterReporterV1-restored_02-02-23”. Thats one we maintain with current data in it. Here’s the link to the file."
User2: “Uhh, I clicked on that link but don’t have access to it. Can you grant it?”
User1: “Oh sure, let me add you to the doc. There, try it now”
User2: “Yep, that worked. Okay do you just need the financials update one time or would you like me to do that for each quarter ongoing?”
User1: “Ongoing please”
User2: “Okay, I’ll bookmark this file then and use it again in 3 months. Hey, my financials only cover the top of the project, do you want the tactical detail too?”
User1: “I do actually, yes.”
User2: “Okay add, Jim Smith to the doc, and I’ll forward the link you gave of the file to him.”So yes, the file still lives in a folder somewhere, users often don’t even have the right permissions to maintain the folder structure properly and they just route around that by ignoring it and using links, bookmarks, and email forwards of links.
So kids with iphones just download every photo, video, and song they have to one folder and have no way to sort it?
Basically, yeah. Chronological sorting is good enough for most people. As long as you remember when you took the photo, you can find it easily.
Jesus that sounds horrendous. I do the same thing with my phone camera out of laziness, and that’s bad enough. I can’t imagine every file I have being accessible based on my memory of timeline.
I do this on purpose. I much much prefer chronological sorting and metadata search than actually organising files as long as it’s faster and works correctly.
Even with actually manually organized file storage ultimately I just end up with folders more based on chronology than anything else.
The way I see it - the only actually practical reason to have folders is if there is logic applied to the files, like e.g. all files in folder X get mounted as a docker volume in program Y or backed up to server Z etc etc.
Beyond that all I care about is that my files are actually appropriately indexed and accessible quickly on-demand exactly when I want and how I want both at work and at home.
Same way how I don’t actually go to /bin/ and list the dir and find the program, I hit Win+D in i3 and just type in what I want to run and get the program.
My one pet peeve though is when devs use this to organise an app’s files like a tornado organizes a goddamn county fair, my ~/ is chock-full of random dotfiles and dotfolders of dotfiles without clear purpose or use and the state of C:\Users\whatever is a lovecraftian horror once you had the same general use Windows install for a few years, god forbid making sense of AppData and whatnot. And it gets so much worse with distro standards evolving to conf.d folders rather than one dotfile per program/daemon which just makes it hard to get an accurate full picture of things.
Fucking Kali of all things is such a bitch for adding
splashto boot prams outside of /etc/default/grub in its goddamn theme script of all places. I use this OS for pentesting practice/learning (and gaming). I do not want fancy boot. I do not want arbitrary, potentially crippling boot options silently added to my grub in files that have no business doing so or really even being a default inclusion no matter how ‘pretty’ and ‘modern’ the result. I am trying to learn deobfuscating JS, not my own goddamn configs, not that the latter isn’t useful but it feels hostile and anti-human to sacrifice simplicity for elegance.
Basically this. None of our parents knew we were dumpster diving telephone exchanges or trying to figure out gaining root on server systems. Today’s underground is equally obfuscated by the “don’t tell the grown ups” as we were.
deleted by creator
Who cares about any of that? I didn’t see a single problem.
This has very little to do with Chromebooks. It’s happening in countries where they are rare as well. The main cause is the fact that things for the most part just… work now. The experience on PCs and especially smartphones has become so streamlined that it doesn’t require that much knowledge to be able to use them at a sufficient level. Plus smartphones have become the default device for most people so they almost never have to interact with stuff like the file system or anything complex. Most people don’t care about understanding how computers work more than what they need them for, and that’s fine.
It’s happening in countries where they are rare as well.
This 👆 OOP sounds like US defaultism.
Boomers and Gen X often handed tech problems to their kids, assuming young people just get it. That mindset stuck—tech as an innate skill, not something learned.
Millennials did learn, but by messing around—customizing MySpace, bypassing school filters, using forums. We had to figure it out. Now, everything’s simplified and locked down. Because we’re the ones making a lot of the tech and we’ve figured it out for them. You don’t need to understand the tech we make to use it.
The problem? Older generations think kids will “just get it,” like we did. But no one’s teaching them. We’re giving them phones and tablets, not skills or understanding. We assume either they just get it, or that they’re tinkering around like “we” did.
that’s the problem but the blame can also be squarely placed on us Millennials. Like you said when we were younger and older people had tech issues they’d hand it to us assuming we “get it” but we didn’t. we had to learn it by teaching ourselves. We taught ourselves how to write html, css, etc via Geocities and Myspace. We taught ourselves how to build computers or learned via tv shows like The Screensavers or Call for Help or just by reading PC magazines. AND THEN we decided since we taught ourselves all these solutions and what have you that we’d make it easier for future generations. We developed apps and tools that “just work” no tinkering needed, no customization needed, those are predefined settings. And we’re not teaching kids, we’re providing them with OUR solutions. Like you said we assume they “just get it” because we had to just get it. We didn’t have a choice. If we wanted a custom internet or tech experience we had to do it ourselves.
Today those options are provided because we provided it for them. They don’t need to be as tech literate as we had to be because we made things easier for them.
How old do you think GenX is?! We had the first home computers, learned the PC as it hit the market.
Not OP, but wanted to chime in.
I get the sentiment Some Gen Xers did grow up with home computers. However, I suspect those people are outliers due to both the cost and general user friendlyness. In the late 90s it seemed like everyone had a home computer, even the normies. This let their kids grow up messing around
It almost seems like we’re heading back in this direction, where normies have moved on to phones and tablets because they “just work”. I don’t think the average kid will grow up as immersed in computers as I did unless their parents are intentionally about making that introduction. I bought my kid a used Thinkpad for Christmas last year. Most of his peers have tablets or just stick to their smartphone.
You didnt learn anything hitting the market unless you were well off, significantly.
Not true at all. Most of my friends had less money than we did and we all had a home computer. Obviously not $4,000 IBMs, but we had Atari, VIC-20, TI, Commodore 64, etc. The rich kid had an Apple ][.
Computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 weren’t that expensive.
Granted, the original IBM PC was pricy, but it was also targeted at business users.
I was thinking of my own experiences, but that’s why I said “often.” I personally find that older people who use tech are honestly much better than other generations when it comes to it. My grandma has been into tech from the jump and she blows my mom out of the water when it comes to tech skill. But I find that the ones who were not interested have a hard time catching up. Mostly because it all happened so fast
I’ve found that with my “pre gen x” (born in the 60s, does that make her a boomer?) mother, she seems to have really bought in to all the old “computers make everything easy!” marketing, so when whatever she wants to do isn’t she just kind of gives up. Also ties into her not understanding the value of my career (sysadmin).
To her, computers aren’t complex tools that may take some skills and training to utilize properly, they’re “press the button to make it do exactly what I want” and when that doesn’t work she gets very frustrated.
That, plus she has had just enough exposure to computers in the 90s that she still on some level sees them as very easy to irreperably break expensive luxury items, so when she is rarely willing to work for it then she’s afraid to poke around in menus because she thinks she could break it permanently.
And to be fair, if you don’t set up your laptop using “cattle, not pets” strategies, it can be easy to get four levels deep in a menu and tweak some shit that fucks up an entire program. Then your option is to remember what you did to revert it, or just blow the damn thing out and reinstall (if it actually clears settings on uninstall, not a given).
The Chromebook does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a cheap notebook which runs Chrome. And it’s fairly competent at that task. It’s exactly as advertised. The problem only arises when people think that the ability to use a Chromebook is acceptable as a substitute for the ability to use a normal computer.
It’s this and it’s not. Chromebooks don’t give kids anywhere to explore outside of chrome and handheld devices provide a controlled environment. A lot of kids (and adults!) are operating with a tablet in place of a computer because the most intensive thing they need to do if they’re not gaming is word processing. It’s big tech overall and the internet shrinking down into like 3 companies.
As someone who lives and works online. I wish.
It seems super consolidated, right up until you start listing the “handful” of big vendors that run the Internet… You get passed the first 3 or 4 big players and end up with a long list of “of yeah, these guys too”…
Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, CloudFlare, valve (and every other game publisher), Netflix, PayPal, Uber, Spotify, Apple, Yahoo (yes, they still exist), xitter, Rackspace, zoom, Dropbox, Etsy, Pinterest…
The list is super long.
And that’s just companies that people would have heard of. The companies that actually make the Internet work is a much longer list, and GoDaddy plays a surprisingly large role as well. There’s also entire business sectors that most people aren’t aware of, for network transit services, and interconnects.
It’s a pretty deep topic.
I completely agree. I think people mean more like in the scope of basic tasks kids aren’t meant to be doing on computers in school. That’s been basically wrangled into Google and Amazon at this point with a handful outlying things. If you’re doing anything else though, the scope definitely broadens, and you can make it broaden more if you try to eliminate the bigger guys.
At the school I was at, it wasn’t just that it’s a Chromebook, but they also lock the Chromebooks down. You can’t use the Linux sandbox feature or the android features, and a proxy is enforced preventing you from going to any websites they deem distracting.
Finally someone who is sane & smart
This is an incredibly dumb take. Tech isn’t one dimensional and there isn’t a “right” path to tech literacy. I grew up on Windows and I learned a lot of what I know by exploring my laptops and learning new things out of necessity. I ended majoring in CS in working in tech. My sister, who’s 5 years younger than me, had Chromebooks growing up both at home and at school, yet she’s also a very proficient CS major. Using Chromebooks doesn’t show that someone is bad at tech, that’s just a baseless assumption.
Chromebooks are just another branch of tech, and there’s really nothing wrong with them. They’re basically Android tablets in laptop form. Google giving them to schools at a deeply discounted price is not a bad thing. Without them, many schools wouldn’t have any sort of tech for their kids to work with. Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools that can enable teachers to incorporate material from the internet into their lessons and help streamline their work.
Hating on things for the sake of hating on them is just lazy and counterproductive. There’s a lot to criticize Google for, Chromebooks are not one of them.
Not Android, Linux. I was trying to figure out why there are so few Android tablets and read that Google didn’t have complete control with Android. That’s why Samsung and HTC and others put their own overlay on it. They didn’t want that for laptops/bigger devices, so for ChromeOS they locked it down and told the hardware manufacturers “no, it’s ChromeOS. You can’t fiddle with it. If you want to make Chromebooks, these are the minimum specs and this is the keyboard you must use. If not, fuck off.”
These kind of takes have the usual format of “anything a company does is bad” and is profit driven. They forget that there is something called marketing and optics behind it.
Being a CS major (even a good one) isn’t a solid measure of tech literacy. CS still suffers from the “do this arbitrary thing so you can get credit”; along with other majors and American schools at large.
Actually I’ve seen first hand the dumbing down of curriculum in my CS program via my younger peers’ stories, and helping them with their coursework. And it’s 100% due to low tech literacy.
Edit: grammar.
Like this wasn’t Apple’s fault. Remember that ad where the kid doesn’t know what a “computer” was?
Apple famously worked very hard to put iMacs into elementary schools. Back before laptops were cheap and schools still had “computer labs.”
To be fair, back when the first computer labs came around in schools, the only thing really available was the Apple II. Nothing else was terribly useful for teaching how to use a computer. It was only later in the 80s that the IBM PC came around and took over for a while.
When I was in school they had Apple II’s and pretended using LOGO was learning how to use a computer. Chromebooks are closer to real world computer usage than we’ve typically had, barring whatever ten-to-fifteen year period where school computers were Windows PCs, which may or may not have happened at all depending on where you live.
The loss of literacy has way more to do with moving from old CLI-based OSs and to GUI OSs and eventually phone and tablet OSs. Not that I’d want to go back to MS-DOS, but the only reason anybody had any understanding of where every part of the OS went and what it did is having to navigate it from memory and it being built from two sticks and three rocks.
Now do cars.
Nah, the sheer complexity of modern computers and the endless proliferation of OSes, languages, protocols, make it impossible to have any kind of tech literacy.
Magic machine makes pictures, I click and order things.
I am pretty sure that a base level of tech literacy is something that is not “impossible”. Sure your average user may not be willing or able to get there, but I am pretty well immersed in the tech world and have a working knowledge on most of the important platforms and concepts.
I’m just old and tired of the endless treadmill of changes for things that do the same things.
The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
