My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.

  • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 years ago

    No, I think we’ll be fine. It’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha that are acting like boomers in regards to technology. My eldest niece and eldest nephew are tech-illiterate even though they grew up with PCs, tablets, and smartphones in their daily lives.

    My eldest nephew can’t figure out how to use Libby, or how to install unlock origin on his mobile Firefox browser, and my eldest niece has no idea how to troubleshoot or look up solutions to any tech problems at all.

    It’s frustrating and I had ban them from asking me anything tech related because I got tired of being the free, family tech support. Now I tell them “well, what did the sources say after you researched the solution?” And that always shuts them both up because I know they didn’t even try looking up the solution on their own.

    They also have the bad habit of believing everything they read online. I tried telling them both that they should look at more than one source when researching important information (nephew was doing a paper on the American Civil War) and they stared at me like I was nuts.

    They are the living, breathing examples of Intelligence VS Wisdom.

    I think us Millennials will, for the most part, have an easy time keeping up with new tech, even as we get older.

    • byrona@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Man that is my biggest pet peeve is someone coming to me asking for help saying IT DOESN’T WORK without either trying to figure it out or even doing the tiniest bit or research. It usually takes one single Google search. My mother in law thinks she has the nuclear codes and she’s gonna blow everything up if she touches her laptop wrong

    • tweeks@feddit.nl
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      2 years ago

      I’m thinking new interfaces/concepts of interaction might be where we lose touch.

      Just like the previous baby boom generation had people with a lot of technical knowledge about for example how punch cards were used to configure computers and how to type with an old typewriter, we might know much about more advanced technical software and touch interfaces, but many might skip the Snapchat/TikTok scene and feel out of place.

      Not to mention future upcoming things like a Brain-Computer Interface connected to an AI; perhaps to socialize, to create tools / content. Some of us, and maybe you as well, will join this scene too, but I already see people giving up and staying away from new stuff.

      We will have a role in the technical side because of our knowledge, but that core knowledge is not that important any longer in many fields just like most developers don’t have to worry about machine code any more.