I was reading an article this morning from The New Oil about how scams are evolving and how to avoid them. Inside the article, he writes, “as another interesting note, while people ages 34 to 44 tend to get scammed more often, people ages 18 to 24 tend to lose more in scams. This counters the idea that only tech illiterate old people fall for scams or that you can be too poor to be targeted.” I would argue that the 34 to 44 range is the more interesting data point because I don’t believe that the 18 to 24 people are more tech literate. I think people are overall less tech literate and they’re just iPad kids. They don’t understand how to troubleshoot anything. College kids can’t use folders or file systems. Everything is just iPad this, iPad that. I think there needs to be more pushback on what actual tech literacy is versus being able to efficiently open apps on Android or iPhones without having any basic computer skills whatsoever. The similarities between older folks and young kids when it comes to having any sort of tech understanding is surprisingly similar in my experience. There is a very narrow gap of time (I would Argue 26-45 currently) that have any real tech literacy.
This is day 9 of #100DaysToOffload
yessss more blogy blogs (have I lost my mind yet? probably)
Lol thanks 🙏
yeah I TA introductory CS college classes and having to teach students about what a folder is – it’s absurd to my little zillenial brain. I’m pretty sure I understood my computer’s file system by the time I was 10 because it was so in your face. like if I was gonna do anything more than my dad starting up a game for me, I needed to know about the file system to do that. now that everything is in the CloUd (i.e. everything is a webpage) and even the OS’s have started abstracting the file systems away, it makes sense why people don’t pick up on it any more. but for the people who’ve made it that way, it’s a bad design decision because it hides how things are actually working in favor of a “user-centered design” that doesn’t actually work. in development we call this a leaky abstraction (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/). since the illusion breaks sometimes (i.e. there are tasks you can’t do without understanding the file system), the entire abstraction ends up just being a foot gun and leaving you bewildered at some point in the process because you never had to do the “work” of understanding what’s happening under the hood.
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