Is being 'computer savvy' teachable to the average person, particularly boomers

[Safir]

My mom's on Linux and is better at using a "smart"phone than I am. (She used to be a programmer engineer-economist.)

My dad screams for help each time he accidentally archives a telegram channel. He also falls for every single chinesium dropshipping scam.

 

[Dreamland]

You reach an age where you become unwilling or unable to learn anything anymore and that age is rapidly falling if the state of generation zoom-zoom is to be considered.
Milennishits have to hold on to that last scrap of neuroplasticity they have for neither their predecessors nor their successors have any of that left.

Computers have become less user friendly for the last decade. I grew up with computers, and having to google how to shut off the new annoying feature pushed on me, with a mandatory up grade I can't stop. Nope, boomers are not the the problem. It's the nonsense built into them.

Politely disagree, a lot of the "features" we're faced with are like this because the average user can't even be trusted to be house-broken or understand written text.
My IT department is literally pushing powershell scripts cranked out by poorly worded chatGPT queries to us without even reading what it does because "Lmao im not reading all that".

 

[millais]

Boomers should be good at typing, because they had nothing but typewriters, which are less forgiving than computer keyboards. But somehow they are not.

 

[Summer of George]

It's just a matter of the luxury of time.

During middle age, you have a job and a household and a family and debts. You don't have a bundle of spare time to be spending on self-teaching or troubleshooting.

Boomers tend to approach novel or unknown situations with the understanding that the outcome is a coin toss. It might be okay, or it everything might break and cause a disaster beyond their immediate ability to fix. Usually, such troubleshooting doesn't involve anything they couldn't intuit if they tried. But they just don't have the time to do all that fucking around.

They also have a 20 year backlog of unfinished projects sitting around the house. They've been burned by this "just try and figure it out" methodology plenty of times before.

Now that both my folks have retired, I've noticed they are getting a lot more adventurous in solving their own tech problems. No more looming threat of Monday morning putting a project on indefinite hiatus.

 

[The Backwards Man]

Depends on how lazy and impatient they are

 

[babyDunk]

No, there needs to be genuine interest for that to happen.Normies just do not have that...... 'zing'

 

[Seething Troon Collector]

Sure there are some boomers that grew up with and are enamored by computer culture. These are the people that were banging out applications in assembly back in the day where programs came on tape. They’re fine. The others, they’re basically clueless.

It will be the same with the zoomers and alphas. They were born into a world where computers have become so abstracted away from the computer science that makes them that, unless they had the mindset to go learn how it all works then they’re just going to be as lost as boomers.

Gen X and Y on the other hand got to grow up in a world where you not only had all of the information available to you and a free Internet that wasn’t pozzed and homosexual, but the companies that took everything over either didn’t exist or hadn’t reached end-stage enshittification. Moreover, using a computer required a baseline level of knowledge since it wasn’t spoon-fed to you.

A lot of that knowledge is being lost in a sea of corpo-slop garbage software written by pajeets, users are shackled by enshittified garbage, and a culture that doesn’t value learning how things work. Throw section 1201 of the DMCA in there for good measure. It could never stop piracy but it can stifle creativity and fuck over users who want to learn shit.

I think the population of people that can fix it is going to shrink year over year until we’re left with a fragmented Internet with decades of technical debt, both from sloppy code written by street shitting dots and from people that understand how the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet works dying off.

My IT department is literally pushing powershell scripts cranked out by poorly worded chatGPT queries to us without even reading what it does because "Lmao im not reading all that".

ChatGPT is not specifically trained and fine-tuned to write code. Without grounding it will produce garbage code. People need to stop blindly asking general purpose chatbots to write code. I have to repeat this multiple times a day. Without MCP servers to get context, or without fine-tuning to get the coding benchmarks up, the code will suck and it won’t work.

 

[Sandy Sun Dunes]

No, being "computer savvy" is a mindset and an attitude. It's about wanting to know how things work and be willing to futz around. It's like being a car enthusiast. To most people their car and computers are tools to do very specific tasks and anything outside of that very small domain is a non-starter due to lack of interest. They just want the tool to work, they don't care to know how it works or why us enthusiasts are pulling our hair out trying to walk them through basic troubleshooting or tasks.

As an IT helpdesk monkey and someone who has taught boomers computer classes on the side, there's a qualitative difference between helping someone who cares to know how their computer works and someone who treats it like a tool. It's all in their attitude. The first person you can show them why an issue occurred, how to avoid it in the future, and even some faster or more reliable ways to get a task done. They appreciate that knowledge will make sure to use it going forwards. The second person does not give a shit, they just want their issue resolved and a maximum of 3 steps they can write down and follow to make sure the black box on their desk doesn't "break" again. Then they get back to the extremely specific routine/rituals they follow to make sure the black box does the needful and they can get their jobs done. Maybe they integrate your 3 steps to avoid shit going wrong again, if you're lucky.

That difference is what being "computer savvy" means. The desire to learn. Someone who wants to learn can adapt, can deal with a different desktop environment. Someone who doesn't want to learn sees an interruption to an already functioning workflow. Until they get used to the new workflow and memorize it, it's going to feel like garbage to them.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Part of the problem is that even if you learned how computers work, every ten years or less that's all thrown out entirely, so even if you understood how to use Mac OS 8.6 like a pro, they've changed so much that it gets more and more irrelevant. Even the new iOS update is a bitch.

Having to work in a copy/mail shop where people bring in Amazon returns, it's clear that they haven't really used these systems, ever. Even a 1999 edition of "The Internet for Dummies" can provide a baseline for understanding the modern Internet. It doesn't help that books how to use this stuff don't really exist anymore and helpful information is hidden behind jeetslop, but it's stunning how out of touch these people are.

 

[Dropa5pack]

Kids today will be even worse than boomers. There was a certain window where computers were popular enough, yet difficult enough to use that bred a certain competence, today almost everything can be done with a phone.

 

[YouDoNotHaveTheRight]

I recently switched to a KDE myself. I had seen ubuntu a decade ago and recently. I am only in my 30s Linux is really good now. Some small things are different. Some hiccups along the way, but nothing I can't overcome. I'm never going back to windows and the sad thing is that I probably logged most pc time on a vista machine and vista was awesome compared to modern offerings from microsoft. For both older and younger folks I just don't think they have the appreciation for computers like those of us in the middle do. If it involved their work switching to linux they may learn it, but kicking and screaming.

 

[Croaking Spider]

My uncle once called Amazon because he couldn't figure out how to order something. This is a guy that used to put together powered wheelchairs for Jerry's Kids. And yet he cannot order a metal plant stand without help from customer service.

This unlocked a core memory for me. I've had to solve many a minor tech-related smartphone issues with my late grandfather. The man was a Vietnam veteran Navy Seabee who I have personally witnessed Macgyver all sorts of shit together in his man shed. The man was building airstrips and bridges in the jungle, but taking his phone off auto-orient was his hurdle. To be fair, he did improve somewhat as he got older. He held on to his mental faculties pretty well considering both he and my grandmother were both fighting dementia. I can somewhat forgive older folk for struggling with something unfamiliar to them. Lifes' kinda funny how you start off retarded in diapers and you end up retarded in diapers. Funnily enough, neither of them had much of an issue getting acclimated to computers (they still grew up typing after all), but the touch screen concept along with the increasingly common trend of hiding settings behind as many menus as possible was a bit higher of a bar to clear.

 

[Fucker Carlson]

Linux is another good example only due to the surprisingly high proportion of people that will overhear "Linux," freak the fuck out and act like it's some kind of tool exclusive to evil dark web hackers or something. Personally, I use Windows and can't currently switch to Linux due to some reasons out of my control, but I'm definitely gonna consider it in the future when I'm able to, especially if W11 keeps getting worse. I have a little experience with it on other computers and so far it's been very positive.

The point is that the existence of this other operating system does not bother or threaten me in any way. Same with MacOS even though I think it sucks. I wouldn't advocate for it to be deleted or anything like that. Same with other OSes I've never heard about. So the actual fucking hysteria that people exhibit when you mention Linux is confusing sometimes.