This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
theres a generation of kids who don't understand basic directories because of the mobile market and never actually used a pc in a regular usecase.
put in perspective, there are those who are more proficient on a touchscreen keyboard more than an actual keyboard.
I've also found (I'm a teacher) this generation is far less proficient at search. They (generalisation) type a whole question into Google, and read the Google created text box to get their answer, taking it as gospel - regardless of if Google has completely gone off the mark.
Contrast this to a generation that grew up with needing to refine search terms with key words, who can find far more relevant info quicker.
It's hard to get them out of the rut and teach them to be more critical of sources. They're so used to having what they need served straight up for them. LLMs (AI) are feeding into this more - they struggle to believe that AI hallucinations exist until I show them.
Again all this is generalisation - when I say 'they' I don't mean 'all'.
This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don't understand what a folder is because they've never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
I've seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
I've had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like "on the computer".
Forget the 30 year old boomer, I present to you: the 18 year old boomer!
I blame hardware and software manufacturers for locking and dumbing down their devices
And there are lots who don't understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shift...
Stop. You’re all hurting me.
There was a tech reviewer that scorched Chromebooks for taking away the CapLocks because... he couldn't type capitals anymore!
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn't) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it they'd obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
If it's an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
The greentext says "he asks for some files", that doesn't sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there's no password on it).
But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
They may have emailed it to the zoomer, and the zoomer attempted to open it on their iphone or something that doesn't have native zip compatibility.
It's Chromebooks, phones, and tablets that you don't ever have exposure to actual files. Chromebooks especially now that they're so common in schools because they're cheap.
I so wish Linux phones were actually a usable thing so that we could have functional pocket computers.
The attempts made so far weren't very convincing.
Sample size of 1 person
ZOOMERS
Millenials are just passing on the abuse they got from the boomers for enjoying avocado toast 10 years ago.
At least making fun of someone’s tech skills is rather harmless compared to questioning the basic desire to eat something other than ramen every now and then.
I have seen multiple "zoomers" struggle with zip files. Probably because they dont know those from their smartphones.
I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I'll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
You'd be surprised.
The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you'd encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
While there is a degree to which there's age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
Gen Z at uni here. Most of my fellow zoomers know what a zip file is. But some people just don't computer that much so they simply don't know.
However if you're doing a computer job and you don't know that's ridiculous.
That's because all they know how to use are iPads. They don't actually understand how real computers work.
Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn't immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is "IT people".
You wouldn't believe how many people get annoyed that I don't know what their password for something is.
We Millennials were born in a sweet spot where PCs were widespread enough to be virtually in every house since childhood but also not too streamlined and simplified.
We had a pc that sometimes didn't work properly, we had to use the command line from time to time, troubleshoot and look up errors. When something fails we try to find out why and only after a while we give up and claim it's an error or look for help.
Also you know, stupid people are in every generation.
There are tech illiterate people in every generation, but they definitely seemed more prevalent in the boomer generation. In my experience it's Boomers > Gen X > Zoomers > Millenials in terms of most to least technologically incompetent. Always suspected millennials are usually more comfortable with tech because they grew up with it, and it grew up with them.
For older generations, especially boomers, I figure they were more set in their ways and for many (but not all, obviously) it was hard to adapt. For Zoomers, I think it was just assumed that they'd just be inherently good so there were many things they were never actually taught (though many of them learned for themselves because they are nerds, which is pretty great if you ask me). Anyways, that's my theory on generational tech literacy.
I'm a xennial, and i think one of the key characteristics of my generation is that we grew up with tech becoming omnipresent, but it was also non user friendly tech.
We started having PCs young, but we really had to know how to build our systems, it was much less plug and play. We grew up with visual OSs, but configuring that shit was not intuitive at all. Or outright broken (looking at you Win ME). We had to troubleshoot, fix, learn, read and test just to get our tech working.
Younger generations grew up with tech omnipresent yes, but tech that mostly works intuitively - you barely ever have to really figure shit out, fix it or reconfigure it.
Just my 2 cents!
In my social circle, none of the 15-25 hav the slightest idea how to work a computer (no, wait, there's one out of the six or seven). So they all come to the nearly 60 year old me that has to explain to them again what a directory is.
I'm Gen X and credit playing video games for most of my self-taught knowledge on how computers work. My first computer was an Apple IIe, which didn't require much more than putting disks in and typing startup commands, but when we got a Windows 3.1 PC next, I had to learn about file systems and troubleshooting when things inevitably went wrong. To this day, most of the computer stuff I've learned was from trying to get games working.
This really bugs me at work sometimes. I'm a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don't understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as "excel image file" (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip... But that's black magic apparently.
I used to work in a camera shop back in the day. Alot of people came in with a thumb drive of some sorts, and wanted pictures printed of images in a word-document. They were baffeled when we said we can't print it with our lab. "But it is right there on the screen!"
Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you're not allowed to change anything whatsoever.
im a gardener. some apprentice who has never owned a computer, not bcs they couldnt afford it, but bcs due to mobile phones there simply is no need for it, asked me how to shut down a computer. not kidding. it wasnt even some obscure gnu/linux distro, it was bog-standard windows 10.
I work with a couple guys that basically aim to do as little as possible in as much time as possible.
I'm a millenial and it seems i've become a boomer, telling these guys to stop building cardboard towers as everyone notices and will tell their supervisor. Then they get angry with me for some weird ass reason while they just spent 3 days doing one hour worth of work.
Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better, but it's 4 of them and one of me.
I understand the mindset that it's the employers task to supply you with work, but there's plenty y'all just refuse to pick it up and get at it.
are you the manager? if not it ain't your problem, and now you have a valid excuse if your stuff doesn't get done. My work tried that shut with me, I just do my work, then leave, if everything isn't done that's a management problem.