Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills
A recent Wall Street Journal report delves into Gen Z's surprising lack of keyboard typing skills, featuring interviews with several individuals and revealing some startling statistics.
Duh. They use phones mostly. A lot of the gen z people I know are just as bad as boomers with tech. Millennials and gen x had that sweet spot of "actually having to learn how shit works not just iphone go brrr."
Yeah I don't know why the article mentions Gen Z's "tech-savvy reputation". Being able to operate a cell phone doesn't make you tech savvy.
Gen X and Millennials grew up using command line and troubleshooting computer problems before the Internet. Their tech skills are way higher than Gen Z.
Yep. And phone typing is the 'hunt and peck' method of keyboard typing. Which is unfortunate because it's ingraining the slowest way to type onto a whole generation.
They also stopped teaching typing in schools. My younger family members never had an computer class or a typing class.
Anything beyond ~2002 became worse than the predecessor in IT related tasks.
I’m part of Gen Z, and no, we as a generation AREN’T tech savvy. just because we grew up with smart phones does not make us tech savvy. in fact, i actually think it made us dumber with tech. i’m the only one in my school who knows how to use a command line and code (i also use linux as my daily driver). meanwhile everyone else doesn’t even know what a freaking file manager is
Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say 'GenZ is more tech savvy' is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.
Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.
As far as actual tech competency goes?
Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there's far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.
Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say "tech savvy" - especially when you start talking about job skills.
I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they're good with it. What they didn't grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they're not as skilled at it.
Hi, I’m a programmer. Most of my classmates didn’t know how to use Linux.
Now, I’ve realized that newer products are being developed via Visual Studio so……
Linux and command line knowledge aren’t the same as being tech savvy
linux can be used through mostly GUI now so i partly agree with you, but installing linux can be quite a hard task for those who aren’t tech savvy. i’m pretty sure being able to do the following can be considered tech savvy:
Edit: the thing is… everyone is so used to things being pre-installed (ie windows/macOS/iOS), being able to download apps easily from the apple App Store. anything even slightly more complicated than that is too hard for them. i’ve had a graphic design class with some people a few years ago and some of them had to ask me for help for how to open a file, save, and export. if something isn’t completely, 100% automated for them, they can’t do it.
The most common explanation I've seen, and imo it makes sense, is that things mostly just work now. Even XP required a helluva lot more troubleshooting and messing with stuff to make it work than today. So you not only have a bunch of people that have no troubleshooting experience, a large portion don't even know how to properly search for things.
On the flip side, you have a lot more people doing insanely impressive stuff at a lot younger ages because if you have the drive to do it, there's more material to learn than ever out there.
I'm a millennial but I grew up with Macs which mostly just worked, I don't remember having to do much troubleshooting as a kid.
But for me it was more that there was nothing else to do. You got bored, and messed around with and explored the computer, figuring out what you could make it do. Even once we got internet, it was dialup, so you got online for a bit, checked some things, downloaded some shareware, then disconnected and were stuck with whatever was on the computer again to mess with.
These days the kids have a never-ending social media feed, they have no reason to ever be bored again.
The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.
So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?
The darned neural implant generation doesn't even know how to doomscroll with their fingers. Kids these days smh no cap.
There’s a common misconception among boomers and gen x that “digital natives” like gen z have a god-given tech proficiency. However, there’s nothing about being born with a smartphone in your hand that teaches you anything about tech.
It’s not like people are getting better at changing oil as car ownership becomes more common, right?
I think "digital naive" is a better phrase than "digital native". They are born with computers all around them. But most adults forget to / are not able to educate them about technology and their implications.
I believe it's a little more sinister than that. There is less education around these issues because many services have adopted a highly polished, "Walled-Garden" approach to their presentation. This keeps people who've grown up with the concepts in their walled garden loyal to that specific service, and makes it difficult for people to dig under the hood and work out how things really function without the sugar coating. They get irritated quickly because they're used to everything "Just working" and don't have experience on more open systems.
Therefore, they would like there to be no need for tech education unless you plan on a professional career as a tech.
As long as ownserhip don't get carried away with enshittification chasing next quarter's finance call and drive users away by annoying them into putting the extra effort in to learning about alternatives, they could keep it that way forever.
I call them digital savages. You wouldn't ask a jungle tribe about the Krebs cycle either.
Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.
By now, we've made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can't be trusted not to break themselves with malware.
The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there's over 24x as many non savvy people that don't need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.
Yeah, fair point. My first computer was a Tandy TRS80, followed by a ZX81. You pretty much had to learn BASIC to get them to do anything at all.
Oh, I remember my childhood and how everybody (and sadly myself) considered us so knowledgeable because we sit chatting via ICQ, writing stupid shit in forum text RPGs, playing WarCraft III, Perfect World, IL2, KotOR and X-Wing Alliance all day.
The tech-savvy reputation comes from the "digital native" narrative i.e. because they grew up with computers they must know computers, which is a silly fallacy because how one interacts with technology makes all the difference. It's the same reason why everyone who grew up with electricity isn't necessarily an electrician.
The tech savvy reputation comes from millenials. We ARE tech savvy.
Only the early ones. By definition millenials are birth years 1981 to 1996, so the last ones were 11 when the first iPhone released.
I think every generation has their percentage of nerds and that just was a little higher in late Gen X and early millenials because computers were so new and you had to tinker to get anything working.
But then came smartphones, and instead they grew up with that...
In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you'd generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn't want to learn it.
Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least "create" something, like in HyperCard).
That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.
Then something happened - most humans couldn't keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn't know how I'm going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.
It's similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it's just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don't need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don't understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don't understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.
That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.
People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It's an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn't it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.
It's very simple. There's such a thing as "too complex". The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.
You don't need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don't need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don't have it in our boots - generally. We don't have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?
I think Stanislaw Lem called this a "combinatoric explosion" when predicting it in one of his essays.
Being a tool user doesn't make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.
Right? I grew up with pen and paper, but I'm better with keyboards.
They use apps.
On phones.
They aren't tech savvy.
I'd also argue that your WPM typed on a keyboard doesn't make you tech-savvy either. 1950s secretaries could type fast on a typewriter and that didn't make them tech savvy either.
There are a wide range of computer skills. Being able to interact with a word processor extremely efficiently is a highly valuable tech skill. Someone who knows about processor architecture but can't touch type is arguably more tech-savvy but also less useful in most office jobs. So I'd say that the secretaries were indeed tech-savvy in a way that was useful for their positions.
I don't even know how fast I can type on a phone.
Even with word completion I find myself hesitating between the choice of word or typing it out.
I know it's not near as fast as on a physical keyboard where is used to be around 90-120 wpm if I remember correctly. (Been a while since I had to do that at an employment agency)
Anyway, it'd be fun to see a thumbs only tiktok/Snapchat typer vs a mechanical typewriter type off.
And, tbf, most people are far from tech savvy.
Most are consumers. Some are really good consumers. Some are power users. Some know how to do things.
Very few actually understand it.
But, there was a time where there was indeed a necessity if you used the tech, you had to understand it.
It's a pretty good indicator. If you spend all day working with computers chances are you'll be able to type quickly
Gen Z is app savvy, not tech savvy. Very very different.
The problem is non-savvy people classifying connecting a Bluetooth or wifi as complicated.
Connecting Bluetooth is complicated. Mostly because it doesn't work.
There's a science fiction book series which name I cannot remember for the life of me but in there is a generation ship traveling from Earth to some other star system and it's been going for centuries.
No one really understands anymore how to operate any of the systems on the ship. They just know which buttons to press, but they have no real understanding of what it's actually doing.
A lot of app users seem to be like that. They can get the app to do what they want but they don't really understand why that's working or what other things the app could do.
Dang kids don't know how to tune a TV or do the tappets in their car!
They'll be screwed if they find themselves in 1980!
This article only covers typing, but younger gen z and gen alpha are (not at all to their blame) woefully bad at understanding technology. Even using their own devices, like the iphone, outside of a few dozen common apps can be challenging. Let alone desktop OSs, servers and things like printing.
I stress that I absolutely do not say this to call them dumb or ignorant. They have not been given other resources and were not raised on other kinds of tech. And as the article points out, older generations in administration and management positions falsely equate this "app savy" intelligence to tech ability. That is where the blame lies mostly not with the young teenagers and kids.
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don't use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It's pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS... I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren't taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the "you don't have privacy" motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
What tech savvy reputation? They doesn't even know what a system file structure is. Neither the article writer, social media =/= tech-savvy.
I was the electronics guy at walmart and just...holy shit the kids buying laptops. A lot didn't even know how to work the keyboard. They would touch a non touchscreen laptop then ask me 'if it isn't touch screen then how do you work it'. Thats just one of a million amazing questions I got.
I know a bit of it is....iono...location bias? Most kids who know computers are probably shopping online or microcenter or something but still.
They doesn't even know what a system file structure is.
I had to talk to somebody about a file that they needed me to look at and they kept saying It's the one in the P drive, and they just could not understand that they needed to give me the absolute file path. This was someone who's an engineer working in a power station, yet they don't understand about drive mappings
I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn't figure out what a "file" was or how to "email" it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It's hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.
but gen z is not tech savvy. They can use a browser. and watch youtube. They never advance past that stage
I think for the most part they are just "good" at using mainstream social medias nothing really more
You would think they know how to use a browser but in reality they only use apps. TikTok being their preferred search engine speaks volumes.
😔
Man look at millennials turning into boomers at record pace
"back in my day we did things properly, now all these damn kids... etc etc"
it's not becoming boomers. It's about rarely meeting one who knows that, for example, wifi is not the internet. I'm not asking for detailed tech knowledge. But getting a blank face if asked something as simple as "where did you save the file?" or replying with "in the gallery/google photos" means you are not tech savvy. these are the absolute basics.
Their parents don't even give them PCs, only phones, how would they even learn?
I've literally never heard Gen Z described as tech savvy.
Yes.
Calling GenZ tech savvy for always using a cell phone is like calling grandma a mathematician because she spends all day at the slot machine.
Boomers go confused when gen y switch to gen z and forget to get updated script from cable teeeveee
The boomers says that to them but that's really not true, this day this generation is less and less "tech savvy", they're just good at using the basic way social media
Being able to use TikTok on your phone doesn't make you tach savvy. They don't know anything about how it all works. It's a false dichotomy.
Yeah. I've noticed the new generation coming into the workplace can't do shit on a computer.
They've grown up on apps that have simple interfaces and limited options. Give them the freedom and power of a workstation and you'll find they never learned to learn real software.
People who know nothing more than how to operate a smartphone are not tech savvy. They can't even do that properly. Never seen anyone from that generation use an ad blocker or revanced or anything else that combats enshittification.
The highest usage of ad blockers happens within the age range of 18-24, which categorically includes Gen Z.
The second highest age range is 25-34, and the third highest is 12-17, which is also included in Gen Z.
That said, I would argue that, while knowing how to use a smartphone doesn't make you tech savvy, knowing how to use an ad blocker doesn't either. It's as easy as installing an extension.
If I had to guess, it's because they don't know what it was like before the ads and enshittification.
Can't long to return to something you never had.
I suppose its easy to find tech savvy gen-z people on Lemmy ;)
Obviously what I was referring to is anecdotal and stems from my social bubble. But there is something to it, that growing up with dumbed down devices makes you less prone to dive deep into the details of tech. If I were born 2 decades later, I don't think I would have gathered as much tech know-how as I did. I essentially had to go through all of it (started in the 286 era with PC-DOS, broke my dad's PC countless times trying to make shareware games work, dabbled around on bulletin boards, grew up with the early stages of internet and saw how it turned to shit, etc.). If I didn't have that, I might just have ended up knowing nothing more than smartphones.
Gen X that think Gen Zs are tech savvy are probably the people that the actual Gen X nerds shake their head at when we have to teach them how to put an URL in the address bar instead of searching for Gmail and clicking on the link every. goddamn. time.
Yes, as a Gen X I'm sometimes surprised how tech illiterate some of my generation are...
Then I remember when we were kids and people like me using computers were seen as weird geeks and "normal people" wouldn't get close to a computer.
Ngl I hate most of the new domain options. Was that site a .com or .net was fine. Now you have a dozen common options and many sites have a silly name. Look at lemmy itself for great examples of it.
I'm a programmer. I write hundreds of lines of code a day (of varying levels of quality ofc). I also fix technology (phones, laptops, desktops. tablets, etc). I'm probably one of the most "tech-savvy" people I know. I very rarely type faster than 70 wpm. it's just not necessary for what most of us are doing.
But think about arguing online! It's apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I've maxed out at 140 wpm, but usually stay in the 100 wpm range.
Programming? Idk, I spend more time thinking than typing personally. Good code requires you to consider all the corner cases and such.
I prefer to argue on the internet via my phone, which I can type pretty fast on thanks to the swipe to type.
and yeah programming simply doesn't require fast typing, I tend to diagram everything out on my whiteboard before even opening my ide. I just have to write tons and tons of code since I'm in a few low level programming classes
Agreed. I write slow and incomprehensible. I read slow with shit comprehension. Passed engineering school with very high GPA and am successful in my engineering career. These metrics are bullshit boomer click bait.
Almost as bad as "Gen z/a can't read analog clocks!"
I think the panic around analog clocks comes from the scenario where you have to explain what clockwise and counterclockwise is. I have personally seen someone eventually removed from a workgroup because they couldn't understand it.
Not that analog clocks matter, but that was an easy way to teach direction in cylindrical coordinates. What can we use now for that?
i could type insanely fast when i was younger
developed RSI at work
not worth it
80wpm is pretty common for a typical average typing speed for anybody who can touch type, 100wpm is more common among programmers, and people who do a lot of typing. Anything faster than that and you have had hand injuries and use a fancy keyboard now, or you will soon have hand injuries.
typing speed is rather funny.
It seems like a kind of horseshoe thing where Boomers are computer illiterate because they weren't around when they were growing up, while Zoomers are computer illiterate because they grew up primarily interfacing with technology via the simplified, corporate-approved mobile phone platforms. Gen X and Milliennials came of age when computers were still more of a Wild West.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams
Hmmm…truly new tech that came out after I was 35…
VR …yeah pretty cool, my partner has one but I’m not a gamer and don’t generally go for anything gaming anyways. Use it more widely for non gaming uses tho and I’m on board. Self driving cars …cool, don’t have one, never been in one, but I’m all over learning/using that shit if it becomes mainstream AI… personally not a fan, mostly cuz I think it could be like nukes where it’s used for more bad than good, but I’ve messed my way around ChatGPT and it’s whatevs. Probably eventually very useful if we don’t murder ourselves first.
Personally, having gotten our first school PCs when I was in 7th grade (92’ -ish), I find that I tend to at least be curious and want to learn about new tech. So I wonder if the late genX, early millennials might break rule #3 just cuz we were forced to know more about computers to run them and thus don’t view tech as inherently scary. Then again, I’m always fucking around with stuff and my siblings (2 yrs older and younger) are always like “woah how u do dat?!?”…maybe im just a lazy oddball always looking for a way to shortcut my life with technology.
Technically I'm the the first category, since personal computers have been around since before I was born and started going semi-mainstream before I was 15, but they didn't really take off in popularity until I was in the second age category, so that one fits me the best.
That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren't exposed to that paradigm so much.
The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that's the ecosystem you work within.
Generally speaking, you learn more about how something works when the core functionality is exposed to the user, and just janky enough to require fiddling with it and fixing things.
This is true of lots of things like cars, drones, 3D printers, and computers. If you get a really nice one, it just works and you don't have to figure anything out. A cheap one, or something you have to build yourself, makes you have to learn how it actually works to get it to run right.
Now that things are so comodified and simplified, they just work and really discourage tinkering, so people learn less about core functionality and how things actually work. Not always true, but a trend I've experienced.
People believe just because someone interacts with some sort of digital device, it makes you an expert on computers. The thing is, it depends on the type of operating system you are interacting with.
For example when I was young, my father would buy those big old gray computers from yard sales. I would mix and match the pieces inside to build my own PC. I broke a lot of shit but learned a lot.
The operating system was one where you more or less had total control over the computer. By 12~13 I was using CD-Roms to load different Linux distros and play around with all sorts of different things.
This experience basically taught me how operating systems work at a fundamental level. How it needs a kernel, how it loads and maintains services, packages, etc. How file systems work and learning how terminals are useful. Scripting languages, and eventually coding applications.
Compare and contrast that to the young kids of today. What do they get? A phone and a tablet. You can't open it up. You can't tinker with it. The OS is closed off and is deliberately made as difficult as possible to modify. No mouse, no keyboard. Streamlined UIs with guard rails.
You get what you get and you don't get upset. That doesn't leave nearly as much room for exploration and curiosity. It's a symptom of our computers becoming more and more railroaded. More and more control by large companies.
It's really sad, I think. Fairly soon I believe every device will be a "thin device" or essentially a chrome book. Very little local processing power and instead it'll essentially stream from a server.
I just want to echo your sentiment with something I've been saying here for a while now:
Do not confuse information technology use for computer literacy.
I will continue to argue that GenX is the only true technology literate generation because we grew up with the technology as it evolved. Future generations are more consumers not partners in the technology they own.
Yea it's a vast generalization but Apple is a good analogy of this. Most people now just want "a technology that works" without any understanding or control over how it works. That's a recipe for technological serfdom under the new generation of technocratic companies designed to own us.
Am I ever going to own a free phone? Probably not, but that doesn't excuse me from at least understanding from a high level all the players involved in my phone and where they're generating value from me.
Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn't develop tech skills because there's barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.
Even as an IT administrator, there's hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren't going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so...cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages "Android" in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It's impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there's so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.
Z is not savvy. They're basically boomers when it comes to tech. It always worked so it should work. None of our z staff can fix a printer and in fact none are allowed to
Z is not savvy. They’re basically boomers when it comes to tech. It always worked so it should work. None of our z staff can fix a printer and in fact none are allowed to
they can be savvy, it just depends on how based and tech pilled they are. If they've only ever used a phone for example, they aren't. If they use linux as a daily driver, they definitely are.
Statistically, on average, gen z is less likely to be tech savvy though.
although in defense of gen z, fuck printers.
Not a very enlightened take. As @nednobbins@lemm.ee correctly put it, tech savviness is the property of an individual and not of a generation. There are non-savvy Zoomers, just as there are non-savvy people from your generation.
For Boomers, cars was the latest tech that everyone was fiddling with. This caused even the boomer that wasn't very interested , to know quite a lot. For later generations, car became more of a means of transportation, and the knowledge of cars was only for specialists. For gen X, computers were the high tech thing, everyone was fiddling with. Most gen x can setup a printer if they have to. For later generations, computers are just tools, and the knowledge is only for specialists.
Of course, but the percentage of capable zoomers who are actually tech savvy is much smaller than millenials, for the reasons already stated.
Just the other day I witnessed a zoomer grad student who didn't know how to use a file explorer on his new windows laptop because he had grown up with an iPad and iPhone.
The natural result of getting rid of computer literacy classes.
There was just some assumption that the knowledge was somehow inherent, like the RF from cellphones entered the womb and taught them how to troubleshoot their PC.
like the RF from cellphones entered the womb and taught them how to troubleshoot their PC
Wait, it doesn't work that way? But that's what all the super trustworthy conspiracy theorists have been saying all the time! RF is dangerous and manipulates your brain /s
By the time the generation after them get to working age, somebody will have invented the Swype keyboard for office use.
It will always be in uppercase unless you press the "no cap" button.
As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.
One thing that's really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.
So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years,
That should literally never be the case. How do you even find your home position like that.
The quick and simple way to learn proper touch tying is simple: Use a typing tutor program. It really is all about writing random stuff without looking at your keyboard, that's all there is to it, depending on layout what you write may make more or less sense. Do that until you can actually type blindly, if you need a refresher for symbols then do that, it's worth the time investment, just for the love of everything don't look at your keyboard and don't ever rest your index anywhere but where you feel that they're in the right position. Not some feel-good "feel" but those nubs on the keys (f and j on qwerty). feel them.
for the love of everything don't look at your keyboard
Signed,
Xennial who was in IT for 25 years and never learned to touch type
You know, I'm not actually quite sure what I'm doing, but I can tell you I am not looking at the keyboard. I suppose it's similar to how I play violin? I don't look at where my hand is but it shifts to different positions depending on what makes the most sense for the pattern I'm trying to play, and yes, a different position does imply a different fingering to reach the same notes.
When learning to program, I initially tried to follow the touch typing guidelines, but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them. And just as with music, there are patterns. In programming, you may frequently need to type {}, :=, or even something like \{\}, and flailing around with the pinky is a good way to give yourself carpal tunnel. So your right hand learns to shift to hit those keys using a combination of fingers.
I built my Gen Z nephew a PC with a GTX 950 a few years back. When I went by to gift him a new video card I found out that he hooked up his video output from the motherboard the whole time. Don't know how that reflects on all kids from his generation but it was kinda funny.
Does Gen Z actually have a tech savvy reputation? I was under the impression that the last few generations aren't that great with computers as they more grew up with mature technology. It is the Gen X and Millennials that are more digital native while having used computers where advanced skills were required.
Depends, the younger half that's adjacent to gen alpha? Sure.
On the other side of that coin, I'm in my mid 20s. Not sure about the rest of the older members of gen-z, but my first experience with a computer was Classic Mac OS and Reader Rabbit.
I barely remember when we got the late PIII purple Compaq presario running XP when I was like 3/4. Playing red faction, and shit my brother showed me on new grounds. I remember my mom showing me how to pirate sabbath using Morpheus. Filling the machine up with useless IE toolbars.
Early YouTube was fucking sweet in the worst way possible, though at first I had to sneak it because that was considered a not-for-kids site at the time.
No one my age really touched a smartphone til like middle/highschool. By then we where all already playing halo:CE and early releases of MC on the win 7 machines in the lab.
I personally had already had basic Photoshop/paint.net and scripting/programming skills trying to make shit for Minecraft (and Roblox before that.)
Granted I also might be a bad example because I ended up working in IT, have written software to some capacity since I was 12, collect vintage machines, and keep a server rack as a pet. Furthermore, the vast majority of my daily computing happens within a collection of virtual machines running Debian.
Personally my solution to the problem was building a Linux Mint machine for my niece and her stepbrothers. Took them a bit to figure things out, but it seems to be going well.
Also bonus ageing juice for all you geezers out there:
Gen-z will technically be entering its thirties soon :P
Gen-z will technically be entering its thirties soon :P
Fake news. We're still in the year 2018 and I'm stayin 18 forever. Σ(' ε 'oﾉ)ﾉ
The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker [...]
This example is perfect - native teachers (regardless of the language being taught) are often clueless on which parts of their languages are hard to master, because they simply take it for granted. Just like zoomers with tech - they take for granted that there's some "app", that you download it, without any further thought on where it's stored or how it's programmed or anything like that.
I agree with you. I think they would kick everyone’s ass at thumb typing though. I was a T9 champion.
Gen X here. Honestly, I was a shit typer until I got a keyboard for my sega dreamcast and bought "Typing of the dead".
I went from hunt and peck to well over 100wpm.
Typing of the dead
Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.
Millennial, StarCraft on 56k modem (no voip). Type like a raccoon but fast.
so... people who take typing lessons and actively try to improve it have better typing skills than the ones who don't. Shocking.
The number of people i'm seeing use caps lock instead of shift to do capital letters have been increasing. "Oh you can do that?"
What goes around…apparently. My 57 year old co-worker does the same thing and it drives me batty.
There was this one kid I knew from school many years ago who used the caps lock to make capitals claiming it was easier cause you didn't have to hold it down. Like bro… just use sticky keys
First time I saw a Zoomer do that it hurt my soul.
Every single article about "gen x" this or "gen z" that is 100% bullshit. Stop reposting this garbage.
STFU, Younger Gen BADD!!
Fuck off old gen, we hate you now. Fo rizz no cap etc.
Juvenoia
Really, the media finally realized millennials don't care if we killed Applebee's or whatever, and they've moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. "They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins" becomes "They hate us because we can use old style keyboards." Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it's stupid to pass judgment in that way.
I mean, as a millennial, I mostly taught myself to type. I'm fast enough, but have bad technique and could be faster. I was only ever actually trained to type in grade school, and barely. Once in a while in computer class we would play an educational typing game.
My mom is much better at typing than I am, because she was trained to type in college. That's not really a thing anymore.
I learned by playing StarCraft on 56k modem. VoIP was not possible so you had to type fast. Style is wildly non-standard but i was typing fast enough not to see a benefit from standard style.
I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.
And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I'm now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I'm familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I'm probably hitting about 65 or 70.
Mavis Beacon would cry if she were around to see this
I taught myself to touch-type when I was a schoolkid using something similar to Mavis Beacon. All the while, I had a voice in my head saying, "This is pointless, everyone will be talking to their computers like in Star Trek in a couple of years". Well, that was the 90s and it turned out to be one of the most useful skills I taught myself - but surely the age of the keyboard must soon be coming to an end now??
once again the divide between being tech-savvy and tech-native rears it's ugly head. no, gen z is not exceptionally tech-savvy compared to previous generations, i can confirm most of my peers are tech morons. they've just been raised with smartphones and therefore know that specific UX language better than previous generations
I think that true "tech-savvyness" isn't really a generational thing.
Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren't satisfied with, "Just do it." or "Shit just works." They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they'll poke at it and try to understand it better.
It's not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.
I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I'm transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it's much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.
Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.
The best I ever typed was like 40-45. And now I two finger type more often than not :(
While typing is a useful skill, I don't think it has any correlation to "tech savvy" skills.
That sounds just fine. I'm pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.
Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what's going on. Gen Z doesn't know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn't know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I've forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they're more tech savvy is ridiculous. They're users of tech, but it's become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don't know what's happening behind their screen.
I blame the attempt to make devices user-friendly. Convenience kills skill.
not userfriendlyness but dumbing everything down
The difference between clearly documenting features, and hiding or removing them.
and this is why i believe that having "user accessible" UI is actually bad, now im not saying every computer needs to use punch cards. I'm just saying that we need to establish some sort of standard for competence here. Linux is a really good example here.
Maybe it doesn't matter if someone is tech savvy. There was a time when we really valued the ability to fix your own car.
i think it does though, tech literacy is a huge boon to personal productivity, and work productivity. There is almost no scenario in which being somewhat tech literate isn't good for you, i think it's more like written language.
It was and still is valuable to be able to maintain the devices and machines that you and people around you use. I'm not sure why you seem to be implying that stopped being the case for cars.
Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.
They are not tech-savvy, we had to dumb down technology so boomers and gen Z'ers could use it.
Well, we dumbed it down for the boomers, but never trained the kids.
Because they didn't need training. Or that's what we all thought. They were born with an internet that was basically Google. We needed to learn command line, they needed to learn how to press one button.
And it really is that way... Until they need to do something more complex and realize they can't.
Guess that means I'm uncle tech support forever
back when i was still a teenager, ww did battle ourselfes who typed faster even without a keyboard lol. We just typed on a table or something just based on our finger memory of where which key is normally on a keyboard. This days i often type on my smartphone, but you can't rly type a lot or fast on phones so i still prefer normal computer typing for most things. But people who just chat and don't code or similar...yeah, they probably are mostly only using their phone. my sister as an example hasn't used her laptop for nore than 4 years, probably more.. and just does everything on her phone.
Swype typing can get pretty fast tbh. But that greatly depends upon the software.
Despite the hate it got, Windows Phone's default keyboard had a far superior swype experience as compared to Android and iOS. Probably because they didn't try to inculcate all user words into their dictionary and used the sentence structure as a reference to rank the predicted words.
Had this one been OSS, it would have been a great service. But now it has been scrapped along with the rest of Windows Phone. One of the reasons why I hate to think of what would happen to any high effort thing I make in a company.
Microsoft actually ported their keyboard to android, called "Microsoft SwiftKey" or similar. It's a great keyboard, but apparently now has copilot ಠ_ಠ
I agree the 'tech-savvy' phrase has outdone its use. We should use a better phrase, like 'tech-indoctrinated' or 'tablet-fed' to give a better perspective into these younger kids' digital lifestyles.
I can see the alphas railing against the term "tablet-fed". They are NOT gonna like that.
That's gonna be what us cranky old millennials call them later while we would be yelling at them to get off our lawn. But we won't yell that, because none of us will own any yards.
I disagree for the term "tablet-fed" as it classifies anyone who used a tablet growing up and not people who stayed within the cushy UX bounds. A lot of the future programmers & tech savvy people are going to have grown up from using tablets. Example, installing mods for minecraft PE when i was ~7 was my first experience actually doing something with tech.
I'm not far enough down the tech rabbithole to use Arch like a lot of people here, but compared to the rest of the population who can't find powerpoint that's right infront of their faces I'd be considered tech-savvy to them.
This might be true but WPM is a very stupid way to measure this argument.
yeh, strokes per minute sounds a lot better
Keyboard typing is a manual skill distinct from tech savvy and has to be taught as such. You're not going to learn it by dealing with a touchscreen swipe "keyboard". I've known a fair number of programmers who were two-finger typists because they were too busy taking CS courses to learn to type.
On the gripping hand, my early-Boomer mother, who learned on typewriters, can type fast and accurately but is quite technophobic.
I'm the oldest of Gen z (early 1990s). I have two younger siblings who are also Gen Z. Typing was a skill we learned in middleschool/ elementary. When I was about 8, we learned how to use google because it was considered a great resource to find information. By the time my middle sibling was in similar classes, they moved away from Google due to NSFW search results. When my youngest sibling was in school, they worried about shock sites.
They've slowly been removing computers from the school curriculum because of fear of outside forces. That includes typing, sadly. This is all coming from someone who grew up in a Plato self self education plan. (Online, self studies)
Outside forces, like challenging their teaching?
They can still google dicks at home.
It was more the dicks showing up in class unprompted. Then, it was people sharing links to shock sites. Now we have to worry about people stealing information. That was always a thing, it's just a lot more common now.
Edit: I also have to admit, I remember helping the teacher enough with their computer to get Admin privileges by using their console. It was literally stuff liking helping them make a PowerPoint full-screen. I'd download games and then dispense them through little known shared files on the network (usually old forgotten projects). I'd also save shortcuts to google proxies. In hindsight, that was exactly the kind of thing they're probably trying to stop. I was pirating stuff at a young age. I definitely could've downloaded malware and shared it with the network.
That feels like too far in the other direction. Rather than open internet access, there should be a district-wide intranet or at least just a proper whitelist of allowed sites, but of course that would require a proper IT department and would be too costly for most schools.
Sorry, but if you were born in the early 90s, you're not Gen Z, you're a millennial. The general cutoff for Gen Z is usually agreed to be about 1997.
I meant to say late. Are you gen z and getting old aswell? (Not an insult, I'm legit asking)
What happened in 1997 to make that cut anyway? There are several definitions with their own reasoning. For example the popular one I always use just makes every recent generation last 15 years and makes cuts that are easy to remember. It defines GenX to be born until 1980, Millennials until 1995 and GenZ until 2010. If you're born in one of those split years, you're basically part of two generations, though you're free to feel more attached to one generation over the other. Not that it matters too much anyway. In the end of the day it's just a time frame to quickly phrase what age group you're roughly talking about.
Tech has evolved to intentionally give less and less choice to the user. Tech skills have declined on average as a result.
Do public schools not teach keyboarding anymore? I ask because I had a keyboarding classe two-hrs 1day per week in grade school plus a full class one year in 7th grade and then again for a full year in high school, and they were always taught by some of the oldest teachers in the school. -My high-school teacher started his career teaching typewriter typing something like three or four decades prior to teaching me in 2004. It seems strange that new young people aren't getting that same basic education.
I don't know if they do but if they do I doubt they've improved. The technique taught by many touch typing courses is a recipe for a wrist injury. It blows my mind that regulatory bodies aren't calling for keyboard layout reform. The "normal" row stagger keyboard as well as the qwerty layout should be in museums, not on billions of "modern" computers around the world.
We didn't have specific typing class but we had IT in both primary and secondary, at least late gen z got plenty of computer time in school and most I know in my generation are decent typists at least
Not being fast at typing does not mean you are not tech savvy. There is more to tech than typing. Like an architect doesn't need to be good at brick-laying to be a good architect.
Really shows the difference between Knowing how to work with, and how it works
The physical keyboard is just a tool. There are alternatives like speech-to-text software, virtual keyboards with swipe features, or stenotype.
The goal should be to use whatever is most effective and efficient for yourself, so if Gen Zrs are more used to touch screen, maybe they should invent a touch screen interface that you can use with the computer, maybe even incorporating the mouse somehow.
For me personally the touch interfaces right now are fucked up - I always tap the wrong letters on my phone, the auto-correct and suggestions used to compensate for this often times make it even worse, and swipe doesn't come up with the words I want, I often have to swipe multiple times. I can't imagine operating a computer like this, but maybe for Gen Zrs it's no problem.
Maybe in the future you just need to think the word and it appears on the screen, and typing would be obsolete.
100%
Input methods will change over time.
The goal should be to use whatever is most effective and efficient for yourself,
And if taught as they should be, that will be the keyboard.
Counting out 5*5 on your fingers works and might be the fastest way you've been taught to multiply, but that doesn't mean we should excuse schools not teaching times tables and how to use a caluclator.
As a Gen Z, I just don't get it. One-off message, note or comment is fine. But have you never happened to have a long-ish conversation while on your phone? You get tired soon and want to go for a normal-sized physical keyboard.
the entire stereotype that gen Z is amazing at technology is overrated, it's the same as the millennials there's some people who have excellent troubleshooting skill and are able to use technology with very little issue, and then there's some that you can tell that they operate technology strictly on memorization not actually understanding how it works. You can differentiate the two by modifying their environments slightly and seeing if they struggle to figure how to do the stuff they normally do.
It's actually more likely that with how user friendly environments are, that gen Z is less Savvy when it comes to using technology then the Millennials due to the fact that they've been pampered into environments that don't require them to think outside the box, when I worked in the customer service field, it leans towards technical service and most of my customers who requested help were either Boomer or Gen Z, Millennials overall seemed to have the troubleshooting skills to be able to figure out problems without involving a third party.
That being said like above, this was a person to person basis I did have some Boomers who were able to rock the kiosks or have the troubleshooting the skills to be able to do it; just as I had gen Z that was able to rock the kiosk as well I'm just stating my observation of what usually happend.
Then to address the keyboard skills, most of what gen Z uses is going to be touchscreen, the desktop / laptop is a dying technology as a primary device for the younger kids as a whole, my sister didn't even have one until she entered College(outside of a school laptop) because she just used her mobile phone or tablet, neither of those required a keyboard outside of an on-screen which you can't use with the home system layout that used to be taught in school. So it's only natural that gen Z might have fallen behind in keyboard skills
I am a zoomer and I agree the schools now need to have information lessons like how to use normal computers and excel
How would you learn keyboard typing, if one always types on the phone?! (I am not even Z and have to look on the keyboard)
Do these things correlate that much tho? Not to toot my own horn, but I am fairly tech-proficient and have terrible typing skills. My technique is somewhere in between hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, despite regular typing lessons in elementary school. I imagine a lot of other people are like this, and vice-versa as well.
Do these things correlate that much tho?
Not at all. Is there any other profession than journalist where words per minute matters?
Court room stenographer
Are computer labs still a thing in schools?
At my kid's elementary school, they just have a charging rack full of cheap Chromebooks and the kids check one out in the morning and put it back in the afternoon. The middle schoolers get to take them home.
European Gen Z here. My schools always had a computer lab and it was always "real" PCs, never in my life i actually saw a Chromebook.
I'm sure this varies a lot from district to district, but the districts that I have teacher friends in, they've been using Chromebooks almost exclusively for the better part of a decade now
Here they are - in more well-funded schools at least. I keep seeing the posts about children being allowed laptops even at home, but here it would be unthinkable, because kids might break them or parents might steal them.
My sister is gen x and I’m a millennial, she’s asks me the most batshit insane questions like, how do I turn off my iPhone? What? You’ve had it 4 years!
X, especially older ones, are only tech savy if they were nerds. After that technology became a more everyday thing so maybe millenial has the magic spot where it was common but not dumbed down. I dunno though.
To be fair, they changed it in the last couple of years. It used to be that you held the power button to power it off. Now you have to hold the power button AND a volume button for some reason.
Gen X here. I've got an average 123 WPM on typeracer, which puts me in the 99,8th percentile.
I started looking at the screen instead of the keyboard early on. There were touch typing classes as an option around 8th grade, I think, but it was literally just having a map of which fingers go where and typing text focusing on using the right fingers. I didn't take one, but I think I'm using the right fingers for 80% of the keys. I'm moving my hands back and forth a bit to let my dominant fingers do the work.
I started playing MUDs in 1997 at age 13, and building up that muscle memory for every combination of two- or three letter commands probably did more than I'd care to admit. I still miss the responsiveness of a proper DOS prompt, or Linux tty.
Hell yeah, muds taught me to type fast, too :D. Realms of despair and others. Got me into modding, too, working on a custom server.
When you fight and communicate by typing in a game, you tend to get good at it.
i have 70. how.
A youth wasted playing MUDs, I guess. I was pretty fast before that, but I probably doubled my pace in a few years.
We’re not even teaching them cursive anymore and they still can’t type? What are they doing in schools?
As a Gen Z - cursive is very much still taught in first grade, and not like you can forget it either because most school assignments are required in paper form, same for lecture notes. You're not writing this much and this fast without cursive.
I feel like this calls for the importance of not just inundation but actual education for kids.
We basically let a whole generation have the relationship with the most common and arguably valuable be defined by advertising companies.
Well good thing neither parents or kids have anything to hide!
I had to teach some zoomers how to send an email, especially about using bcc, pretty funny I have to say
