There is a cliché that youth tends to be “tech-savvy” and that they somehow have a congenital understanding of all manner of sophisticated electronics and computer gear. Well, I work in the IT-department at a college and I can assure anyone who is interested that this is simply not true based on my own direct observation.
I run the computer and wireless network on our campus and with the fledgling school semester now underway we need to respond to a typical rush of complaints about “The Network”. Some of these whines turn out to be legitimate, and others not. This is to be expected, but the thing that strikes me is how many of this Great Online Generation are completely ignorant to how any of their beloved e-gadgets actually work. It seems to me that the only real affinity that youth has to electronics is the ability to stand in line to buy the latest toy on the first day it is released, and the ability to push the buttons that some design-engineer thinks that they should push. There is, however, no real understanding of what those button-pushes are actually doing “under the covers” and for the most part they are as lost and bewildered as their grandparents might be when something isn’t right with their plaything.
I have been working in the field of computer networking for a long time and I certainly know more about this stuff than the average Wal-Mart shopper, but there is a societal impression that all members of The Borg Generation naturally “know stuff” about this stuff. I was on a call to a dorm-room on Friday to look a report that “the Internet is broken” because the student’s Playstation wasn’t behaving (horrors!), and to pass the time as I was investigating what was happening I gave a running commentary of what I was looking at and what I was doing. The student was utterly lost and confused by what I was saying, which didn’t strike me as too odd, until he let drop that he was an upper-classman and Comp-Sci major. Uh, really, dude? The stuff I was looking at here wasn’t bleeding edge high-tech either; it was just DHCP (if you know what that is) and fundamental to how almost every “connected” device anywhere operates these days. I didn’t expect this student to debug his own problem because as the network manager I have access to tools that he doesn’t, but this was like someone who claims to be a race-car driver not having any idea what a “cylinder” or “spark-plug” is. I guess that you don’t need that knowledge if you are just going to work the gas pedal and steering wheel, but this belies the “tech expert” reputation of the whole generation and it makes me wonder what our Comp-Sci department is really teaching out there. I suppose that the professors assume, like so many others, that Youth picks up the boring basics by osmosis and so they start off the “101” computer class with sexy advanced theory for next-gen products not yet even designed. After all, us hands-on Morlocks are out there to fix those pesky gaming-consoles for them when they act up.
I think that there may have been a time in the past when simply using an electronic gadget like a personal-computer meant that you needed to know a lot about how it operated, because it so frequently didn’t. These days however, being a mere user of high-tech gear generally doesn’t require that you actually know anything at all beyond the assumptions of the GUI – and if the device stops working? Meh – there is probably a new version out there by now anyway and so it is a good excuse to just throw the thing away and be super-cool with the latest-and-greatest. After all, you want your friends and family to think that you are sophisticated and hip and tuned-in to the newest tech – even if you don’t really have a clue.
John's Jejune Journal 