My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
I actually think the opposite. Millennials grew up during the boom of technology and many had to rapidly adjust to all of that in a short amount of time. That’s why so many are so good at it. Gen Z on the other hand has trouble managing folders and files. This is largely due to tech getting easier… too easy almost. The direction of tech right now is AR/VR and my grandma was able to quickly grasp it because the controls are so natural.
I don’t think that millennials will be behind in the tech field, but trends? Yes.
This dismissive sentiment is actually why I think eventually many Millennials will end up clueless as they age. Yes, Gen Z might not know how filesystems work, but that’s because they don’t have to. It’s fast becoming an obsolete user abstraction, replaced in many places by tags, dates, and other contextual / searchable hints. If I want to find photos of my sister’s wedding, I just tap the map where it was and I see the entire gallery - no need to navigate to
/home/MooseBoys/Photos/2017/JanesWedding.Being able to adapt to new tech is as much about the ability to learn something new as it is to unlearn something old. The amount of people criticizing Gen Z for not knowing how some antiquated system works suggests to me that plenty of Millenials are holding on dearly to their mental models of how technology works. When presented with something vastly different, like a computer without a screen, they’ll probably be just as clueless as a boomer trying to figure out where to put the postage stamp on the email to their nephew.
I don’t think it’s so black and white. Instead I think it’s created both clueless gen z kids and extremely computer literate gen z kids. I see so many kids now picking up on computers and coding so quickly that I don’t think things like the filesystem will ever be too archaic, it’ll just remain in the background managed by those who can now simplify tasks for the others who don’t understand it as well. The proof is in Linux’s growing numbers that people have more interests in computers now than ever before.
It’s just that equally as such, there are people who are just going to navigate the world of tech in a completely different way. They either see the world (literally lol) through their phones or even with upcoming AI. Though I still think millennials have the capacity to keep up better than previous generations when it comes to tech.
Thank you sir, you nailed it!