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Ifeanyi Orizu Jr.'s avatar

Starting while I was in college, I remember reading a few articles, published in different years but covering the same phenomenon, about how young people entering university did not understand the concept of a file system. Because they had grown up using iPhones, file finders, cloud storage and other technologies optimized for "ease of use", they had never learned where the files on their devices were stored. And so, when, for example, they were asked where the project files they had downloaded for an assignment were located, they did not understand the question. [1]

To me, this was a strange thing to read about, since I had always considered the file system to be a basic part of the "interface" of a computer. Due to my own peculiarities, a significant part of my computer usage while growing up was based around saving images, music, and other digital items that I found interesting from the web to my personal machine. Additionally, I would often transfer files between my (Android) phone and my computer, or between two different personal computers via a USB drive. I don't think any of this was remarkable or advanced usage, but it did give me a sense of how files are stored and organized on computers. It does not feel right to me that consumer technology is moving towards obscuring this basic knowledge from users. I've also noticed these kinds of abstractions being added to Windows in recent versions, which has been grating but hasn't annoyed me enough to move to Linux just yet.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

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Amod Sandhya Lele's avatar

My parents always used to prefer driving a stick shift to an automatic. I didn't really understand why until it hit me one day that I preferred DOS to Windows for the exact same reason: I could tell what was really going on in there. I'm a Mac user now but it still makes me feel good to pull open the Unix command line and get a better sense of what's going on under the hood.

That's me as a Gen Xer. Something that's really struck me about the Zoomers is that, as far as I can tell, they're the first generation in recent memory to be *worse* at technology than their parents. Oh sure they're great at video editing and other end-user stuff that I'm terrible at, and I give them credit for that, but they don't have any sense of how it works, what's going on underneath - and therefore how to fix things when they break. Like they don't know HTML, even though more or less the entire Internet is made of it.

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