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.
Even just understanding that much goes a long way toward figuring out how the inside of a modern computer is organized. It doesn’t have to be that way—it evolved naturally as a means for us to manage and understand the complexity of it all. If anything, the AI revolution is revealing what our computers could do when we completely abandon the principle of keeping the computer’s operations intelligible: far more power, but black-boxed forever. I hate it, hahaha.
Files and the hierarchical (tree) filesystem are, for those fluent in them, such a natural and powerful abstraction that we forget that they are indeed one.
But they're not a law of nature, there are multiple levels existing below as well as above.
In some respects, they're too powerful, which is why the streaming media companies want to take them away.
And in other respects - versioned, collaborative documents - the analogy becomes technically involved such that only experts have the patience to master it. Anyone can use Google Docs (which although has some "file-like" behaviour , doesn't run on what you or I would classically think of as a file), but few non-coders have the patience for something like Git which exposes what's "really" going on.
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.
Zoomers are worse at Gen X technology, same as Gen X are worse at Boomer technology (not just driving stick, but changing fan belts and fuses, checking tyre wear, topping up radiators and brake fluid).
They're also *doing things* with Gen X technology which us X'ers aren't entirely able to comprehend. Sure, we can see it, but can we understand it? A little humility maybe.
We could say that they use videos, games and memes fluidly in ways which are past our full grasp, because we're still thinking in terms of HTML and sockets, and part of our neural wiring is forever reserved for obsolete CD-ROMs and 3.5 floppies.
Or we could argue that the maximum level of agency and freedom exists at the level of HTML, the socket and the Apache daemon, and not at the level of the boomer-tech which is the transistor and PSU.
incredible post. kind of makes me want to sign up for a computer science/engineering class. but i’ve opened the linux mint terminal once or twice, so i’m probably good
Realizing that the base of most computing is still just text terminals helps structure your perception in some rudimentary fashion, I’m sure! But you are encouraged to dick around a little… Or try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2, F3, F4 on your Mint box and see what happens.
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
Even just understanding that much goes a long way toward figuring out how the inside of a modern computer is organized. It doesn’t have to be that way—it evolved naturally as a means for us to manage and understand the complexity of it all. If anything, the AI revolution is revealing what our computers could do when we completely abandon the principle of keeping the computer’s operations intelligible: far more power, but black-boxed forever. I hate it, hahaha.
Files and the hierarchical (tree) filesystem are, for those fluent in them, such a natural and powerful abstraction that we forget that they are indeed one.
But they're not a law of nature, there are multiple levels existing below as well as above.
In some respects, they're too powerful, which is why the streaming media companies want to take them away.
And in other respects - versioned, collaborative documents - the analogy becomes technically involved such that only experts have the patience to master it. Anyone can use Google Docs (which although has some "file-like" behaviour , doesn't run on what you or I would classically think of as a file), but few non-coders have the patience for something like Git which exposes what's "really" going on.
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.
Zoomers are worse at Gen X technology, same as Gen X are worse at Boomer technology (not just driving stick, but changing fan belts and fuses, checking tyre wear, topping up radiators and brake fluid).
They're also *doing things* with Gen X technology which us X'ers aren't entirely able to comprehend. Sure, we can see it, but can we understand it? A little humility maybe.
We could say that they use videos, games and memes fluidly in ways which are past our full grasp, because we're still thinking in terms of HTML and sockets, and part of our neural wiring is forever reserved for obsolete CD-ROMs and 3.5 floppies.
Or we could argue that the maximum level of agency and freedom exists at the level of HTML, the socket and the Apache daemon, and not at the level of the boomer-tech which is the transistor and PSU.
incredible post. kind of makes me want to sign up for a computer science/engineering class. but i’ve opened the linux mint terminal once or twice, so i’m probably good
Realizing that the base of most computing is still just text terminals helps structure your perception in some rudimentary fashion, I’m sure! But you are encouraged to dick around a little… Or try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2, F3, F4 on your Mint box and see what happens.
hmm perhaps i will….